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dinosaur, EC Comics, EC Comics reprints, Ray Bradbury, There Will Come Soft Rains, Weird Fantasy
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.
Your Guide to Ray Bradbury in EC Comics
Collected in “Tomorrow Midnight“
Punishment Without Crime (Kamen) – Weird Science #21
I, Rocket (Williamson) – Weird Fantasy #20
King of the Grey Spaces (Severin & Elder) – Weird Fantasy #19
The One Who Waits (Williamson) – Weird Science #19
The Long Years (Orlando) – Weird Science #17
There Will Come Soft Rains (Wood) – Weird Fantasy #17
Mars Is Heaven! (Wood) – Weird Science #18
Outcast of the Stars (Orlando) – Weird Science #22
Collected in “The Autumn People“
There Was an Old Woman (Ingels) – Tales from the Crypt #34
The Screaming Woman (Kamen) – Crime SuspensStories #15
Touch and Go! (Craig) – Crime SuspensStories #17
The Small Assassin (Evans) – Shock SuspenStories #7
The Handler (Ingels) – Tales from the Crypt #36
The Lake (Orlando) – Vault of Horror #31
The Coffin (Davis) – Haunt of Fear #16
Let’s Play ‘Poison’ (Davis) – Vault of Horror #29
Miscellaneous
Home To Stay (Wood) (Based on “Kaleidoscope” & “Rocket Man”) – Weird Fantasy #13
The October Game (Kamen) – Shock SuspenStories #9
The Black Ferris (Davis) – Haunt of Fear #18
What the Dog Dragged In (Kamen) (Based on “The Emissary”) – Vault of Horror #22
Sound of Thunder (Williamson, Torres, Krenkel) – Weird Science Fantasy #25 (reprint = Weird Science-Fantasy #3)
Zero Hour (Kamen) – Weird Fantasy #18
Million Year Picnic (Severin, Elder) – Weird Fantasy #21
The Silent Towns (Crandall) – Weird Fantasy #22
The Flying Machine (Krigstein) – Weird Science Fantasy #23 (reprint = Weird Science-Fantasy #1)
Surprise Package (Kamen) (Based on “Changeling”) – Weird Science #20
Mad Journey (Williamson, Frazetta, Krenkel) (Based on “The Earthmen”) – Weird Fantasy #14
Readers have submitted an additional four uncredited stories for this list:
A Lesson in Anatomy (Kamen) (based on The Man Upstairs) – Weird Fantasy #12
A Strange Undertaking (Ingels) (based on The Handler) – Haunt of Fear #6
The Jellyfish (Ingels) (based on Skeleton) – Vault of Horror #19
Just Desserts (based on The Smiling People) – Shock SuspenStories #3
Mars Will Send No More 
These look familiar. Well, no wonder – I scanned these images back in 2001. Funny how these things get around. Somebody’s shrunk them down to about 75% since then; my original images were easier to read. I also posted technical and historical info about that issue; unfortunately when people repost this stuff the ancillary info tends to be stripped out. The one from Weird Fantasy 18 looks like my work too.
It would be nice if people wouldn’t dick with these when they rip them off. The images really look better in the larger size as posted; that’s why I scanned and posted them that way.
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Thank you for dropping by and commenting! Scans do take on a life of their own once they are posted online. Several people on forums have referred me to scans which turned out to be to be scans I did in the first place. It doesn’t bother me though. As long as people are sharing and enjoying the images and learning about some of the great comic art of history, I’m happy to have contributed.
Although I did many EC Comics scans on this site myself, the site “Cross-Eyed Cyclops” was a useful source for filling in major gaps in my EC collection. Perhaps you posted there many years ago. Unfortunately, due to the crackdown a couple years ago on the file sharing sites that site used, many of those files are no longer available from them. I hope that by sharing and re-sharing in easily-accessible formats, we comic bloggers, scanners, and enthusiasts keep alive an awareness of these historical works.
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Do you think you could send me the original scans? I’d love to use them with my class as we are about to read this story.
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“A Lesson in Anatomy” (WEIRD FANTASY #12) is similar to Bradbury’s story, “The Man Upstairs.” But to say that it was adapted from Bradbury’s tale is a stretch. The ideas are similar, but the graphic story is hardly an adaptation.
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Thank you for dropping by and commenting! “A Lesson in Anatomy” is one of several stories on this Bradbury list that I have yet to see in print, so you might be right about it. The list has been updated over the years thanks to some helpful comments from other readers, because my original list was incomplete. But that doesn’t mean it’s flawless! I will see if I can find scans of Weird Fantasy #12 so we can compare the two stories.
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In the Bradbury story, a kid is caught watching a boarder through a window in the upstairs alcove. The boarder breaks the window and gets the kid blamed. After the boarder goes to sleep, the kid cuts him open (believe it or not) and finds weird stuff inside. The guy’s a vampire. The kid stuffs the body with silver coins and the boarder dies, due to the silver (not the surgery).
In the E.C. story, a kid is caught watching his dad — the coroner — working on a corpse. The dad tells the kid to get lost. The kid goes off into the woods and finds a tramp. The tramp and kid exchange words. Later, the kid opens up the tramp (when he’s asleep) with one of this dad’s scalpels. Inside, he finds machinery controlled by a turtle-like creature (which the kid squashes after it jumps out). Flash to a spaceship where the turtle-like creature’s mates are. They decide not to invade Earth because, obviously, the Earthlings are too clever because their scout has been discovered and eliminated (by a little boy, no less).
So yes, I’d say the E.C. story was based on the premise of the Bradbury yarn. But in no one would I call it an adaptation.
The reason I had been looking at your page on Bradbury and E.C. was for a post that I was writing for the PulpFest homepage. We’re having a presentation on that topic at this year’s convention (virus willing). So I wanted to make sure of what you had listed on your page.
Quite honestly, one can argue that your readers are likewise wrong about “The Jellyfish” and “Just Desserts.” They have some commonalities with the Bradbury stories cited, but I’d suggest that his stories probably served as the basis for the E.C. ideas which then veered off from the originals. They’re not true adaptations. “A Strange Undertaking” is the only true adaptation from the stories submitted by your readers.
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You’re right. I found scans today of the EC Comics story, and other than “weird stuff inside a body” and a child protagonist, it has little resemblance to the Bradbury tale.
The first panel and title made me wonder if a little inspiration from the EC Comics version made its way into Alan Moore’s mind and influenced his legendary “Anatomy Lesson” issue from Swamp Thing.
I’ll see if I can dig up some of the other stories on my list, too. I couldn’t find them years ago when I first created the EC/Bradbury series of posts, but I found some other sources since then.
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I honestly think that except for the one based on “The Handler,” the remaining stories are simply riffs on Bradbury’s ideas.
“The Jellyfish” is about a guy whose brother frames him for a crime. In prison, he invents a drug that turns a person’s insides to mush. He gives it to his brother who collapses into a “jellyfish.” The Bradbury story is about a hypochondriac who is at war with his skeleton. He visits a strange doctor who removes a bone, turning the hypochondriac into a “jellyfish.” Adding to the piece, the strange doctor likes to eat bones.
So it’s basically a riff on the Bradbury yarn, rather than an adaptation.
Bradbury’s “The Smiling People” is basically a “Telltale Heart” story/ “Psycho” story. A guy has his dead family seated around the dining table. He killed them because they were against his marriage. The cops come and the corpses fall over. In “Just Desserts,” a guy arranges a dinner party with people he hates. He decapitates them.
Once again, it’s basically a riff on the Bradbury yarn, rather than an adaptation.
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