Product Description

This volume reprints the second six complete issues (24 stories) of the comic book Weird Science, originally published in 1951 and 1952, and features science fiction and fantasy stories, flying saucers, aliens, other worlds, space travel, similar to the first science fiction movies of the same period.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #234870 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 212 pages

Customer Reviews

Flawed and Loving It!
First of all, the book is not flawed in any physical way. The printing is great, the binding is great, and the color is great.

What's flawed are some of the stories. But the flaws are fascinating! For instance, in a story about going to the moon written the decade before it actually happened, we have a man, in a space suit, granted, falling back to earth through space and merely floating to the ground with a parachute. Nevermind the whole tendency to catch on fire when entering the earth's atmosphere at several hundred miles an hour.

Fabulous! I mean it. Far from being a negative thing, such a flaw really points up the refusal of writers like Feldstein to let ignorance get in the way of a good story. It's great to see him stretch a plot to make way for an effect, too. Like introducing a character called "peach pit" (because he likes to suck on peach pits of course) in order to allow for an alien seed to get into his body to be "born" in a way that anticipates Alien, once again, by decades. You would think the government would be pretty careful with such life-threatening cosmic nuts, wouldn't you? Well, I won't spoil the ending. Hilarious!

Even the flaws reveal Feldstein's wonderfully playful talent for either making up altogether or finding stories like these and adapting them to comics. He was so unafraid! For instance, what do you do with a multi-dimensional creature that appears only partially as a floating blob in the air? You theorize about it a bit before harpooning the thing and tying it to a couple of trees with some good, stout rope, that's what you do! And why? To destroy it of course. After all, it's already made the neighbor's cow go poof! That's humanity in a nutshell.

These comics are a monument to the power of the imagination to do the best it can with whatever it has to work with in order to have a little fun (or to defend the planet, presumably . . . without all the red tape). Even the flaws are fantastic!

Modern Computer Coloring Techniques Does Not Mesh With Master Illustrators
In general, the EC WEIRD SCIENCE stories are excellently rendered, with mediocre writing by Al Feldstein. Feldstein essentially recycles tried and true plots with "twist" endings that stop being a surprise when you come to expect a twist. Things don't end well in EC comics, so it becomes formulaic. The Comics Code Authority, influenced by Werther inspired furor, reacted against this notion, and demanded a different formula, one where all's well that ends well - both formulas are equally predictable and contrived.

The art, of course, is spectacular. Not only did EC hire top artists, Gaines paid them top dollar. Comic artists got paid by the page. EC's rates allowed artists to spend more time on each page, since it gave them a higher monetary yield. Simple economics - when these artists were getting paid half the rate to work for other companies, they simply had to put out twice as much work to make the same amount of money, so they couldn't spend the same amount of time on it.

In this volume there are several excellently drawn stories by Wally Wood, and Joe Orlando, and a few by Jack Kamen. Orlando had just been hired by EC, and was determined to make an impression, his work stands out in this collection. There is one Harvey Kurtzman comic (the best written story in the volume of course). There are a couple stories by George Roussos, and one by Feldstein.

Unfortunately, the computer coloring does not jibe with the old comic illustrating techniques. These guys were not expecting a colorist to fill in background detail for them, nor were they expecting colorists to try to mold depth into faces, bodies, or folds of clothing. The artists created depth with rendering. The modern coloring creates strange patterns. Faces just look odd, and folds in clothing look like random patterns due darkened shades of computer colors over rendered inks.

Comic Artist Frank Thorne said of computer coloring "...it's too gaudy and slick. The technicians try to model the form, but it seldom is convincing." I have to agree. Whether or not they are following Marie Severin's color scheme doesn't matter, the new techniques don't really accomplish what they set out to do on modern comics, and they just get in the way on these masterpieces of rendering.

Not the best
I really loved Volume 1 but Volume 2 is very disappointing. Simple and silly Ideas stretched out on 6 to 8 pages. It was very boring to read and I had to force myself to continue to read. Absolutely no twist endings and there is nothing new even for the fifties beside the on story in which a Man gets pregnant by eating a nut from space and undergoes an operation and gave birth to an octopus monster which will be killed by TNT.
I would recommend to buy Shock Suspenstories Volume 2. There are 6 science fiction stories out of 24 stories and each story contains more ideas and suspense than the whole Weird Science Volume 2. And the art is also much better in Shock Suspenstories.