SciFiNow issue 70 (True Blood)

One of the bestselling issues of 2012, for me as Editor this was one of the ‘perfect’ SciFiNow covers of that era.

What set the magazine apart from its competitors was its coverage of US genre TV, and though HBO’s True Blood had a devoted fan following, it was no longer getting the same level of attention from the mainstream press and so they had dropped the glossy publicity shoots entirely (I think Anna Paquin may have been pregnant at that point as well).

This was one of the rare occasions when we were able to secure a budget overspend to buy in photography from an image library, and Art Editor Andy Downes created this elegant treatment.

SciFiNow’s other USP was its playful, irreverent tone that really found itself on this cover with lines like “Bite me” (which works so so well with Anna Paquin’s expression) and big hit after hit in a variety of treatments - questions, quotes, versus - if I were writing a cover craft manual I’d annotate each and ever cover line.

To my delight an alarmed production controller emailed me in a panic to point out that I’d mispelt “access all areas” as “excess all areas” ::eyeroll::

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