Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Fiction Illustrated #3 - 1976

sgOf the three issues in this series, #3 is by far the most known, since it features "Red Tide", a book-length detective tale written and drawn by none other than Jim Steranko!

The story is told entirely in book form, with single illustrations alongside prose. It's a lot of fun to read and Steranko's well-known love of the genre shines through.

This series was a neat little experiment; obviously it didn't go over too well(is it a book? a comic?) since it never went past this third volume. And I was never even able to find any info on the first issue!

4 comments:

John R. Platt said...

Volume 1 was called "Schlomo Ravan" and was written by Bryon Preiss himself and illustrated by Tom Sutton. I may still have a copy. (I got all three volumes on eBay when all I really wanted was this Steranko book.)

MyComicShop.com has the first two volumes in stock, and lists a fourth called "Son of Sherlock Holmes," also written by Preiss.

Christopher Mills said...

Am I the only one who thought that CHANDLER was overrated?

Booksteve said...

SCHLOMO RAVEN was a very funny, Will Elder-esque lampoon of detective stories. Yes, there was a 4th volume BUT it was no longer digest-sized as that size was hard to display. SON OF SHERLOCK HOLMES was drawn by former Wally Wood assistant, Ralph Reese.

Michael Brown said...

I have all four volumes of Fiction Illustrated.

As noted, #1 was Schlomo Raven.
#2 was Starfawn, by Priess and art by Stephen Fabian. This is a SF story.
#3 was Chandler, and was available in both digest and large size format. Dark Horse would later reprint it.
#4 was Son of Sherlock Holmes, ONLY available in large size format.

More were planned, but never came out from Pyramid.

#5 would have been Dragonworld, a prose book by Preiss, illustrated by Michael Reaves. Doubleday and Bantam would publish this in 1979.

In 1978, these volumes came out from other publishers:

An adaptation of "Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester with art by Howard Chaykin was next, as a 2 volume work. Only the first came out, and Epic finally published it in complete form.

"Empire" by Samuel Delany with art by Chaykin.

And finally, the "Illustrated Roger Zelazny", art by Gray Morrow.