Been reading the EC comic Weird Fantasy. Mostly science fiction stories, but as you see in the condensed version above, the publisher’s background in girl comics seems to have caused an unusual focus on heartbreak and romance type narratives.
William Gaines, the intrepid boss of EC, was introduced to SF by comic artist and future scifi novelist Harry Harrison, a regular contributor here. And, allowing for the enjoyably moronic style of writing, Weird Fantasy musters more genuine enthusiasm for the unique possibilities of the sci-fi form than most contemporary movies were managing. I suspect filmmakers looked down on science fiction, whereas comic creators looked up to it.
FORBIDDEN PLANET is the great exception to most movies dealing with these themes — it trusts the audience to grasp more or less at once that it’s the future — white American males are flying about in space — then in short order we get a robot, lasers, a lost alien civilisation, telekinetic powers. Just one of those concepts would have been enough for most movies. And the FP knock-offs never pushed the boat out any further, indeed they mostly sailed it straight back to harbour.
Of course there are good sf films that milk a single idea for 90 minutes — THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN is wonderfully single-minded.
One nice thing about Weird Fantasy is that, between each hackneyed premise — parodied in one strip where two employees of the magazine attempt to brainstorm a story — and each abrupt and often silly twist ending, there are all kinds of different surprises, of tone, plot, attitude. Makes me realise again how pitch-perfect Michael Kupperman’s comic-book parodies are (e.g. Tales Designed to Thrizzle).
Very small people may already be inside all of us. Is there a message you would like passed on?
shadowplay 