The Strangest OMNI Magazine Covers of All Time
Staring zebras, deadpan cyborg women, and an awful lot of eyeballs
When I was a kid in the 80s, I loved OMNI magazine.
It was a mind-bending read for nerds of my vintage. In the early years they published some truly pioneering science and tech reporting — you’d read a long interview with Jonas Salk, a report on the frontiers of robotic manipulation, or a sprawling article on fractal math (with an appearance by Benoit Mandlebrot himself.) They also ran science fiction that established new genres: I read some of the first cyberpunk hits in OMNI, like William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” and “Dogfight”. Probably 50% of the neural wiring I use today was etched into place by that magazine.
Alas, in the 90s OMNI gradually devolved into wild-eyed coverage of UFOs; the declining years of the magazine were clotted with feverish Blue-Bookian prosecutions of supposed coverups of the alien visitations. Kind of depressing end to a great publication, really.
That said, it wasn’t too surprising that things tilted into such nuttiness. Even in its epic years, the magazine always had an extremely weird edge. Its freak flag not only flew, it billowed.
This was epitomized by the most visibly iconic part of OMNI: The covers.
