Hey, it's Marlon Brando in a space suit! The path to his flyer is blocked by robot sentries. The subtitle explains, "Operation Datakill is underway, and NATHAN is fighting for his survival."

NATHAN is the "Lunar Brain," humanity's most important positronic computer (a hat tip to Isaac Asimov), controlling everything from traffic flow to defense systems and even the weather and the movement of Earth's tectonic plates. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket!

So when the alien Laren try to hack into NATHAN, humans decentralize the information, splitting it among 14,000 robots and then deleting the mainframe. But NATHAN doesn't take kindly to this and fights back - hence the "thinks otherwise" in the title. By the end of this story arc called "The Council," Earth has been both time-displaced and teleported to a completely different galaxy to hide from the Laren.

German magazine Perry Rhodan is the most published science fiction periodical in the world, with over one billion copies sold. It's been running continuously since its debut in 1961 and thus exceeds 3,300 consecutive weeks in print. Each issue contains about sixty pages of text offering the latest chapters in an ongoing space opera saga. Individual stories (called "cycles") are serialized over a period of 1-2 years.

However, this particular cover was originally commissioned not for Perry Rhodan but for its predecessor magazine, Terra, which ran for an even 555 weekly issues from 1957-1968. That pulp series published original German works, as well as American authors such as Isaac Asimov and E.E. Smith, for the book rental market. Yes, book rental.

Terra #133 contained one of Karl Herbert Scheer's fifty adventure stories in the series zbV, (zür besondere Verwendung, meaning "For Special Deployment," as opposed to normal military assets). The hero is Thor Konnat, a "mutant" with telepathic powers and super-intelligence, predating Professor Xavier. Scheer also developed Perry Rhodan and wrote 76 of the first 1600 weekly installments.

In this story entitled "Uberfallig" ("Overdue"), Konnat contends with Martians awakening on Earth after hundreds of thousands of years in hidden suspended animation. I don't know how the cover art related to that story, or if it was ever intended to do so in the first place.

Herbert "Johnny" Bruck (1921-1995) was an extremely prolific painter. He had been producing covers for Perry Rhodan (as he did for its predecessor Terra) since its very first issue. Bruck also painted all fifty ZBV covers. It's easy to imagine his work in conversation with that of American artists such as Wally Wood and John Schoenherr.

The black arch is part of the painting, since we are looking at Perry from inside a building, through a doorway. Note the two buttons inside the door on the right side. Open and close? The doorway was cropped out of the original 1960 cover but included when the painting was repurposed for Perry Rhodan in 1974. The robot, flyer, and spaceman cast long shadows, but Bruck chose to omit the shadow of the manhole (robot-hole?) cover.

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