Time to look to the skies for some truly weird sci-fi horror thrills, and today they reign down from above via Marty Elkin and the September 1954 issue of Beware #11 --which also features a really great Myron Fass cover illustration!
Time to look to the skies for some truly weird sci-fi horror thrills, and today they reign down from above via Marty Elkin and the September 1954 issue of Beware #11 --which also features a really great Myron Fass cover illustration!
In spite of seeing the aliens right away, I think I expected this to be another story where the henpecked husband wants to murder the shrew wife. (In this case, an attractive one named Martha - sort of looking ahead to WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?) So it really surprised me.
ReplyDeletePerhaps Peter might have known his wife was an alien - any reader with experience of the genre would certainly know it from the start - if he'd only, you know, slept in the same bed with her and touched her once in a while?
ReplyDeleteAlso the aliens are literally motormouths.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how the first pages almost feel like a documentary of my regular struggles with Photoshop. I mutter the same way--many of the same words--and end up with a monster on my screen, too. Later the program freezes-up when I'm trying to save hundreds of megs worth of transparent layers and etc. PHHHSAZAAZZZZ! And then I bang on the screen like a moron.
ReplyDeleteGuess I'd better watch the skies.
It was a pretty weird choice to include so many roomy frames of Peter fiddling with knobs and jawing on to himself and others, only to then have to crush the cataclysmic alien conquest of Earth into two half panels. The story's epic climax is like a Bazooka Joe wrapper. I dug the art here for sure, and would have liked to see the same attention lavished onto the invasion part.
And speaking of epic, that Myron Fass cover is definitely the bees' knees. Self portrait, I assume. I love the trees mimicking that bony apeman's hands from the deep field. Actually, he looks more like Swamp Thing in a wig.
I'd like to see more sci-fi horror here, I always have fun with these though this one has enough plot holes to drive a death star through.
ReplyDeleteI love the robot like aliens; I love how -- a scientist -- immediately see another species and thinks "MONSTER!" I love how they took over the entire planet but a single unmovable gun emplacement is somehow going to defeat them .. and then his wife of X years being an alien in a rubber disguise (I guess every time he tried to kiss her she had house work to do!) is just great fun.
I was sure at the start that the wife was an imposter but the military turned out to be the ones. The surprise ending got refreshed and worked as an unexpected twist for me. Thank you Karswell.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is getting too political, but there's something a little redundant about the important Pentagon men being exposed as the "invaders."
ReplyDeleteHang in there, got a Dick Ayers request classic up next -- thanks for the great comments! :)
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