This is Dragon Magazine 129, from January, 1988. It is a pretty standard issue, with the focus on some interesting features on demi-humans, hence Keith Parkinson’s cover painting, “The Big Stash,” featuring what he called “greed dwarves” in the cover blurb. I had this issue when I was a kid and this comment colored my idea of dwarves ever since.

An odd thing: there is an article on power armor for Star Frontiers, using Parkinson’s cover art from Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space as an illustration. That book came out in 1986 and the line ended with it, but Star Frontiers got plenty of support in Dragon Magazine for years after, which is cool.

This issue also contains the first part of one of my favorite Dragon Magazine articles: “Justice is Served!” It details the Scourge of the Underworld and all the low rent super villains he murdered in then-recent Marvel comics. Over the course of 1985 and 1986, Scourge would pop up in disguise seemingly at random to murder a villain (my favorite is probably Death Adder who, after having his serpent saucer mysteriously shot down is forced to take a cab [the idea that NYC is so weird that even Death Adder can get hail a cab without too much trouble is hilarious] only to be gut-shot by Scourge, the cabbie, through the driver’s seat). The story mainly played out in Captain America, culminating in the Bar With No Name massacre, in which Scourge killed nearly 20 villains (who were meeting to discuss what to do about Scourge). Anyway, Scourge popping up here and there really made the shared universe come alive for me, and you can probably blame him for getting me into comics. (I don’t usually shoot interior art of Dragon Magazines, but I couldn’t help it this time – I love the black and white and hot pink thing they did here. Some of the pix are from the second part, which was in issue 130, which I reprinted yesterday).