Space Wars - Fact And Fiction
(1980 - Octopus Books)

[-BELOW THE LINE-] From the post-StarWars glut of anything looking like it was related to the movie came this book. With maybe just a smidge of original content, this book has been cobbled together from material culled from *years* of Britain's Fleetway publications (like Look And Learn, Thriller Picture Library, Space Picture Library, Speed & Power, and Ranger). It's a 128-page volume and right-off-the-bat half of those pages are lost to the sequential-art comic-book adventures of Jason January, Space Cadet. Then 24 pages have to be given to text, for informational articles and juvenile-level sci-fi tales, so finally there isn't enough left to be the needed art/illustration pages to get up onto "The List". You do get 39 large reproductions and 2 groupings of multiple images, all of it being fun art that, admittedly, is probably not going to be collected anywhere else. There are six large images that flow over the central-gutter, but surprisingly almost all remain acceptable in that presentation. There is no artist captioning whatsoever, but a few signatures and a bit of research does yield what the consensus is for a majority of the identifications. So, the 'well-presented' artists seem to be: Alessandro Biffignandi (3), Geoff Campion (3), Wilf Hardy (21), Mike Whittlesea, Gerry Wood, and UNKNOWN ARTIST (5).