Cover art - Black Static, Issue 39

I believe that in an era of online and electronic magazines Black Static is still putting a good fight for the printed periodicals. Of course, I might be entirely biased on the matter, although I find electronic formats comfortable and accessible growing up with printed magazines and being nostalgic after the days when I kept a close watch on the mail box for the next issue of a favorite journal makes me take the side of the printed periodicals more than that of the electronic ones. Still, Black Static stands tall not only for being a printed magazine (it has an electronic appearance for each issue too, but I prefer the printed version) but for the quality in content it provides with every single issue. Naturally, there are some issues that feel stronger than others but so far I didn’t stumble upon one that doesn’t have at least one memorable story. And when it comes to its fiction section I am also thankful to Black Static for leading me to the discovery of a couple of new, very talented writers in its pages. Besides the fiction section though, each issue brings excellent comment columns signed by the outstanding Lynda E. Rucker, who replaced Christopher Fowler with great success after the 33^rd issue, and Stephen Volk, the great book reviews of Peter Tennant and the amusing, but always pertinent DVD/Blu-ray reviews of Tony Lee. And that is not all, Black Static comes with top-notch cover artwork, coupled with great interior illustrations for each story, a particularity that for me made each encounter with the magazine’s issues even better. And the cover of Black Static’s 39^th issue is another example of the quality of the illustrations of this magazine. As we can see once again the cover artwork captures the essence of Black Static, a genre magazine that offers plenty of reasons for fear, both of the immediate, in-the-face kind and the subtle, insidious type. And if the responsibility for doing this visually on the cover of the 39^th issue falls to Ben Baldwin, within the pages of the same issue Ralph Robert Moore, Tyler Keevil, Vajra Chandrasekera, Joel Arnold, Steven J. Dines and Suzanne Palmer would try to do the same with the use of words. And obviously, the already mentioned Lynda E. Rucker, Stephen Volk, Peter Tennant and Tony Lee will delight us with their usual features.