Book: Marvel Preview
Issue No.: 13
Published: January 10, 1978
Title: “The UFO Connection!”
Cover Price: $1
Format: Original paper copy
I often read incomplete versions of Marvel books for Marvel Time Warp. Many official digital reprints of old Marvel books are missing ads and fan-mail pages, and some fan-made digital scans are also missing those things. But I assume that I am at least reading all of the actual comic book story pages.
Marvel’s magazines (which are not the same as their comic books) tend to feature a number of non-comic book story pages — stuff like editorials, prose stories, and pin-up galleries. When I went looking for a digital version of Marvel Preview issue no. 13, I couldn’t find any official digital reprints, and all of the unofficial/fan-made scans were missing several pages.
Marvel Preview was an anthology magazine (at least it was in 1978), and this issue is billed on the cover as “Marvel Preview Presents UFO Connection!” That cover promises articles about John Lennon, Jimmy Carter, and the Illumanati, but those articles weren’t in the fan-made scans I could find. Given the subject matter, I obviously had to read those articles. This led me to eBay looking for affordable back issues. Which I found. But the problem with buying old magazines on eBay is, even if you find the book for a decent price, the shipping charges are inevitably high. But! One of the sellers offering Marvel Preview no. 13 was also selling Marvel Preview no. 16 from 1978. So I got two Marvel magazines for about sixteen bucks, shipping included.
For reasons that I don’t totally understand, UFOs (unidentified flying objects, generally assumed to be of extraterrestrial origin) were all the rage in the late 1970s. (And, for reasons that I don’t totally understand, they’re kind of making a comeback these days.) And apparently the staff at Marvel Preview were not immune to UFO fever. This book opens with an editorial from writer David Anthony Kraft in which he claims that he actually saw an alien creature in his rural North Dakota home when he was a kid.
That leads into the main feature of this issue of Marvel Preview, a comic book story written by Kraft called “The UFO Connection!” It’s kind of similar to that old TV show The Invaders — earth is being invaded by evil aliens, but no human knows about the invasion except for a scientist and his young daughter. It’s a fairly epic (nearly 40 pages) story that, aside from the secret evil aliens, gets into a few other tropes of the late 1970s, including psychic energies, reincarnation, and Egyptian pyramids. The finale of the story has our protagonists attempting to destroy the Great Pyramid of Giza (!) because it is actually a tool the evil aliens are using to drain the psychic energy of earth’s humans.
Text pieces make up the rest of the issue. As promised on the cover, there’s an article about President (at the time) Jimmy Carter’s claims of seeing a UFO. And another article about ex-Beatle John Lennon’s own UFO close encounter in New York City. And there’s a review of Brad Steiger’s Project Blue Book book about the U.S. government’s UFO investigations. In most of these non-fiction pieces, the Marvel Preview editorial staff makes it clear that they think UFOs are extra-terrestrial in origin. Or at least that there’s more to UFOs than swamp gas and ball lightning. These guys want to believe.
There’s also a lengthy excerpt from Cosmic Trigger, a book that seeks to tie together UFOs with the Illuminati, Aleister Crowley, psychic messages from Sirius, and pancakes, among other things. I guess the author (Robert Anton Wilson) is serious about this stuff, but I found the excerpt generally tedious. Maybe I’m just too skeptical or too cynical, or maybe both. Anyway, Cosmic Trigger is apparently still in print if you want to check it out for yourself.
Finally, there’s a light prose fiction story (called “All Heart”) about friendly aliens visiting earth and a two-page fan-mail column. My favorite bit of fan mail here is from a guy who is so into Star-Lord (the star of an earlier issue of Marvel Preview) that he promises to have the character painted on his eventual van or sports car. I hope this dude went with the van, and I hope this dude got an absolutely epic painting of Star-Lord on that van.
Week Two Wrap-up
For the second week of 1978, Marvel published (at least in the United States) nine 35-cent comic books and the one-dollar Marvel Preview magazine. Total cover price for all of those books is $4.15. Adjusted for 2023 inflation, that’s about nineteen bucks.
Next time — Fred Flintstone meets George Jetson!