Saturday, November 3, 2018
More Than Human
After a gruesome month of Atlas gems, it's seriously hard to switch publisher gears cold turkey, so maybe we'll do a few more, and later, ease into a more varied month as November progresses along. Sound swell to you? And let's start with a Mort Lawrence monstrosity from the April 1954 issue of Uncanny Tales #19.
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8 comments:
A great start to November. A very nice splash. Soundtrack by Rob Zombie. Classic ending that I wasn't expecting. Fun as always, thank you Mr. K..
I was not expecting that end, either. I must be naive.
I'm #3 as to be caught by that ending! What really helps is so many stories before this have used the "listen to me, I'm dying, but there's aliens/mutants/etc out there here's my story" that it makes the ending a real surprise.
Lawrence did some excellent art. The splash is incredible.
Easily forgivable plot hole, though, the other mutants should have been able to sense our hero as he sensed them, altering them that he was one of them. They don't seem to know.
That splash page is pretty amazing--yeah, the ending is a nice surprise.
Why are all of these mutants so darn clumsy though? It seems that they go through an awful lot of accidents.
Also, maybe it's just me, but I swear on the fifth page in the fifth panel, Mark has a lamp shaped like a human head!
Even though I know BLADE RUNNER itself very badly, it's easy to notice that it's a clever variation of the general idea of BLADE RUNNER - the character spends the story fighting "them," only to find out he's one of them. (Only in this case it's something other than machines.) Another story like that is CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS, and probably several others. But this story beat a lot of them to it.
Wow, the art in this thing! Usually I'm not easily charmed by stuff so slavishly representational ("realistic"), finding it staid and unemotional; but this stuff is really dynamic and great. I particularly like the panel where Fred goes off the train platform. And I agree with everybody else about the splash, of course, as well as the handful of other panels that recalled it throughout the story. I also dig the way the colorist chose to leave parts black and white, showing off all that lovely texture the inker applied to brick alleys and things.
Great start to post-October!
I first read the "surprise, I'm one of them!" twist in "Dragon's Island" (Startling Stories, June 1952). Also, "More Than Human" was the title of Theodore Sturgeon's 1952 fix-up.
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