THE LAST WAVE, P. O. Box 3206, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10163. THE LAST WAVE is dead in the water. This anomalous publication, the virginal daughter of Bob Guccione's porn empire, takes the prize for peculiarity. Though its rates are the best in the business, its stories are often ignored. OMNI's fiction is often excellent, but its power-mad art department has earned an unpleasant notoriety.
Stories often bristle with non sequiturs and over-edited jumpiness.
OMNI's oppressive policies and slender output of fiction conspire to keep it out of the first rank. Research articles and papers are presented baldly, in painfully specialized vocabularies meant to preserve intellectual turf rather than to enlighten the layman. Its news coverage is authoritative and excellent, with fine graphics. But it often displays an irritating arrogance and condescension, and its annoyingly up-scale ads reek of East Coast yuppiedom. Genial essays and awful poetry sometimes fail to disguise its essential nature as an organ of propaganda.