Over at the Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog we see a collection of "Worlds of IF" covers from the 1950′s and the 1960′s, by a smorgasbord of illustrators including a few by Virgil Finlay, and what seems to be a posthumously published cover by Hannes Bok.

In fact I wasn’t positive that the publication date was, you know, after Bok’s expiration date, and when I went looking to verify that I ran across this small archive of his work. It includes the one I’ve reproduced below.

Frederik Pohl posted some of his reminiscences about Bok last year. You can read those here and here.

The 50′s and 60′s are actually a little too modern for me, for the most part, but I’m always ready for a little Finlay or a bit of Bok. I’m often bemused by the fact that the long, odd trip I’ve taken with my own work has led me back – by a route that’s anything but direct, and which couldn’t be called intentional – to illustrators like these, whose work I enjoyed so very much when I was young. It’s all a bit like a joke that I wasn’t in on, or the end result of a convoluted plan by some cackling archvillain.

There’s just something about assemblage sculpture of robots, in which the artist picks from the cast-off streamlined spare parts of yesterday and makes something entirely original – though not entirely new – out of those old gauges, speaker grilles, canisters and vacuum tubes. Like I say, there’s just something about them and that something never fails to make me smile.

So thanks to Dark Roasted Blend I’ve been smiling this morning.

These are just a couple of pictures of Mike Rivamonte’s assemblage sculptures. My favorite listed component (so far!) is "Australian drive-in speaker". Because the dedicated roboticist will go straight to the Antipodes for his diodes.

There are also rockets, including some resin-cast versions, listed on Rivamonte’s home page, and for those of us with more appreciation than ready cash there are some awfully nice prints, too. Wonderful stuff!

It’s always Buck Rogers day here in the Secret Laboratory, but I don’t always have anything to show for it. Therefore, let’s take a moment to admire Teresa N. Fischer’s painting of vintage Buck Rogers toys arranged in a still life, complete with a hanging backdrop of the starriest stars imaginable.

This 20" by 20" oil is currently on display at the Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento, California through May 3rd.

Mister Doortree’s Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog has been giving us day after day of Alphonse Mucha (here, here, and here) including the wonderful, atypical, and seldom seen Slav Epic murals. They’re so very different from his decorative work – not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you, but these come as a big surprise if you’ve never seen anything but his Art Nouveau illustrations and borders.

I was lucky to see this one in Paris; through sheer happenstance there was a Mucha exhibition at the Petit Palais during the week I was there in 1980. As I recall the canvas was edged with great big grommets and the painting was stretched on cords looped through them – it looked like a gigantic, taut sail of mythological wonderment.

That nearly made up for the fact that the Louvre had closed its late nineteenth century collections for some kind of renovations. But I did get two afternoons in the Musee Gustave Moreau, and that was a real pleasure since in those days Moreau was right up my street. I think that his street was the Rue de Rochefoucauld.

The tireless scanner of Mister Doortree now casts its uncanny, glowing beam of awesomeness on a collection of covers from Big Little Books and their countless clones, all featuring the adventures of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, and all at that ever-interesting site called Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Robots! Rockets! Death Rays! Sinister Comets! Forgotten Cities!