Magazine Cover Copies

A continuing (if very irregular) (and just odd) feature in this blog is my highlighting of magazines that use the same cover images. Years ago, someone did a study of Time and Newsweek covers to see how many times they used the same images on their covers, and it turned out that they did it very, very rarely.

But the genre of the fantastic appears to be less lucky. Or less picky. Here are some dual-use images from several decades ago. In the ancient past, when America ruled the world and the future looked bright.

The Japanese edition of Starlog magazine ran this arresting cover image – which apparently also made it to the cover of the Japanese edition of Omni magazine.

Fantastic Films, Dynamite, and Starlog all made use of this Luke Skywalker lightsaber picture from Luke's sojourn on Dagobah to promote their cover stories about The Empire Strikes Back. The strange thing about its popularity is that it's not a very good photo; it's too dark, grainy, and simply unclear. However, it is moody, which is good. But there are better Empire pics they all could have run with.

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Daryl Hannah's starring role in Clan of the Cave Bear got the cover treatment in Heavy Metal (which is odd, because HM never put film shots on its cover, unless it was for Heavy Metal's own movies) and Starlog (which is also odd, because Starlog was a science fiction magazine, and Clan was a caveman film). Same photo, horizontally flipped by one of the magazines.

A Tron 1982 Flashback -- in Japanese

As we prepare for the arrival of the sequel to Disney's 1982 Tron film, here's a blast from the past.

For more Tron magazine covers (including the original and the sequel movie), see newer blog post.

German Starlog Issue Files -- Auf Deutsch Bitte

Please forgive me if you're getting sick of all of the Starlog archiving going on in this blog. But as I continue my project to create an internet archive detailing every issue of the U.S. edition of Starlog magazine (well, because I can), I've also found some other fine folks who've created some archives online.

Earlier, I noted the Japanese editions of Starlog.

Now, I've found an archive of the German edition of Starlog, which was published for about four years in the 1990s. Over at the German-language web site Mad Mags, you'll find a complete archive of this ausgabe.

The German editions were actually put together and printed in the United States, then shipped to and sold in Germany, which likely had an impact on making it financially restrictive after a few years.

Japanese Starlog Magazine Covers

I just stumbled across a web site that has a cover archive of both (separate) Japanese runs of the now-defunct U.S. science fiction media magazine, Starlog.

Here are a couple of them:

See the rest.

PS: I'm building my own online archive of the U.S. edition of Starlog. See the first installment here.