Great Balls Of Fire !
(1977 - Pierrot Publishing)

(by Harry Harrison) Not appropriate for children or adolescents. Marked on the covers as "An Illustrated History of Sex In Science-Fiction" or "A History of Sex In Science-Fiction Illustration". I'd have to say it's more of the latter. 118 pages, of which a little more than half are dominated by art - 47 pages each being large reproductions of a single piece of art. Unfortunately, other pages have any number of black-&-white pictures of color magazine & book covers, as well as a couple of examples of sequential art. The one double-page spread, a panoply of fine-drawn fantasy characters, suffers from the intrusion of the book's gutter. The captioning is haphazard. Even though there are two pages given over to detailing the artists and sources, they are strangely incomplete, with additional artist names needing to be found in the page-indexed acknowledgements (and even then, a handful of images go un-credited). Harrison's essay isn't as in-depth as you might want, but it hits all its marks and doesn't tax the brain-stem too much. His chapters are titled: The Sex Queen Of Outer Space, Early Promise, Strange Relations, A Matter Of Plumbing, The Whip Cracks-Or Is Krafft-Ebing?, Fetish For Main Course, Is Conan Dating Clark Kent ?, The Chains Cast Off . . ., and . . . The Gates Thrown Wide. While female nudes harmlessly abound, along with a couple of males, several of the images deal with adult themes, making me keep it put away from children. The artists that can be found 'well-presented' here are: Neal Adams, Allen Anderson (3)*, Jim Burns (2)***, Dick Calkins, Caza, Richard Corben (2), Philippe Druillet (5), Enrich, Virgil Finlay, Frank Kelly Freas**, Jean Giraud (Moebius) (2), Russ Heath (2), Jeffrey Catherine Jones**, Macedo (3), Esteban Maroto (2), Jean-Michel Nicollet (2), Hubert Rogers, Sanjulian (3), Romain Slocombe, Jean Solé, Barney Steel, George Torjussen, Alex Toth, Boris Vallejo**, Voss, Wally Wood & UNKNOWN ARTIST (4)