In February of last year, we ran a post on the first issue of Worlds Unknown — a four-color anthology title from Marvel Comics devoted to the science fiction genre, with a special focus on adapting short stories and novels by well-known SF authors.  As we discussed at the time, this passion project of Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas, saw just six issues released in this format before it took a hard turn in a decidedly different direction (an adaptation of the fantasy film The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) for its final two issues, the last of which came out in April, 1974.

Given its poor performance in the marketplace, Thomas’ project could hardly be called a success; still, in October of the same year, it became clear that the editor hadn’t given up on the basic idea behind it, as that month saw the debut of a brand new entry in Marvel’s ever-growing, and ever more genre-diverse, line of black-and-white comics magazines:  Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. 

Evidently, Thomas (and the other Marvel brass) had decided that the essential notion of an adaptation-centric science-fiction anthology comic was sound; the problem had been the format used in the previous attempt — i.e., the standard 32-page, Code-approved comic book.  And so, here came Worlds Unknown, Mark II (or even Mark III, if you want to count Journey into Unknown Worlds, the 1950-57 Atlas SF/fantasy/horror comic that inspired the names of both of its 1970s successors).  This time, writers and artists wouldn’t be constrained by the need to utilize a whole issue to properly adapt a single long short story or novella, not would they need to be concerned about any “mature” content contained in the original source material.

The cover of Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1 seemed designed to send a message to the serious SF fan that Marvel meant business this go-around.  Not only was the publisher kicking off with an adaptation of John Wyndham’s well-known 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, but included among the issue’s text features (Marvel’s B&W books always had text features of some sort) was an interview with Ray Bradbury — who, if not exactly the “most famous SF author of all time” (Jules Verne and H.G. Wells might have had something to say about that), was at least as famous (and as highly critically regarded) as any SF writer then currently working.  All that, and a painted cover by Frank Kelly Freas — a popular illustrator who wasn’t exactly new to Marvel (he’d already produced several covers for Crazy magazine), but who nevertheless had the notable distinction in the present context of having won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist a total of eight times — and could thus reasonably be considered to be at the pinnacle of his field every bit as much as was Bradbury.  Pretty impressive.

Well… the cover was mostly painted by Freas.  Once you turned to the magazine’s contents page, you saw that it was in fact credited to “Kelly Freas and John Romita”.  And if you’re wondering why the acclaimed painter might need the assistance of Marvel’s art director on this particular job, Roy Thomas would offer an explanation of sorts some four months later, on the editorial page of Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #3: according to the account given there, the “team-up” between the artists was “made necessary when a few last-minute changes were dictated and the fabulous Mr. Freas was off at an SF convention, picking up still another award.”  This information was accompanied by a black-and-white reproduction of Freas’ unaltered original; naturally, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we can do a little better than that here today:

As you can see, Romita’s “last-minute changes” consisted of repainting the two human figures on the left side of the canvas.  But why were these changes “dictated” in the first place, and by whom?  Decades later, in an Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction retrospective for Back Issue #13 (Jan., 2006), writer Zack Smith offered Roy Thomas’ frank recollection:

“[Marvel publisher] Stan Lee did not like the people on the cover,” [Roy] Thomas said.  “John Romita did an overlay with younger people.  It was more like, ‘Marvel Comics met science fiction,’ which was what we wanted to do.”

Um, OK.  I’ll let you make your own judgement as to whether Romita’s revision of Freas’ work counts as an improvement, a desecration, or no big deal either way; for my part, I’ll just say that the whole incident reinforces my suspicion that Stan Lee never saw a cover he didn’t think could be made better by having John Romita mess with it a little (or even a lot).

Moving on, we come to the magazine’s inside front cover, featuring a frontispiece by Spanish artist Esteban Maroto that, to the best of my knowledge, wasn’t touched up or otherwise altered in any way…

Then, following the aforementioned table of contents, we have an editorial by Roy Thomas.  It’s worth the time to read in full, in my opinion, both for the informational tidbits it shares about this particular issue’s contents, and for its insights into Thomas’ early aspirations for this new publishing venture as a whole:

Thomas evidently took some heat from letter-writing fans over his dismissal of “straight ‘space opera'” in this piece, leading him to issue a clarification in his editorial for UWoSF #3; there, he explained that what he meant by the term “space opera” was “primarily the type of SF fantasy exemplified by the likes of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet — those lovable but long-toothed transplanted westerns in which a rocket is substituted for a Palomino, a ray-gun for a six-shooter, and a B.E.M. (Bug-Eyed Monster) for Jack Palance.”  He did not mean to deride “the slightly more sophisticated type of space-travel story epitomized by, say, ‘Star Trek’ — let alone more mature adventures in space which simply happen to use some of the time-dishonored trappings of space opera.”  Which is all fine and good, and I’m sure Thomas sincerely meant it when he said it… still, it’s rather amusing to read the editor’s earnest declaration in his earlier editorial that he believed space opera had “rather run its course” in 1974, in light of the fact that in less than three years’ time, Thomas would be avidly seeking the comic-book rights to an as-yet-unreleased movie called Star Wars — a gamble of sorts that would ultimately make huge profits for Marvel Comics, proving as it did so that a certain kind of space opera was very, very far from having run its course.

Moving on, we come to the first actual comics material in UWoSF #1: a three-page framing sequence, written by Tony Isabella, with art by Gene Colan and Tom Palmer:

As indicated on the first page’s credit line (as well as by Thomas’ editorial), the “slow glass” concept used in the framing sequences of this and subsequent issues was derived from the works of Bob Shaw, who’d introduced the idea in his 1966 short story “Light of Other Days” (which is itself adapted later in the issue), and had gone on to write several other stories based on the same theme, as well as one novel, Other Days, Other Eyes (1972) that incorporated three of those stories.  (Per the same Back Issue article that we referenced earlier, the original plan had been to base UWoSF‘s framing sequences on Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, and to adapt one of Bradbury’s stories in every issue; when this fell through, associate editor [and published SF author] Gerry Conway suggested Shaw’s “slow glass” as an alternative.)

This “prologue” segues directly into the magazine’s lead comics feature, which, as we’ve already noted, is a comics adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids — or, somewhat more accurately, the first half of an adaptation whose second and concluding part would be forthcoming in Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #2.  It’s scripted by Gerry Conway, with art by Ross Andru and Ernie Chan.

Our story’s narrator, Bill Masen, grows up fascinated by triffids, first studying them in college and then going to work for a company growing them.  Despite his expertise (or perhaps due to it), he’s skeptical of a colleague’s belief that the sounds the weird plants make when they rub their stalks together are a means of communicating with each other… and that they may actually be plotting against their human keepers…

Unable to convince his nurse to let him have so much as a peek at the “space-faring fireworks“, Bill turns in for the night.  The next morning, the nurse doesn’t come in at the usual time, and feeling a bit piqued, our protagonist goes ahead and pulls off his bandages, despite it being two days early.  Then, he steps out into the hall…

As it turns out, there’s a significant number of people who, for whatever reason, didn’t see any of the meteor shower, and so have retained their sight.  Humanity being what it is, it’s not long before some of the sightless seek to exploit their more fortunate fellow citizens…

The young woman’s name is Josella Playton; in Wyndham’s novel (which, full disclosure, I haven’t actually read; I’m basing this statement on Wikipedia’s synopsis), she’s a wealthy novelist, but in Conway’s script is basically reduced to the role of “the girl”. She asks Bill to accompany her home, which he does, but when they arrive, they find that that her father has been stung to death by a murderous triffid.  They flee, eventually finding temporary refuge in someone’s abandoned apartment…

The leader of the people holed up in the University, the “Colonel” (it’s not clear whether his military status is official or assumed) welcomes the new arrivals.  He brushes aside any concerns that his approach towards the sightless people outside the walls may be too harsh, declaring that it’s a different world now than it was just two days ago and they must become hard, “for the sake of our children, and our children’s children.”

And that’s that for the first half of Marvel’s Day of the Triffids adaptation.  To see how the story ended, my seventeen-year-old self of fifty years ago would have to wait a couple of months for Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #2 to come out, and pick it up… which, somehow, I didn’t.  In fact, since I was never motivated to read the novel (or see the 1962 movie version, or watch either of the BBC television adaptations), I never did learn how things worked out for Bill and Josella and the rest of humanity, — at least, not until very recently, when I finally got around to reading UWoSF #2.  Assuming that at least a fair percentage of you are similarly unfamiliar with the rest of the story, and not wanting to leave you hanging, please allow me to offer the following highly abbreviated summary of the narrative’s remaining events:

While out foraging for food for the Uni group, Bill and Josella are captured by Coker — the sighted leader of the sightless folks we saw at the end of the first chapter — and forced to act as guides for his people.  The two are separated, and after Bill manages to make a desperate escape facilitated by attacking triffids, he spends much of the rest of the narrative searching for Josella.  This effort is hampered by the advent of a third catastrophe on top of the other two already besetting humanity — a fatal plague which may (or may not) be caused by all the corpses rotting in the street.  Ultimately, after remembering that Josella once told him she’d always wanted to live in Sussex Downs, Bill makes his way there, and the couple is reunited.  Soon afterwards, they learn that the Colonel’s group has moved to the Isle of Wight, and that they’ll be welcome there; before they can leave their current refuge, however, they’re forced to deal with a new threat — a self-appointed paramilitary cadre that intends to have sighted people use the sightless for labor, in a return to feudalism.  But Bill and Josella and their allies successfully thwart these jumped-up thugs, allowing the story to end (or, at least, stop) with these two panels (art by Rico Rival):

As seventy-four year old SF properties go, The Day of the Triffids has done pretty well for itself — especially in the UK, where, according to the Internet, “triffid” entered the British popular lexicon early on as shorthand for a large, scary-looking plant. And its day is hardly over; as of this writing, there’s a new television version in the works from Amazon Studios, which will join the three live-action adaptations already extant.  Obviously, someone out there likes it.  But your humble blogger is obliged to confess (while acknowledging that he’s basing this assessment purely on Marvel’s adaptation, which isn’t really fair to John Wyndham) that he doesn’t really get it.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by later post-apocalyptic yarns where all the bad stuff can be traced back to one cause, however improbable, but I just can’t get on board with the basic premise of Triffids, which asks us to accept at least two unprecedented phenomena (the advent of the triffids themselves, the arrival of a blindness-causing meteor shower) descending upon the world more or less simultaneously.  Wouldn’t just one of those be enough to make a good story out of?   And while there’s some lip service given in Part Two to the possibility that the meteor shower’s origins may lie with malfunctioning satellites containing biological weaponry, there’s never any suggestion that that weaponry has anything to do with the genesis of the triffids, which makes their arriving at the same time purely a matter of humanity’s bad luck.  Sorry, I just don’t buy it.  Maybe if the artwork had been done by someone whose style was more suitable to horror than that of the Andru and Chan combo (or, in Part Two, Rival’s) I could have gotten beyond the story’s issues, but as it is, “The Day of the Triffids” stands today as my least favorite comics-format feature in Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1, just as it was fifty years ago… its length and leading-off slot notwithstanding.

Let’s move on to what, for my money, is the best comics feature in the issue — and one that makes the whole issue worthwhile, all by itself:  Neal Adams’ “A View from Without…”

Yes, it’s technically a reprint.  But, as Roy Thomas accurately points out, neither it nor the other three reprinted stories in the issue had ever appeared in “professionally-distributed magazines” before now.  Rather, they’d seen print on in small-press run, independently produced publications distributed through and to the fan/collector market: fanzines, as Thomas refers to them, or as they might perhaps more accurately be called (and often were, back in the day), “pro-zines”, since most of the contributors were working professionally in the industry when these books came out.  As with the Blackmark graphic novel by Gil Kane that Thomas was concurrently reprinting in Savage Sword of Conan, this was material that deserved a much larger audience than had thus far been exposed to it.

“A View from Without…” had originally appeared in Sal Quartuccio’s Phase #1, with a release date of 1971; though, per a 2015 interview with Neal Adams published in Alter Ego #181 (May, 2023), the piece had actually been completed a year or two before that.  In addition to having written and drawn the eight-page story (for which he evidently wasn’t paid, at his own request, according to comments made by publisher Quartuccio in Comic Book Creator #25 [Spring, 2021]), the creator also “appears” in it, as photos taken by his then-wife Cory formed the basis for the portraits of the story’s alien narrator, Kalen.

I’m taking the liberty of reproducing “A View from Without…” here in its entirety, without interruptions; if you’re already familiar with the work, I expect you’ll understand why; if you’re not, I think my reasoning will be clear by the time you reach the end.

 

I have another confession to make here: when I originally read this story in October, 1974, at the age of seventeen, I didn’t really understand the ending.  That’s partly on me for not being as well-informed — or at least civically aware — as I should have been at that age; so that while I had probably heard at some point about the famous “Greetings” draft notice (which apparently was actually headed “Greeting”, without the “s”), it wasn’t fixed enough in my consciousness for me to make the connection… at least, not for some time,  But in my defense, while “A View from Without…” was absolutely timely when it had originally appeared in 1971, by late 1974 it had already become something of a period piece, given that military conscription had ended in the United States in December, 1972.  Perhaps a text introduction to give this presentation of the story its proper frame of reference — or just a date of “1971” added to the “Prologue:” blurb on the story’s first page — would have been advisable here.

That said, the rest of the story hit me just as hard fifty years ago as I’m sure Neal Adams meant it to.  And it still stands as a powerful statement today, with a central message that, regrettably, appears to be timeless.

Next up is the issue’s first (and primary) text feature —  “The Bradbury Chronicles”, a 10-page interview conducted by San Diego Comic-Con founder Shel Dorf.  It’s substantial enough to still be of interest to Ray Bradbury fans of half a century later — but it ain’t comics, so we’re going to move on to…

…a subscription ad.

Of course, it’s not just an ad, since it features a fine illustration by Alfredo Alcala that shows off his more whimsical side.  The identities of most of the “band members” are probably obvious to most of you reading this, but at least a couple of ’em are on the more obscure side, so, clockwise from upper left, we have:

• Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars (who’d moved to the black-and-white Monsters Unleashed after losing his color comics berth in Creatures on the Loose).
• Simon Garth, Zombie (from Tales of the Zombie, duh).
• Morbius, the Living Vampire (then appearing regularly in Vampire Tales as well as in the color comic Fear).
• Satana, the Devil’s Daughter (also appearing in Vampire Tales).
• the Frankenstein Monster (featured in Monsters Unleashed as well as his self-titled color comic); also, please note the copy of Crazy magazine safety-pinned to Frank’s shirt.
• Werewolf by Night (another denizen of Monsters Unleashed).
• Dracula (titular star of Dracula Lives, double duh).
• Conan the Barbarian (as in The Savage Sword of… though it’s possible he was intended to rep Savage Tales at the time Alcala drew this piece; see below).

This ad had actually been running for some months at this point, and was rather out of date by this time — note that there’s no representation in Alcala’s illustration for Planet of the Apes, which had debuted in June, to say nothing of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, which had been around since February.  Still, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss what might be my last chance to share this with you, especially as it serves as a valedictory snapshot of Marvel’s magazine line as it stood just before the “frightful four” who’d kicked off the publisher’s major move into the B&W market began their inexorable decline — a not-very-long-at-all march to oblivion which would begin the very next month, November, 1974, when the final all-new, non-“Annual” issue of Tales of the Zombie arrived on stands.

Next up is our second reprint: Frank Brunner’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Mongo!”, starring “Smash Gordon”…

Originally published in Heritage #1a (1972), a ‘zine that — for this issue, at least — was devoted to Flash Gordon in its various permutations.

It’s interesting, I think, that Marvel allowed for a bit more, shall we say, extensive depiction of female nudity in this reprinted piece than they generally did with the new work they commissioned for their black-and-white books…

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Mongo!” is undoubtedly the most lightweight story in the issue, and the one piece among the four reprints that, with its underground-lite humor and casual style of lettering, most clearly reflects its ‘zine origins.  But it’s amusing enough, looks great, and at four pages, doesn’t hang around long enough to wear out its welcome.

The next story, “Savage World!”, also has a connection to Flash Gordon… sort of.  Back in the 1930s and early ’40s, Alex Raymond’s comic strip character had been portrayed in three film serials by Buster Crabbe, a former Olympic swimmer who’d also play Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and a number of other adventurous types on screen.  Come the 1950s, Crabbe decided to rent out his name and likeness to the comic-book industry; first to Eastern Color, whose Buster Crabbe ran for twelve issues in 1951-153, then to Lev Gleason Publications, whose version ran for just four issues in 1953-54.

It was for the latter title that, in the spring of 1954, a young artist named Al Williamson received the assignment to draw the eight-page story we’d come to know as “Savage World!” — an assignment he ultimately completed with the help of some talented artist friends, fellow members in a loose-knit group sometimes called “the Fleagle Gang”.  Over thirty years later, Williamson would recall the circumstances for an article published in Death Rattle (1985 series) #10 (Apr., 1987):

Angelo Torres and I were just going to bash it out…  Take the money and run.  So we started to work. I had just finished laying the thing out, and we were going to start work.

 

But there was a scene that was to show a beautiful city, and the only man who could draw a beautiful city was Roy Krenkel. So Roy came in and pencilled the city.

 

Then we said that Buster had to be done by the best guy in the business.  I was deathly afraid of inking faces.  Especially old Buster; I wanted it to really look like him.  So naturally we got Frank Frazettal. He inked about 90 per cent of the heads, all the close ups of Buster.

Unfortunately, Buster Crabbe was cancelled before the story could see print (Lev Gleason went out of business not longer afterwards, in 1956), and Williamson ultimately took back his original art pages in lieu of payment.  A little over a decade later, Williamson was contacted by his fellow veteran of 1950s science fiction comics, Wally Wood, who was putting together the first issue of an independent comics publication — arguably the first comics pro-zine, or, if you prefer, “ground-level” comic book — called witzend.  As Williamson later remembered for Death Rattle #10:

He [Wood] had seen photostats of the originals — I had given a set of them to each of the artists — and he told me he wanted to publish it.  I told him I had the art, but I didn’t know who had written the story.

 

“He said, ‘I don’t like the story anyhow.  I think I could write a better one.”  So he did.  I was amazed.  It’s now a completely different story.  At this point, I don’t even remember what the original story was — but I know Wally’s is much better.

The completed “Savage World” appeared in witzend #1, published in 1966; as in its later Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1 presentation, the only credits it carried were for Wood and Williamson.  (Presumably, all of Williamson’s “Fleagle” pals were fine with that…)

“…and this is a scientist, educated and comparatively civilized!”  The inner-worlders move on to test Helen using the same equipment, and are much happier with what they find in her psyche.  Meanwhile…

Larry turns the subdued inner-worlder over to Mark, directing his comrade to force their prisoner to show him the route to the surface, while he goes back for Helen…

The original script for “Savage World!” appears to be lost to the ages; still, in his decades-later reminiscences, Williamson said that, while he didn’t remember specifics, he was pretty sure that in the OG version, “Larry and the others were not interlopers into a peaceful society. The good guys were the good guys, and the bad guys were the bad guys in that one.”

Wood’s decision to make the morality of the characters’ actions less cut-and-dried may well have made for an improvement over the script that Williamson had originally been given to illustrate; on the other hand, the “we’re the bad guys” theme wasn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff, even in 1966.  But regardless of the story’s worth, the Fleagles’ artwork is absolutely gorgeous; if only for that reason, we should all be grateful that Al Williamson had the good sense to get the pages back, and then hang on to them, back in the day.

Following “Savage World!” is the issue’s second and last text article, “Past and Present Master” — a four-page interview with Frank Kelly Freas, conducted by Gerry Conway — and then it’s on to our final reprint, Michael W. Kaluta’s “Hey Buddy, Can You Lend Me a…”:

Written and drawn by Kaluta in the early days of his professional career, this story was originally intended for the fourth issue of Web of Horror — a short-lived black-and-white comics magazine launched in 1969 by the folks who brought you Cracked magazine in an early attempt to compete with Warren Publishing’s Creepy and its ilk.  After three issues, the magazine’s editor had walked off the job; several of its young contributors had endeavored to keep it going, but when it became evident that the publisher had no interest in putting out Web of Horror #4, one of those artists — Frank Brunner — had gone to the Cracked offices and retrieved as much of the material already produced for the issue as he could.  Most of it ended up being published in one ‘zine or another over the next year or two, including “Hey Buddy, Can You Lend Me a…”, which saw print in Scream Door #1 (1971).  (The obvious parallels with the back-story of “Savage World!” are entirely coincidental, but are striking, nonetheless.)

The stranded travelers realize that, armed or not, their chances of survival are slim — all of the plant life in the wilderness has absorbed so much radioactive waste from the “omni-cities” of their society that there’s nothing to eat — but then, hope comes in the form of a distant ringing noise.  Following the mysterious sound, the group comes upon a crater wherein lie the remains of destroyed buildings — and one strange, upright box which turns out to be the source of the ringing…

Maecia manages to grab up the fallen firearm and shoot the giant insect point-blank, killing it; though not before it’s injured her husband…

Reading this story in the second decade of the 21st century definitely requires a different sort of suspension of disbelief than readers of the 1970s had to worry about.  I mean, a telephone booth?  One that is still not only mechanically functional, but actually connected to a telecommunications network?  Nah, no way.  Still, within in the context of when it was originally written and drawn, it’s a tidy enough little SF chiller.  And, naturally, like all of this issue’s other reprints, it looks great.

This brings us at last to the final feature of the magazine… or “features”, if you want to count the remaining pages of the “slow glass” framing sequence with which we began…

You’ll have noted, I’m sure, that the topics mentioned by the skeptical Mike all match up with the stories featured earlier in the magazine… with the exception of “time travel”, which doesn’t really fit any of them.  Maybe there was originally supposed to be a different story in issue #1 in place of “Smash Gordon” or “Savage World!”?

As previously noted, Gene Colan’s pencils for the scenes in Mr. Tyme’s shop were inked by Tom Palmer, probably the most sympathetic finisher Colan ever had; however, for the adaptation of “Light of Other Days”, Palmer is replaced by Mike Esposito, and the results are somewhat less felicitous (although the essential quality of Colan’s pencilled art still comes through, I feel).

Mr. Hagen quickly returns with the promised rug, and then, once everyone is settled on the low stone wall, resumes his pitch.  He explains that all of his slow glass is at least ten years thick, making his price of two hundred pounds for a four-foot window a bargain.  Hagen is then briefly distracted by the reappearance of the woman and child at the cottage window — as is our narrator, who’s surprised when a squirrel leaps down right in from of the window, and the woman doesn’t even blink.  Could she be blind?

Resuming his spiel, Hagen begins to rhapsodize about “the miracle, the genuine honest-to-goodness miracle of engineering precision needed to produce slow glass.”

The narrator and his wife, Selina, take cover under the cottage’s eaves just as it begins to rain; then Selina remembers that they left the rug lying on the wall, and rushes back to get it…

The poetic excerpt quoted in the last panel (and whence also comes the story’s title) is from Thomas Moore‘s “Oft, in the Stilly Night” (full text here).

Unlike The Day of the Triffids, your humble blogger has actually read “Light of Other Days” in its original prose form (so can you, by clicking here) and so I’m actually able to venture an informed opinion on how it stands up as an adaptation.  Generally speaking, Isabella and Colan have remained quite faithful to their source; that said, there’s been one significant change made to the tale’s climax that I find unfortunate: in Shaw’s original story, while the married couple are understandably weirded out by the discovery of Hagen’s secret, they don’t immediately flee the scene in near-terror; rather, they complete their transaction and take their purchased slow glass with them, holding each other tightly in a way that suggests there may be hope for their marriage.  It’s all rather more subtle and humane than the Marvel version, which goes for a more conventionally “spooky” ending; thankfully, most of the poignancy of Shaw’s conclusion manages to survive the alteration.

And with that, we’re done… though we can be sure that Mr. Tyme will be back in two months to share with us more strange scenes of the unknown worlds that lie captured within his slow glass…

---

As of course he was, come December, 1974, in the second issue of Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction — although, as I mentioned earlier in the post, I wasn’t.  Why didn’t I buy UWoSF #2?  It’s a mystery to my present-day self, who remembers my younger self liking the first issue quite a lot, overall; sure, I hadn’t been knocked out by the first half of “The Day of the Triffids”, but I’m still surprised that I wasn’t curious enough to find out how it ended to shell out a dollar — especially given the knockout cover that Mike Kaluta provided for issue #2.

I didn’t buy issue #3, either, despite its featuring an adaptation of one of my favorite Harlan Ellison short stories, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”, drawn by Alex Niño.  Nor did I pick up #4 and #5.  I’m inclined to believe that the magazine may have had distribution problems in my area, so that I never saw these issues at all, but at this late date there’s obviously no way to ever know for sure.  Perhaps I had other reasons for passing these by, back in the day — reasons which made sense to me at the time, but which I no longer remember and can’t even imagine, in 2024.

Fortunately, however, I did manage to pick up the sixth issue when it came out in August, 1975, which means I didn’t miss out on what turned out to be the best adaptation ever produced for Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction during its all-too-brief lifespan.  I’m looking forward to sharing that one with all of you, ten short months from now.