To trawl through the pages of the first of the UK’s two editions of Rolling Stone during June 1972 is to encounter a surprising degree of the fantastical. It begins with the Correspondence, Love Letters & Advice half-page, in which one Chris Kuchler of Los Angeles attempts to drum up for support for two of Jack Kirby’s recently-cancelled Fourth World titles at DC Comics:
Sadly for Chris, and indeed for those of us who still regard Kirby’s New Gods as one of the very finest comics ever, it was already far too late for any fan campaign. (And that’s not even taking into account how unlikely it was that Carmine Infantino would ever pay heed to to what could only have been, given the times, a dribble of complaints passing his desk. I doubt even a mountain of pleading would have changed his thinking at this point the process.) For not only were the books dead and buried, but their Kirby-helmed replacements on DC’s schedule were already beginning to hit the stands. Case in point, the very first issue of The Demon was released on the 22nd of June 1972, just two weeks after Kuchler’s missive was published in the UK.
Further onwards in the issue is Juice From A Clockwork Orange, a piece by Anthony Burgess on the meaning of both his original novel and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of it.
(The article also bears some effective illustrations which, regrettably, are uncredited.)
Most interestingly, Burgess finishes off by trying to guide the reader’s understanding of A Clockwork Orange in its written and screen forms, while paying particular heed to the fact that the British and American versions of the novel end in very different ways.
Finally, the back-of-the-mag Films section reviewed two then-current fantastical movies. William Paul was rather sniffy about Douglas Trumball’s outer-space eco-scifi Silent Running, which, he wrote, “gets too most of its effectiveness out of special effects, which, nonetheless, are fairly special in this case”. By contrast, Greg Ford came out, during much shilly-shallying, largely on the side of the EC Comics-inspired horror anthology Tales From The Crypt, declaring that most of it “clicks with AC-DC excitement between genuinely excruciating Horror and genuinely funny Absurdism, with only a few pardonable lapses into completely mindless Stupidity”.
The Almanac Of The Fantastical 