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: #196284 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!

Get it while you can
I have absolutely loved all the titles in the EC Archives and am so disappointed that the publisher has evidently ceased publication. Missed release dates and no word on future releases tells me that this incredibly fabulous series of EC reprints is coming to a close. I also like the 8 1/2"x 11" size of them; they're bigger than the DC comics archival reprints. If you're a fan of these great '50s comics, you can't go wrong with any of the books in this series. The colors are bright, crisp, and the paper is extremely high-quality.

Another Great EC Collection
This book like the rest of the EC collections Gemstone Publishing has put out is done very well. The printing and binding are of a very high quality.

Now for the stories, you need to remember that these stories were first published in the early 1950's. You need to read them as entertainment and not pick the stories apart for the lack of modern science behind them.

If it were not for the Gemstone collections, you would need to pay hundreds it not thousands of dollars to be able to read these stories.