An Echo That's Reversing – Page 2 – more discussions on the Fine Arts, current events, programming, and what-not

The Ballad of Barbarella the Smuggler

While hunting for different editions of the Barbarella comic, I came across a rarity from Virgin Record Stores in the UK from 1981. Around that time, the second collection of Barbarella comics, Le Coleres du Manges-Minutes, was released in various editions internationally and Virgin Records printed a four-issue series in English under the title The New Adventures of Barbarella (this title was also used in the German Heyne editions a decade earlier with Die Neuen Abenteuer der Barbarella). Those Virgin Records publications had become my white whale in both their rarity and cost. Rarity being the biggest barrier because for a while I could only find visual records of their existence and none for sale. Eventually, I pieced together numbers 2, 3, and 4 for a decent and not embarrassing price. The cost of my collection as a whole is embarrassing, but only for a few editions am I actually uncomfortable confessing how much I paid.

But still the Virgin Records issue number 1 was elusive.

Dov’ero io? Italia nei circonscrizioni di Nuovo York

Back in my takin’-Italian-lessons days my teacher sent me a message that Carmen Consoli was touring in the US for the next several months. A few lessons prior, she had given me homework that included some of the history of Italian popular music from, say, the 1940s to the early 2000s. Many of her lesson slides had dated information so there were no artists included from the 2010s… and certainly not the 2020s. The newest artist that was referenced, and simply from a photo, was Carmen Consoli, active from the mid-90s to around 2010. I did a quick search and listened to ripped albums on YouTube (do albums exist in any other form?) which really hooked me, maybe/probably more because it was alt-pop in Italian than that I liked the music.

J-C Forest “Barbarella”, Editions Kesselring

April 2020 I participated in my first online auction. The item I was after (and won!) was the original art used on the cover of Asimov’s Lucky Starr paperbacks from the late 70s. Today, I’m in the middle of another auction, this time for a beautiful portfolio of Barbarella prints signed by Jean-Claude Forest. No. 543 of 777 produced. It’s listed at €60 – €80, but based on how the first 70-or-so lots have gone so far (2 hours in) it will be much more than that. Auction started at 8 AM and at this rate my lot won’t come up until later this afternoon. I’ve set hourly alarms to remind me to check the progress.

Lucky Starr illustration from previous auction

The Barbarella Library

Back in October of last year I started collecting different editions of the Barbarella comics. As my collection grew and my personal documentation–by language, year, format–expanded, I decided to create a public website to share all of that information, along with details from items I don’t own, and so created The Barbarella Library. The website is a work-in-progress because, as I’ve found while chasing various and more rare editions, Barbarella has an unexpectedly rich bibliography.

The comics, written by Jean-Claude Forest, first appeared in eight chapters from 1962 to 1963 in the French magazine V and then collected and published in 1964 by Le Terrain Vague in oversized hardback. Eric Losfeld was the publisher of both the magazine and the book. The stories were first translated in English in 1965 and 1966 in the American literary magazine Evergreen Review–along with works by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, and Alain Robbe-Grillet–then compiled in an oversized hardback edition. Both magazine and book were published by Grove Press.

The loss of our prehistory

A few long time ago (a little over 12 years to be whatever) several geek websites posted a link to a site where photos of a sci-fi convention called Westercon from the 1980 event were posted. The people in the photos were so 80s and earnest and lo-fi that you couldn’t help but be jealous of them and the time they were living in. The geek sites posted additional links to other relevant parties who had valuable/interesting additions to the conversation or who had actually lived through those halcyon days, and each site had their own discussion threads where yet more links were posted and memories from those who had actually been at that convention were retold. It was one of those moments that, meta-wise, made you wish you were a sociologist 200 years from now because there was just so much those photos and discussions revealed about a certain group at a certain time in history along with how they themselves remembered that history.