Man did that Amazing cover and your piece on Johnny Mayhem take me back. I used to haunt my two closest pb and mag outlets for anything sf or Gold Medal or Ace. But I was a special Ziff-Davis freak. I think it was all those great loopy sexy Valigursky covers. You're right, though. The one thing he couldn't draw was monsters. Half of them looked like Beanie & Cecil outtakes. Between 1949, when he first sold to them, and 1956 Steve Marlowe/Milton Lesser must've written millions of words for them. Then Silverberg took over when Steve started doing pb novels for Gold Medal.
I can still remember the hot September night when I was all broken up over my ninth grade love (well, I was her love; as I discovered she wasn't necessarily mine) and I sat on one of the long bridges that connect the two land masses of Cedar Rapids. It was just before this drug store closed. I decided to go buy a pack of Luckies (kids rarely had trouble buying underage smokes in ole CR) and a bottle of Pepsi so I could sit on the bridge some more and try not to think of jumping in.
And there on the shelf was the new Amazing. I thumbed through it and found my very first fan letter ever published. It didn't help much where my true love was concerned but I felt in the club--Kent Moomaw, Mike Deckinger, Roger Ebert, the whole gang. I still have that issue in my a drawer in my desk. It had a great Valigursky cover with no bug eyed monsters, just an astronaut strapped to an asteroid (I didn't say it was scientifically accurate, did I?) Thanks for the ride on the time machine.
I can still remember the hot September night when I was all broken up over my ninth grade love (well, I was her love; as I discovered she wasn't necessarily mine) and I sat on one of the long bridges that connect the two land masses of Cedar Rapids. It was just before this drug store closed. I decided to go buy a pack of Luckies (kids rarely had trouble buying underage smokes in ole CR) and a bottle of Pepsi so I could sit on the bridge some more and try not to think of jumping in.
And there on the shelf was the new Amazing. I thumbed through it and found my very first fan letter ever published. It didn't help much where my true love was concerned but I felt in the club--Kent Moomaw, Mike Deckinger, Roger Ebert, the whole gang. I still have that issue in my a drawer in my desk. It had a great Valigursky cover with no bug eyed monsters, just an astronaut strapped to an asteroid (I didn't say it was scientifically accurate, did I?) Thanks for the ride on the time machine.
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