the pointless weblog

Tales From The Galaxies was a science fiction anthology published in 1973 by Pan Books. 

This anthology contains four stories (The Red Stuff by John Wyndham, Miss Inman and the Kloots by Amabel Williams-Ellis, The Odour of Thought by Robert Sheckley and Exploration Team by Murray Leinster) and also a comic strip reprinted from Astounding Stories (The Heritage, which was illustrated by Malcom Stokes). The cover was illustrated by Alan Lee.

There’s a single illustration in the book, which is a picture of a Kloot from the story that is about Kloots. It was drawn by Mike Jackson. It’s really lovely.

The book doesn’t mengion who wrote the comic strip that they reprint. All it says was that it was illustrated by Malcolm Stokes and originally published in Astounding Stories. It doesn’t even say when it was first printed and just lists it as copyright unknown. It also feels like they’ve not printed all of it. I quite enjoyed it though, due to dinosaurs, and the spacemen’s incredibly haggard faces.

THE END, maybe.

This Action Force annual was published by Marvel in the UK in 1987, which presumably makes it the 1988 Action Force annual.

Action Force comics were mostly just rebranded GI Joe comics. They were also mostly just men screaming AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH at the very top of their voices. In less than 60 pages they manage to cram in about four hundred screaming men.

It is without doubt the most macho thing I have ever read.

Invasion of the Ormazoids was a choose your own adventure book starring Doctor Who. It was written by Philip Martin, illustrated by Gail Bennett, and published by Severn House in 1986.

In this book you get to help Doctor Who fight some monstrous pretend Davros and his army of genetically engineered abominations on a planet at the edge of the universe. The whole thing is completely incomprehensible in every way. I think it might be the worst book I’ve ever read.

I’ve read the sentence that starts “The question is” about a hundred times in an attempt to understand it, but I cannot. It is just too much.

The book also messes up the conceit that the character you’re playing is actually you by repeatedly including “you” in the illustrations. Luckily it appears that you’re just David Tennant.

There were at least five more books in this series, but I don’t know if I dare seek them out.

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons was written by Terrance Dicks and published by Target Books in 1975. It was based on a Doctor Who TV serial written by Robert Holmes. The book contains 6 full-page illustrations by Alan Willow, who presumably also did the cover illustrations, although it doesn’t actually say.

I’ve never seen the TV version of this story, but as it contains an evil circus, The Master, malevolent murderous plastic dolls,  a gigantic crab/spider/octopus beast, telephone wires of death and plastic daffodils that are programmed to kill each and every one of us, I expect it is the scariest thing ever broadcast on TV.

Despite all that, the most shocking moment comes on page 55.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term “garaged” before, and it’s making me shudder mildly with revulsion.

The illustrations that pop-up throughout the book are uniformly excellent. I would usually worry slightly about them spoilers, but the blurb does enough of that already.