Twilight Zone Comics (1963)

Gold Key published four Twilight Zone issues in 1963. 

Let's have a look at 'em.

Issue 2 opens with "The Lost Colonie," wherein a telephone lineman from 1962 discovers (you guessed it) a lost colony from 1662 while working underground. The people in the past built their underground city to "escape Peter Stuyvesant, the tyrant of Nieuw Amsterdam." The lineman uses his flashlight to bedazzle the people of the past and escapes by retracing his steps back to the hole punctured in the timestream, a la "All Our Yesterdays."

Serling, always with the cheery suggestions.

The second story is the weakest of the three, but it's still fun. (More or less how I feel about every one of these stories in issues 2- 5). An old timer has a silver watch given to him by General Custer, which allows him to time travel. 

There's more, but 'nuff said. ("One side, ya stomachlobbers - Irish buggy baby comin' through!" and other Old-Timey-49-er dialogue.)

The third story is classic TZ: TOS fare. A man wakes up in spacesuit with apparent amnesia after a rocket crash. He looks for his friends and instead discovers three apelike creatures. They are his friends, transformed by the rays of Phobos - which some believe to be an artificial satellite constructed for this purpose - into creatures capable of surviving on Mars. (It really is remarkable how many times this theme comes around in science-fiction, on Mars especially.) He refuses to live as some damn ape-man and tears off his suit to let the atmosphere kill him. Instead, he wakes up in a hospital bed, on Earth, the first man to complete one hundred successful orbits. As such, he has been selected to lead the mission to Mars. He recognizes his new crewmates as the apes from his dream, and further - 

Fun stuff. All stories written by Leo "the Dorf" Dorfman and illustrated by Giovanni Ticci and Alberto Giolitti, all of whom has prolific Silver Age profiles in the industry.
 
Issue 3 features art by fellow Silver Age (and beyond) legends Alex Toth and Mike Sekowsky. The writing credits are to the best of my knowledge unknown. The issue opens with:

Another one that would have fit right into the Original Series's imdb. A WW2 soldier is blasted into the past by a tremendous explosion and rescued by a "special squadron." They outfit and arm him but seem odd to him, somehow. When they come across a German position that has a squad pinned down, they form a bayonet charge and take them out, then disappear. 

Naturally they're the Lost Squadron of this particular battlefield, always willing to lend a hand to a doughboy separated from his squad.

Next up is "Birds of a Feather," another one where you can more or less guess the ironic ending in store from the first couple of panels. There is, however, a tad more to the story. 

I enjoyed this one, particularly the art.

The last story is the one from the cover, "The Queen Is Dead - Long Live the Queen." 

Another fun one.

Spoiler alert:

This last one has a little bit in common with Season 5's "Queen of the Nile", which also aired in 1964. I don't know if such a thing was coordinated - probably not.

Onto issue 4, which could be the best of the '63 offerings. (More art by Sekowsky and Toth, and stories by Paul S. Newman. Possibly some other writers, too - it can be tricky tracking down Gold Key writer info.) The first story, "The Secret of the Key" is another time travel affair. A man in Paris overhears a shopkeeper telling a customer that he has a gold key that is not for sale at any price. Intrigued, the man steals the key, and when chased by the gendarmes, he uses it on a door that appears in the middle of a brick wall. (Like one does.) He materializes in Revolutionary France where he is first chased by the mob, then ends up (!) in the private chambers of Marie Antoinette. (That's about as probable as hopping the White House fence to evade some ruffians and sneaking in the Oval Office bathroom window or something, but hey.) The queen mistakes him for her husband, then uses his resemblance to her advantage. 

After drugging him, she and Louis XVI swap the stranger for the king, and it is the stranger who makes his date with Madame Guillotine at the Place de la Concorde.

I basically will watch or read anything set during the French Revolution, so maybe I find this one a little more fascinating than it deserves. (Sidenote - is it just me or are people totally uninterested in the French Revolution? Seems un-American to me, as counter-inuitive as that might sound on the face of it. One revolution reflected the other.) It feels like it should be a Night Gallery segment. I have that reaction to a lot of Gold Key TZs, actually.

The next story brought to mind "Black Leather Jackets" from the series. A reporter is sent to cover the opening of a hot new club, which he does, but upon arrival discovers it's all a front for an alien takeover. 

A brief morality tale ("The Captive") is next. This one is actually pretty cool despite being seemingly Frankenstein'd from a half-dozen other Twilight Zone stories.

"Local jerk receives supernaturally ironic comeuppance."

Issue 4 comes to a close with:

You have to admire any plot that follows a progression like this: a US Navy pilot crashes into the Pacific during WW2. He awakens in a strange chamber attended by a beautiful woman, who reveals that he is now a guest in the underwater kingdom of King Neptune. He refuses to stay and must earn his freedom by passing King Neptune's gauntlet - a test of strength against the most fearsome creatures at his disposal.

He does and wakes up in the sick bay of a US transport, his seaweed headband admired by the officers in charge. He claims to not remember anything while offering a silent prayer of thanks to Trina, the lady-fish who nursed him to health. 

If Issue 4 isn't the best of the '63 TZs, it has to be issue 5. (Written by Leo Dorfman, art by Mike Sekowsky, Tom Gill, and Frank Thorne.) The cover story was memorably summarized in the comments section last time by Friend of the Omnibus ChrisC. He was going from memory, though, and a few of the details turned out to be (only slightly) different. Race Corey (what a name!) and Anson are wanted thieves holing up in the Corey Family mansion, long since abandoned and dilapidated. The family legend is that an ancestor made a fortune as a smuggler during the War Between the States and that the money is hidden somewhere on the property. That night, Race has a dream where his ancestor shows him where to find it. The next day, lo and behold - there it is! Right where the ghost said it would be. 

It's all Confederate currency, but also included are the currency plates with which the pair can reproduce authentic dinero for Civil War buffs and currency collectors.

Alas, while hiding out as wagon-wheel bumpkins after accidentally murdering one of their customers, they drift into a remote and misty valley where they unknowingly drift back through time. They are set upon by a Confederate patrol, who quickly discovers the currency plates in their possession and has them executed by a firing squad.

Time traveling to the Confederacy almost never works.

The other stories are each a hoot. The shortest is "The Shadow of Fate," which is your standard ghost-saves-the-Queen-of-England-from-fiery-train-wreck tale. "The Legacy of Hans Burkel" is the story of the title character, a bad luck sailor on a Nazi U-Boat of the damned.

Fantastic Sekowsky art.

And lastly, there's "Poor Little Sylvester." Sylvester is an orphan and heir to a great fortune. The stipulations of his inheritance call for him to share it with any caretaker who safely sees him to adulthood and provides him with anything his heart desires along the way. 

Sylvester is interested in everything, which leads to a house full of clutter for the aunt and uncle looking after him.

They're happy to go along with his whims until he orders the Space Warp Converter from the Sugar Globs Company.

Sylvester activates the Converter but can't get it to work. After tinkering with it, though, he manages to send one of his aunt's lamps to Altair-4 into deep space. 

When they threaten to abandon Sylvester and empty the house of all valuables for their troubles, Sylvester takes matters into his own hands.

You've got to wonder - did Stephen King see this comic? Did it sit like a piece of sea grit in the clamshell of his imagination, one day to turn into the pearl of David and Hilly Brown from The Tommyknockers? The stories are different enough - no one's suggesting he plagiarized it or anything silly. Just wondering if King - a comics fan and familiar enough with the Twilight Zone - ever came across this story back in the day and filed the idea away for later.

Keys to Knowledge this time around include entertaining asides on : The Sea (Island Life and Coral Fish), Roads and Vehicles (Primitive Transportation the Roman road), Electricity, and Encryption and Archaeology.     

 

See you next time. 

Captain's Blog pt. 25: Guide to the Gold Key Trekverse

A full set for all of the Trek comics that Gold Key published goes for a pretty penny on eBay, but I got these 4 softcover collections for a song.

They only (!) collect the first 35 issues of the series, so technically, I have read only about half of the total output. I could get the trade paperbacks that collect the whole series, and maybe someday I will. For those of you who want a great issue by issue breakdown, I'm happy to report there's one already out there, on Curt DanHauser's site.

I first started collecting at the tail end of the once-mighty Western/ Dell/ Gold Key publishing empire. I only had eyes for Marvel, so I never came to any of this stuff until the 21st century, when my appetite for "retro" increased quite a bit.

Anyone who wants a cheap and packed-full-of-anecdotes overview of the whole saga is encouraged to download or track this down. Bruce Timm designs some great covers for Twomorrows Publishing.

Gold Key was known for its pop art covers, like these:

and unique paneling

 And then it adopted the painted cover approach:

I first became aware there was a non-Marvel/ DC comics publisher on a trip to Georgia (I think) in 1981 when my grandmother went to the store to buy me some comics (probably to shut me up.) She came back with this weird three-comics-in-one bag thing by some publisher called "Whitman."

What the frak?

Whitman was the last gasp of the aforementioned publishing empire. I didn't think anything of it at the time, just noted the different covers and panel design, then put it at the bottom of my comics trunk and went back to Spider-Man and Daredevil. 

Before the licensing rights to Trek went to Marvel and elsewhere, though, they were the sole province of Gold Key Comics. Gold Key was definitely "old school," i.e. they didn't think too much about giving writers and artists credit. They were also of the "solicit artwork from Italy because it's cheap" thinking, so sometimes the scripts and art seem to be working at cross-purposes.

At any rate, someone should erect a statue to commemorate the work of Gold Key's "Unknown Writer." For the Trek comics, Len Wein and George Kashdan wrote the majority of the known stories. And Alberto Giolitti and Nevio Zaccara and Alden McWilliams provide most of the artwork. Spock and Kirk, for the most part, look like Nimoy and Shatner, but Uhura and Scotty (and even Sulu) change looks often throughout the 35 issues I read.

I can only assume this was a result of the artists and writers (and publishers) never being in the same room, much less on the same page, through the Gold Key run. Writingwise, this Trekverse has some interesting differences than the one(s) we know and love.  The first 8 issues are probably the most curious to read in this regard, as planets are named somewhat whimsically (i.e. "Planet Numero Uno,") characters frequently say things like "Great Galaxies!" or "What in the name of Space?" and several galaxies (all invented) are mentioned or visited (!) in the span of a few issues. Most notable, though, is the use of Space Esperanto in lieu of the universal translator, something which elicited a chuckle each and every time I saw it. (Luckily, Shatner has a headstart on the language from his time in Incubus.)

Also, the role of money is somewhat confusing in this iteration of the Trekverse. Several plots revolve around some alien bad guy taking a planet hostage and demanding "30 billion space credits" from the Federation. If that sort of thing is a bridge too far for you, don't even bother, but if you get a kick out of that, as I do, these things are actually a lot more rewarding to read than I anticipated. It's a curious glimpse, as all non-canon stuff is, into a Trek that never was.

The complete covers gallery is kind of fun to flip through. A lot of these covers blurbs really make you think This happens an awful lot to the Enterprise crew, doesn't it?

As mentioned above, the full series was collected in trade paperback, but those collections don't include the bells and whistles from The Enterprise Logs, namely Kirk's and Spock's "Psychofiles:"

"Surviving son of Benjamin kirk, hero of the Klingon Repulsion," eh?

Are those supposed to be Vulcan children? I also like the "They make Spock very unhappy!" I wonder when Spock stopped referring to himself in the third person.

this excerpt from Scotty's diary:

or this From Sputnik to Warp Flight business:

The Kzinti Invasion? Also, Zephram, not Zefram?

Familiar faces, but different:

Klingons?

Romulans?

As demonstrated last time with that Afro-Kirk picture, sometimes things get a little weird:

Um... seriously, Captain?

In "Child's Play," McCoy mentions that Warp 8 is 512 times the speed of light. In the same story, the Enterprise has to go from end of the Milky Way to the other. Hmm. You do the math, here...

Speaking of light years, this sort of confusion about what they measure seems troubling for one's Chief Engineer.

And some of the plots seem a little familiar:

 I love that "I just can't shoot Abe Lincoln" line. Actually, there's a lot to love in this issue. (These panels are from two different parts of the story, by the way, so it's not as weird a transition as shown here.)

In particular, "Museum at the End of Space" is remarkably similar to the story that would eventually become "The Time Trap" in TAS. (Oh, I see the TAS episode is "adapted from the comic book," so mystery solved.)

All in all, I had a lot of fun with these. A few of the stories were genuinely great (such as the one whose name I can't quite recall, now, where Spock makes the discovery that stars themselves are sentient beings; that's quite a discovery!) and it was amusing to read these at the same time I'm reading DC's and Marvel's efforts with Trek. (The subject of a later post in this series.) For all the sophistication of DC's and Marvel's, I almost prefer Gold Key's more off-the-cuff approach. Although they settle into a more recognizable Trek pattern after the first twenty issues or so, for the first twenty issues or so, I was observing a world where galaxies could be zipped around like a small town, and everywhere you go, you were hailed in "Space Esperanto." I have to say: that's a universe I want to live in.

And I am now adding "Warp Four Loony" to my list of insults.