‘Tis the season to be spooky, so let’s enjoy a horrifying tale.
Back in October 2012, I celebrated the monstrous month of morbidity by sharing with you all the scans I could find of Ray Bradbury stories that had been adapted by EC Comics. You can access them all by clicking this link to my tagged archives. Since then, some delightfully obsessed readers contacted me to fill in gaps in my research and share additional scans. And, oddly enough, several institutions of higher learning now include a few of my Bradbury blog posts in their literary curricula for students.
No, that isn’t the horrifying tale. Use your head!
The horrifying tale for today is called The Coffin. It appeared in Haunt of Fear #16 in 1952, written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Jack Davis, and was reprinted in 1996 by Gemstone, who made so many great EC Comics available and affordable for a new generation. I believe this version also appeared in a rare collection called The Autumn People.
Bradbury’s original version appeared in his first published book Dark Carnival in 1947, and is sometimes called Wake for the Living. If you want a copy of that vintage tome, you will need around $1000. But The Coffin was reprinted in 1980 in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, which you can currently get on Kindle for $12, and affordable print copies still exist. Finally, The Coffin was adapted for television as part of Ray Bradbury Theater in the mid-1980s.
So, without further ado, here is a gallery of this slice of spooky weirdness from EC Comics.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared.
We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared.
We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared.
We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared.
We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared.
We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared.
We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. Below the story featured in today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. We discovered Ray Bradbury back in the sixth grade and subsequently read almost everything he ever wrote. So, while these stories weren’t new to us when we found them in EC reprints, we enjoyed the heck out of them. We hope you do, too.
Below today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury. Below today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury. Below today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury. Below today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury. Below today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury. Below today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
EC Comics featured many stories by Ray Bradbury, and we’d like to share them with you. We discovered Ray Bradbury back in the sixth grade and subsequently read almost everything he ever wrote. So, while these stories weren’t new to us when we found them in EC reprints, we enjoyed the heck out of them. We hope you do, too.
Below today’s gallery, you will find a list of Ray Bradbury stories and the EC Comics issues where they appeared. We believe we’ve compiled a definitive guide. If you have additions or corrections, we would love to hear from you.
The small Ohio town of Xenia was where both sets of my grandparents lived when I was a kid. Xenia is kind of famous for the massive tornado that almost wiped it out in 1974, a year after I was born. The storm destroyed the house where my father’s parents lived, and I’ve seen photos of that destruction in old family photo albums. In the 1980s, my class at school watched an educational film about tornadoes, and the Xenia disaster was included. That day lit the first spark in my young mind that I wasn’t merely learning history; I was a part of it.
Grammy and Grampop eventually rebuilt their house. My sister and I spent large parts of our summer vacations there. One of our favorite memories is making ice cream by hand with Pop every summer. We used an old hand-cranked device that seemed—from a child’s perspective—to take hours. But the result was always amazing, and even better because we had made it ourselves, together.
In 1979, I was six years old and happily making ice cream.
Grammy passed away in 2005, Dad in 2015, and Pop just a few days ago. Pop was a veteran of the Korean War, and although I remember the shrapnel scar on his leg that you could see whenever he wore shorts in the summer for his route as the local postman, he never talked about his wartime experiences.
Perhaps he was from a generation of men who did not openly discuss their emotional pain. Or perhaps telling your grandkids about the horrors of war isn’t the most natural thing in the world. But in later years, he connected with other vets and began giving presentations about his experiences and supporting and counseling other vets. Having read his typed memoir of being wounded, the subsequent airlift, and his hospitalization, I can only hope that talking about his experiences was part of a healing process.
Pop also did beautiful woodwork in his shop in the basement—the only part of the original house to survive the tornado, and a place where my sister and I often spent hours with the toys stored there from the childhoods of my dad and his sister, my aunt. Pop made a ton of frames and glass-fronted cases such as the one that still hangs in Mom’s kitchen to display her glassware collection. I remember how excited he was to recover old lumber in the form of oaken pews from a local church that was shutting its doors.
Though my grandparents disdained alcohol for religious reasons when I was very young, Pop eventually began brewing dandelion wine in that basement, and grape wine from grapes he grew himself in the backyard. It had nothing to do with the fact that Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite novels, but that was one more reason to appreciate what Pop was creating.
I can’t count how many times I read this book.
This week, I requested that a tree be planted in Pop’s honor. I felt it was a fitting tribute to a woodworker, and doubly so since his grandson has printed so many books on paper. The tree will be planted in Michigan, where I spent so many of my most formative years as a writer, musician, and artist. Pop will always be with me in my creative endeavors. Whether they are paintings, books, drawings, comics, home-brewing experiments, or whatever, I learned something from Pop about the value of making things myself.
I brewed my own mead back in 2017.
Cheers, Pop. Let’s make something awesome for them to remember us by.
Steak is an independently published comic from the UK that explores the personal and political ramifications of traveling back in time to hunt dinosaurs for their meat. Author and educator Will Conway reports that when he started out, he had not heard of the Flesh series from 2000 AD, and that Steak is an entirely different beast. While Flesh sprung from the violent imagination of Pat Mills and focused on brutal chaos in a prehistoric setting, Steak delves into more psychological dimensions of the dino-hunting enterprise. But there’s plenty of Cretaceous carnage, too!
The main character, Benjamin Buckland, comes up with the idea while recovering from a brain injury, and he and his scientific partner Roger Dukowicz conceive the means of time travel after eating “a rare cactus”—presumably peyote. If that sounds like a mentally unhinged way to start a business, then it should come as no surprise that by the second issue, Buckland’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic. It doesn’t help that his more even-keeled partner gets abducted, and a shadowy organization is spying on him.
As a self-proclaimed “zoophage” who gets a thrill from eating exotic animals, Buckland asserts that his main goal is to eat dinosaurs. He pays for his hobby by opening restaurants and doing licensing deals to expand the market for his Mesozoic meat. This leads to hilarious narration about how different dinosaur species taste, several gory yet coldly factual pages about how to butcher them like cattle, and pun-filled products such as “Apattiesaurus” burgers and “Psit-taco-saurus” food trucks. Dukowicz sports T-shirts with dinosaur-themed pop-culture references such as “Iguanodon Corleone”.
But with corporations trying to steal his technology for profit, and militaries trying to obtain it for a pre-emptive advantage in warfare, Buckland is beset from all sides. How it will all play out remains, at the time of this writing, a mystery. Issue number three of this five-issue series is currently in production, so now would be a good time to subscribe and see what happens next.
Marc Olivent’s artwork is a lot of fun, especially in the scenes of dinosaur hunting and how they go horribly wrong. The dinosaurs are impressive and energetic, whether they are chomping someone’s head or stampeding off a cliff. The narrative structure is creative, jumping around a bit in time in the first issue without much guidance as to when things take place other than intentionally vague captions like “Now then” and “Meanwhile”. It works well for a time-travel story, and piecing together the puzzle is part of the pleasure.
Steak considers the ethics of killing animals that died off millions of years ago. Are they endangered species because they are now extinct or, as one character puts it, is it “morally okay” because “They were already dead before they were already dead, I guess?” And when members of a hunting party get killed by dinos, the lawyers struggle with the question of how to handle someone dying millions of years before they were born. But these philosophical conundrums don’t bog down the narrative, which remains fast-paced and lively, and lets you draw your own conclusions.
So far, the series has avoided the complications of potentially altering the future by killing animals in the past, an idea most famously explored in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. But who knows? Maybe we will get there eventually, because Steak is a smart, funny, and exciting romp that serves up a unique and unpredictable take on a classic concept.
Collector’s Guide: You can order print copies at the Steak website, and subscribe to updates about upcoming issues. Currently the first two issues are available for Kindle in the USA and in the UK.
Back in 2017, in the first few months of my writers workshop, I received feedback from a science-fiction writer I respect and admire. As you might already know, many of the first thirty episodes of the Meteor Mags stories take place from 2027 to 2030. The feedback I got was that science-fiction stories should be set at least forty years into the future.
I think the idea was that this buffer of time gives some plausibility to the development of “futuristic” technologies. It might be a decent rule of thumb for aspiring SF writers. But futurism isn’t a central concept or concern in Mags’ stories, and as a lifelong reader of comic books, I could list dozens if not hundreds of sci-fi stories set in the present or the distant past.
I won’t belabor the point but merely offer an example: The Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra was published from 2012 to 2015, but that absolutely insane sci-fi epic was set in the 1940s through the 1960s.
You can probably think of many more comic-book examples, such as the 1980s Watchmen series set in an alternate 1980s universe. Or you can go back to early prose classics from H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley. Any fan of steampunk can come up with science-fiction tales set in the Victorian era, and any Ray Bradbury fan knows that many once-futuristic dates in The Martian Chronicles have long since come and gone.
Science fiction’s future is old news.
The Meteor Mags stories take place in a solar system that shares many aspects of ours but is clearly different. One of the more obvious clues is how asteroids are named with their number after their name: Our “4 Vesta” is Mags’ “Vesta 4”. Call it an alternate universe, an alternate timeline, a Marvel What If scenario, or, for you Robert Heinlein geeks, a “ficton”. I don’t care. It’s just where Mags lives, and while it sometimes offers a commentary on or satire of our solar system, it’s unique unto itself.
In terms of satire, a few examples come to mind. The Musical Freedoms Act of 2019 is an obvious satire of the “Religious Freedom” laws that recently plagued the United States. In Jam Room, Mags mentions that Ted Nugent ran for President in 2020 but was assassinated. In Hunted to Extinction, Mags concludes a parody of gratuitous female shower scenes in SF movies with a comment about the Alien franchise.
Her solar system and ours have a few things in common, but they also have many differences.
In terms of divergent timelines, the divergences go back at least a few hundred years in the backstories about how Mags’ ancestors affected the golden age of Atlantic pirates in the 1700s and the economic landscape of Europe in the 1800s. Some of those events have been specifically mentioned in the text, some have been implied or alluded to, and some remain in my massive pile of notes for unwritten historical tales.
The history of space exploration and asteroid mining were influenced by Mags’ presence in her solar system, especially in terms of her contributions to localized gravity control. I do not expect that humans in our reality will have a lunar base established in 2023 nor be mining asteroids on a massive scale a few years later. We certainly will not be colonizing Mars and building major metropolises there in our current decade. These “futuristic” concepts overlap our timeline and are a direct consequence of the existence of Mags and her illustrious and unusually long-lived maternal ancestors.
A futuristic approach to science fiction is based on the idea that readers expect a story that is set in the future of their personal reality where scientific and technologic advancements have materialized. It’s a place where our dreams and aspirations about tech have come true. It’s a fantasy about where our species is headed. We might be headed toward utopia or dystopia, but these are somewhat distant futures that science fiction speculates about; hence the term “speculative fiction”.
That isn’t my approach at all. My approach is to consider myself as being Mags’ biographer. That position gives me not just the future to play with, but the past. The events relevant to her life include—as Carl Sagan liked to say—”billions and billions” of years, from the earliest days of her solar system to the heat death of her universe.
Even that timespan and location is too limited. I’ve already published a story about Patches that suggests the end of the universe is not the end for Mags and Patches, and I have notes for a story where Mags gets a glimpse of every possible alternate universe where she existed.
So, we’re way beyond guidelines to set these stories at some arbitrary number of years in our future. They don’t take place there. They take place in the infinite playground of my imagination.
The series has always—first and foremost—been about the characters and their friendships through the insane adventures they encounter. The science-fiction aspects are far less important to me than that emotional core. My intent is not to make fantasies about future technology seem plausible. I only want each story to be fun—fun for me to write, fun for my characters to live though, and fun for the readers who might consider the adventures of a hell-raising, shotgun-wielding, piano-playing, feline maniac with an odd assortment of space pets to be a nice break from the drudgery of everyday life.
As I’ve said before: This isn’t science fiction. It’s rock’n’roll wearing science-fiction clothes. Feel free to take yours off and join the party.
Mars Will Send No More is approaching the end of its eighth year, so I’ve been doing maintenance on it, clearing out dead wood and tidying up a bit. With more than 1500 posts, this garden of artistic obsessions requires pruning now and then. But I don’t mind. It’s fun to take a trip down memory lane and re-experience the ramshackle madness and mayhem upon which this blog was founded.
It’s a strange time for comic book blogs. Lloyd Wright at Diversions of the Groovy Kind is celebrating ten years of bronze-age comics blogging with nearly 3000 posts, and he’s musing on how life has changed since he started. He’s returned to writing comic books after stoking the fires of his nostalgia, and he’s a grandfather now, so he plans to post less frequently. Lloyd was a big influence on Mars in its formative days, so visit Diversions to wish him well and check out his latest original creations.
Paul O’Connor at Longbox Graveyard was an early supporter of my blogging endeavors when Mars was getting off the ground, and he’s been through changes, too. His “graveyard” has long since been been pruned and organized into a collection of his bronze-age favorites. He’s survived Californian fires, moved to Canada and returned, and is doubtlessly pondering his next conquest in the wake of leaving Twitter and putting his blog on indefinite hiatus. Drop by the Longbox to explore his entertaining collection of personal musings and generous guest blogs by fellow comic-book fans, and let him know we’d love to see him back.
Here on the distant frontiers of my Martian outpost, I’ve got no plans to abandon these virtual fortifications any time soon. We can always find something to rap about, whether it’s poetry,writing, art, food, or cats. But in honor of Lloyd and Paul and all the comic book bloggers out there, I’ll share an update about the comic book posts that have been the most popular here. Some of them overlap with my twenty-two all-time favorite comics, which you can find on the Archives Page. Some of them are from the earliest days of this blog, and others have recently rocketed to the top.
Here they are, in descending order starting from the currently most-viewed. Thank you for indulging and sharing my obsessions and joys, and stay creative.