Today, we dream of machines that think, machines that are intelligent, machines that will think for us, machines that will solve our problems. Machines, that while they talk amongst themselves with a voice that might sound a bit like Hal 9000 as voiced by Canadian actor Douglas James Rain with a tone which betrays an all too human arrogance, might eventually move beyond their original programming. As we dream what these intelligent machines can do for us, how they will benefit mankind, they will out-think us. But we dream of that as well. And maybe they, too. The boy however, lying on his back in the grass that was still warm from the heat of the day, he had his eyes up on the night sky. A canvas that reached so far down it well-nigh touched the ground. The boy, wide awake far beyond his bedtime, brushing his long, wavy blonde hair from his forehead with one hand, he dreamt of machines which had a soul. He could almost see them up there among the distant stars whose light literally took light-years to travel to Earth. Machines that were silver spaceship that glided majestically through the black void of space. And his machines felt the desolation and the cold against their outer hulls made from gleaming metal. And when these ships approached a planet, their souls sang. With their man-made eyes they took in all the vast vistas that were on display like the mountainous region the boy could see in the distance when he raised his head and tilted it to one side like he did right now. There was lush vegetation at the bottom, and secret pathways created by the heavy leather boots of brave explorers who had climbed up those treacherous rocky terrains like mountain goats, looking for a foothold and holding on to life by clenching their fingers tightly around any protruding rock that promised a safe grip. Not all of them made it to one of the peaks, but it was all worth it. But not all endeavors came from a positive source of a noble spirit. There were the sounds of war. There had always been the sounds of battle that echoed from the high mountains. But if you listened now, it was here in the present and much closer. The noise from the planes and canons was close, because the Panama Canal was close, too. The canal was of strategic value since it provided access to both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. And in war access was crucial, their father had explained to them in Spanish. War was a business of winning real estate and you needed roads and waterways to gain more territory as you moved your troops across a map of many countries that were only outlines some men thought they could move as well. South America had the Panama Canal, father had explained to him and his kid sister Liliana. Men like Hitler, who had other men built the Autobahn, the autopista, so his legions could invade Europe from all sides of their fatherland. They had roads. But it was not when Poland or France had fallen under the black jackboots of tyranny that Colombia entered into the war. The Japanese however, they had built many ships that traveled across one of the bodies of water their Panama Canal connected to, ships that used the Pacific like one big road that kept them suspended like the spaceships he imagined. The Americans are the friends of Colombia, the man who“d named his only son after himself, had explained to them. After Pearl Harbor they had entered into the war, but not by sending ground troops, but by cutting all diplomatic ties with the Axis powers. It didn“t come as any surprise that his father Alfonso would speak highly of Colombia“s allies. Their father, who was of Scottish descent in name only and who was a true Colombian, had fallen in love in America. This was where he was born as well, in New York City, but since his father owned a coffee plantation, when he was only two years old, they had moved to Bogotá. Alfonso liked to talk about business and about the war it seemed, and sometimes, it seemed those two were the same thing. Little did he know, that in only two years“ time, after attacks by German U-boats on their merchant ships, Colombia would enter into the war, but for real this time. They“d sent their navy“s ships to the Caribbean to hunt those boats like they were some beasts from the jungle hiding between the thick foliage and the singing mosquitoes.
To employ a deeply romantic ideal that reflects the type of stories they did and is also rife with wild and raw machismo, the two artists were like prize fighters, with both contenders winning championships in their respective weight class. Wood was a heavyweight through and through. Everything he did, he did to an extreme. He was a heavy drinker, he worked crazy hours behind the drawing table and once at a later stage in life, he loved posing for pictures in which he held up some rifle or semi-automatic firearm. And his art was like that as well. His character had a heavy, real-life presence like nothing could move them. While Wood“s characters revealed the strong influence Will Eisner had had on his style, he“d been doing background work on The Spirit syndicated newspaper strip for the legendary artist, the bodies he gave his character were less about athleticism, but with their bulked-up frames and their elegance, for the woman, and with the way he posed them, they spoke to express their intimate, most inner thoughts and secrets. The body language of the characters laid it all bare on the outside with raw expressionism. Everyone and everything was baroque. There were details, lots of details at all times that often included manly sweat. Men were strong and ruggedly handsome; every woman was an impossibly beautiful sex-goddesses. Wally Wood“s characters moved through urban and futuristic worlds alike that had the real, deeply depressing feel of the flame-thrower writing of a Jim Thompson. Machines were shiny and bulky. Like with his characters, they took up space and commanded your attention. Al was featherweight, not in quality, but how he approached his characters and his settings. Everything he produced came with a very light, feathery touch which gave the impression that his pencil had never even touched the paper of the artboard. While Wood“s characters had their feet firmly planted onto the ground and you did not need much imagination to feel the straining weight of their bodies, you were afraid for Al“s characters. A sneeze or a tiny breeze might brush his carefully laid out pencils right across the page. While he hated to draw things that defined a mundane world, like men in business suits and regular cars, something Wood excelled in, his pages did not speak less of a bravura and vitality than the older artist“s did. But it all had to come with a sense of wonder for Williamson. His men and women had fine features and they all adhered to a deeply romantic ideal. His alien vistas, though rich in vegetation, had a dryness to them, an arid heat that created no sweat on his characters“ skin. And while Wood“s men were handsome with their animalistic brutality, and his women who were often their equal but more cunningly so, were lusty and fierce predators, Williamson offered all of this, but in an elegant way. His panels were abundantly filled with richly ornated, meticulously embellished scenery through which he had his men not walk but stride with their heads held high up and one hand resting on the grip of a blaster that hung from a belt slung low around their small hips. Whereas Wood“s men were broad and wide like football players and his women were amply endowed and feminine and seductive to the hilt, men as depicted by Williamson were slender and tall like Al was himself, but they were also wise and noble beyond their young years. His women were Princess Aura times ten. They did not wear their sexuality on their sleeves though, not like Ming“s sadistic daughter or like Wood or Celardo depicted women. Whereas these artists clad their female characters in overly tight, clingy outfits, even the uniform of a nurse seemed to have shrunken in the wash, Al dressed women in elegant, flowing gowns that reached all the way down to the floor. It seemed the right kind of attire for the stories he was telling, tales that shun the realism that Wood and his future colleagues preferred. His worlds were of the fantastical. Though there was a permeating sense of nihilism and cynicism from time to time, often required for a witty conclusion that pulled no punches, his fine featured, nimble characters lived in worlds that came from unrestrained imagination that were for the most part unencumbered by any notion of realism and any constraints a grimy, real world setting inevitably brought to them. As Mark Schultz, author of “Al Williamson“s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic”“ (2009) would put it: “What made his work unique is that he incorporated the fluid motion of cinema into his drawings”¦ No other illustrator or cartoonist has approached his ability to create an illusion of action.”“ And Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter distilled what made Williamson“s artwork so engaging into a single sentence: “He made panels you could lose yourself in.”“ You really could.
Right from the start it was a story of contrast and contradictions. Between 1949 till 1951 Al Williamson worked for a number of comics publishers like Avon, Fawcett Comics and Standard Comics. During this time, Frazetta would often ink his pencils while Krenkel did the backgrounds. When he met Wally Wood again, who also pitched in on one of his art assignments, Wood mentioned that there was a publisher around that offered something more interesting. Their stories came with a certain sophistication and they were in the midst of getting a very select crew together. Williamson liked the sound of that. Early in 1952, he showed up at 225 Lafayette Street in New York, the home of EC Comics. Publisher Bill Gaines and his editor and main writer Al Williamson looked at his portfolio and they liked what they saw. They asked Williamson if he wanted to work for them exclusively. He wanted, but like he“d had with Hogarth, he had some reservations. Feldstein, who had started out as an artist, had a method by which he wrote the script on the artboard directly and thus defined where the captions and the speech bubbles would be placed. Williamson did not like that at all. He hadn“t worked all this time to break free from the mold another artist wanted to define for him that he would yield now. Feldstein, like Hogarth relented. Not known for making exception and often already ruling the pages before the artists began their work, this was something that drove Wood crazy, Feldstein kept his script to the sides to allow Williamson to work freely within the confines of the art board itself minus the printing gutter needed to accommodate the binding for these cheaply produced, four-color pamphlets. Earning this exception while he was not only the newest member of their team, but the youngest as well at barely twenty-one, and his often overly emotional, borderline eccentric behavior quickly earned Williamson the reputation of the prima donna of EC Comics. Williamson work was often late and messy, though, with pasted-on scraps of paper where he’d sweated over getting the pose or facial expression of a character right, or the texture of a mountain terrain. But he had developed a superb style of his own by now. And he knew that he drew rings around anything Adolfo Buylla did, who was back working in his native country of Spain at that time, and some of the work Hogarth was producing. As far as his frequent outburst were concerned, his thin skin or his lack of interest in drawing anything as ordinary as an automobile, this could be chalked up to his youth and a childhood spent by growing up among the constant barrage of raw emotion of radio soap operas in Spanish. And after all, he was a Colombian-American. However, there was a good camaraderie among the artists who worked in Gaines and Feldstein“s bullpen during the 1950s. And it wasn“t like Williamson was their Mozart and he was surrounded by a bunch of Salieris. All these men were highly accomplished artists who did some of their career best work at EC Comics. And talented as he was, Al was no prodigy. That spot was reserved for the man he hand-delivered to EC as a bonus. Like he had done with Adolfo during his childhood and with Krenkel and Wood during his stints at Hogarth“s Illustrators school, Al did bring his collaborators with him to help him out and for him to improve. There were Krenkel, boy genius Frazetta and Angelo Torres who hung out at his studio, together with fellow artists George Woodbridge and Nick Meglin. When the guys visited the EC offices, Harvey Kurtzman, the other writer-artist-editor next to Feldstein at the publisher quickly dubbed them the “The Fleagle Gang”“ after the notorious bank robbers who were active in the Midwest during the Depression Era. By while the latter carefully planned their crooked activities, often spending months in preparation with gang members carefully casing their next intended target and then drawing maps that included routes on which the police might arrive and off-road exit ways for a quick escape after the gang had done their job, Williamson and his motley crew of renegade artists were all about fun and adventure. Still, Al Williamson, Frazetta, Krenkel and Torres when working together and on occasion alone, would go on to produce some of the best material that EC Comics put out. Williamson also got lucky in that in addition to working from scripts by Feldstein, he and his loose gang of workmates were awarded the opportunity to illustrate stories by two of the best science fiction writers, one who had his career left behind at that time and one who was a rising star. But like with so many artists who found their way to the EC offices, it all started with a tale by Feldstein which had been based on an idea by Gaines. The tale however came in the wrong genre for Williamson.
The contractions were there with the very first assignment writer-editor Feldstein gave to Williamson. “The Thing the ”˜Glades!”“ which appeared in Tales from the Crypt No. 31 (1952) was a moody piece for sure, thanks to the art, but then again it was not one of Feldstein“s best works. After several murders have occurred near a small community in the Everglades, Sheriff Black and Deputy Clem decide to talk to an old-timer who lives all by himself in his cabin away from the city. Ezzard, who has long white hair and a long white beard greets the men in true hermit style with his hunting rifle cocked. While he chases the Sheriff away from what he deems is his property since the woods belong to nobody really, he tells him that he knows nothing about any murders. But the old man isn“t more than a person of interest at first due to the gristly nature of the killings which leaves each victim rend limb from limb. Though, once a witness comes forward who had observed the perpetrator in the act of committing his latest slaying, and who then had followed him to the hermit“s cabin, all signs point to old Ezzard harboring a criminal. However, the way the young man who had witnessed it all describes it; it was not really a human being who did this. Armed to their teeth the three men once again darken the door of the recluse to confront him with the new information. It is when Sheriff Black commands him to surrender the man or the thing that had been doing all these killings, that the truth is revealed. Being from around here, Sheriff Black knows half of it already. Twenty years ago, Ezzard“s wife Amy died in childbirth and the bereft husband had told the town folk that the baby had died as well. But, no! To make the men understand, he offers his confession: “Amy died! But the baby didn“t! Only I kept it a secret! The baby was deformed! That“s why I moved out here t“ the glades! I didn“t want nobody to know about him! The lower part o“ his body was all shriveled! As he grew year, by year, the shriveled part of his body jus never seemed to develop! Instead, his upper body grew big and muscular”¦ and hairy! But his brain”¦ his brain was like the lower half! It never developed either”¦”“ But even though his son has committed murder, Ezzard defends him. He is his son after all. Though Sheriff Black is quick with his judgement: “You mean he“s”¦ crazy!”“, Ezzard vainly appeals to his sense of compassion: “No! Don“t say that! It“s jus that he thinks like a child! He, he wants to play! Only his big arms are too strong to play! He”¦ tears things apart! But he“ll learn! I“ll teach him!”“ Once again, he insists that the men leave, and that they do with his gun pointed right at them. It is only minutes later that they hear a scream. Rushing back to the cabin they find the old hermit who is wounded. Now, the old man is willing to admit to the error of his ways: “You”¦ you were right, Sheriff! He”¦ he is a killer! ”¦ I tried!… I was wrong!”“ These are his final words as he has bled to death. It is then that readers finally got to see the recluse“s son who looked as ghastly as one could have expected from his old man“s description. He seemed raving mad with foam dripping from his mouth like that of a wild dog stricken with rabies. Junior immediately went on the attack, making short work of Deputy Clem as well as the young man while the Sheriff was quick to run into the thick underbrush after he“d seen that the bullets from Clem“s shotgun seemingly had little effect on the long-haired, hairy creature who after all still was a human being. Having called the child more or less a moron only minutes earlier, Black had his brains now hard at work to outsmart his pursuer. But then he spied an opportunity and he took it. There was a bog of quicksand close by. Out of breath and with his heart violently beating in his chest, the blonde, mustachioed Sheriff pulled of a desperate sprint. Then, as if he was playing a game of tag, he fooled the boy into jumping right at him while he gracefully side-stepped. Having lunged himself up into the air with the aid of this powerful arms, the poor being had no chance of avoiding the bog. Slowly he drowned and suffocated in the quicksand that knew nothing of mercy or redemption. One hand held up high in a gesture that begged not so much for forgiveness but spoke of the will to live, was all which remained for a moment that was frozen in time on the penultimate panel until it was time for Johnny Craig“s Vault-Keeper, who had presented this yarn, to deliver his closing monologue. What makes this story so difficult to enjoy is the total lack of empathy for the deformed child. And that is what Ezzard“s son still is, maybe not physically, but mentally. Even when the old hermit relates his heartbreaking tale, Sheriff Black is always quick to interject his judgement. There is no sympathy for his plight. Surely, Black isn“t shown as a shoot first, ask questions later kind of guy, after all, he wants to bring in a killer, he also isn“t instructing his men to prepare a trap either, for a being that obviously cannot be reasoned with. It is a horror tale of course, a story of nature versus man with Ezzard“s son to take on the role of the thing that went bump in the night. But writer Feldstein didn“t let his narrator show any pity or understanding either. In the narration, the raised hand that is sticking out from the bog takes on an animalistic quality. This isn“t a hand asking for assistance or mercy or even a quick release, but a spooky reminder of what had just transpired. From a pure storytelling perspective, there is also a lack of tension. The title of the story literally gives away the ending. All that is left to the readers“ imagination is to envision what this thing might actually look like that had been doing all these killings. But like with the child, there is also no sympathy for the dead. These are just torn bodies that don“t even resemble human beings any longer and are treated as such. These are plot conveniences nobody in the story will either miss or mourn. But worst of all perhaps, looking beyond the yarn itself, it was a next to impossible assignment for the artist. While perhaps he had seen some swamp-like jungles during his childhood in Colombia, it was all he had to work with. Except for four panels, the action takes place outdoors and there were only so many ways to make the underbrush of a swamp look visually arresting, at least for an inexperienced artist. Al starts off strong, though, and he makes good use of the negative space created by the vegetation throughout the story, but Williamson“s images feel exhausted by the end. Strangely, except for one panel in which he shows a beautifully drawn white bird, there is no wildlife present. Equally puzzling as this lack of life among the quickly generic looking fauna are the inking choices he makes. Though one can see first hints of his feathery characters, the lines he uses are too heavy. A lot of the scenery gets blotted out by too much ink altogether. Though this helps to create an atmosphere of an oppressive swamp that so is rich in foliage that even bright sunlight cannot fully penetrate, it also makes everything look less interesting in consequence. What is surprising however is that while Williamson does make some artistic decisions that do not pay off for the most part, and he would not return to horror stories, only a year later he and Frazetta would do a story for Crime SuspenStories that would go down as one of his arguably best tales. Al Feldstein and Al Williamson“s next effort represented a vast improvement, though after much build-up, the resolution arrived with a somewhat silly twist that did not make any sense really. Matters were helped by not only placing the artist in a genre that suited his sensibilities well, but this time around Al shored up the quality by enlisting two members of the “The Fleagle Gang”“, his close friend Krenkel and Frazetta. With Frank doing pencils with Al on the characters and Krenkel providing the alien landscapes and all three of them inking, it is nevertheless surprising how many hallmarks of what would become known as the “Al Williamson Style”“ are already on display in his second story for EC Comics. Some of it certainly had to do with Feldstein not only letting Williamson do science fiction, but seemingly tailoring the script itself to Al’s romantic ideals that stood in stark contrast to EC“s drive for realism.
“Mad Journey!”“, which appeared in Weird Fantasy No. 14 (1952), came in an issue that offered a strange hodgepodge of artistic styles and confused editorial intent. This was a time when Gaines and Feldstein very much were still finding their feet. The lead-in was a rather grim, naturalistic looking story that dealt with aliens who had been using Earth as a place to dump off their violent criminals for centuries, going all the way back to Adam and Eve, and who now arrived with their latest inmate named Adolf Hitler. It was followed by two short humorous pieces by Joe Orlando which featured the publisher and his editor as characters. After that readers found a tale which was illustrated by Jack Kamen and which was rooted in the anxiety over a nuclear holocaust and its aftermath as seen from a woman“s perspective. Entirely unsurprisingly, if you considered that the story was authored by men who between themselves carried a lot of baggage, this gruesome yarn was a romance tale in disguise about a woman who had been too picky with her choice of mate, and who got her comeuppance once the mean-spirited twist arrived. But then there was the Williamson story. The half splash page that divided the first page top to bottom did promise something exciting and fresh. Whereas science fiction tales by the other EC artists either came with a somewhat cartoony style, Kamen“s grounded approach or Wood“s hyperrealism, this tale showed a golden city like El Dorado in the background with a long golden bridge spanning a deep ravine. People seemed tiny, though, when compared to the blonde hero explorer who, with his white shirt torn, stood on an alien terrain while pointing towards the city as if to guide the eyes of the readers. Unfortunately, like he had done in the previous story, Feldstein wasted a bit of his artist“s potential. This time by putting the action (of which there was none, really) into corporate offices and boardrooms, and for five pages no less. This was a story about talking heads who talked and talked. But Williamson and company made it all work for the most part with their good character work of faces in close-ups and rich, lavishly styled office spaces. But interestingly, perhaps originated by Gaines who used all kinds of source material for the “story ideas”“ he provided Feldstein with, this story was right out of Ayn Rand“s playbook. It was the tale of Rodney Simon, the young, good-looking president of an oil company who got a visit from one of his scientists. Upon learning that science guy had discovered a new fuel and that he“d taken the liberty to bring yet another geek on board, a consultant for the U.S. Air Force Rocket Program, Rodney makes the decision to build a rocket ship which will be powered by this new super fuel. In true Randian fashion, the board of directors is against Rodney, and even wants to declare him mad, but in the end, of course, he prevails in securing the funds from the company they need for their ship, because Simon himself will pilot the rocket ship. The scientists are along for the ride with their target the planet Venus. What could go wrong? Well, for starters, they crash land their ship which kills the other two men. But this was when the action started. Thrown clear of the crash, Simon finds himself on an alien world, one that came with a desert that looked a lot like one of Earth“s but seen through a twisted mirror. Running and screaming, while displaying many signs of post-traumatic stress, he happens upon the golden city which, as his luck would have it, is inhabited by very human looking people who are all dressed like this was some kind of Renaissance fair. They seem to even understand him when he tells them that he is an Earthman. Simon is led to an official looking building and then thrown into a jail cell. He isn“t alone. Though the Venusian guards seem to understand him fine right away, the would-be space explorer needs a bit until he finally figures out what the other prisoners are saying. When he does, this provided Feldstein with the required twist to end the tale on: “I“ve been here two years now! I“ve even learned their language! Want to know what they“re saying”¦? Yes! This is a Venusian insane asylum! And this is the room that houses deranged Venusians who insist they“re from Earth.”“ Edgar Rice Burroughs this wasn“t, but Williamson and Frazetta and Krenkel infused the scenery and their hero with a lot of pulp sensibilities to make it all work. From there, many more tales followed that Feldstein, for the most part, wrote with Al Williamson in mind. It was a fruitful collaboration, however Williamson“s optimistic romanticism which he expressed through his highly idiosyncratic art style did remain an outlier at EC Comics. Even though the artist was slow and took his time to get things perfect, Al Feldstein wanted to expand his scope by now and then giving him a tale that was outside his wheelhouse, or simply making an attempt to showcase Al“s expressive art in other title as well. Though the artist did a fantastic crime tale, when he got the assignment to do another one, he simply couldn“t do it. This was one of Feldstein“s most cynical tales and it came with Bill Gaines“ input. Set at the beach, Williamson took Frazetta to Coney Island to take pictures of the roller coasters which would feature heavily in the tale. Once there, Al convinced his friend to do the story instead. The dark tale about a young man who was built like bodybuilder suited Frazetta, and “Squeeze Play”“ stands as one of EC“s best and most grim stories from their later period. Williamson did help Frazetta to ink it, though. However, the contrast wasn“t only often in the script, but in the art of the other artists as well.
It is somewhat ironic that with a lot of the “story ideas”“ Gaines gave to Feldstein as a springboard lifted from other previously published material (earlier not credited until they moved into adaptions), one of Gaines original ideas would get ripped-off by Hollywood and for a big budget movie no less. A vehicle for then hugely popular actress Jennifer Lawrence, “Passengers”“ almost immediately drew comparisons to a story by Gaines, Feldstein and Williamson when it was released in 2016. Both the film and the story called “50 Girls 50”“, first published in Weird Science No. 20 (1953) are about a group of colonists who are put into hibernation pods to compensate for the long travel time needed to reach a distant world. In each version one of the male colonists wakes up from his stasis prematurely who then in turn wakes up one of the females on board their spaceship. Though this is where most of the similarities end, with no mention made of the EC story in the film“s credits, it still interesting to see the different approach each of the writers takes with this kind of premise. Screenwriter Jon Spaihts (who also co-wrote “Doctor Strange”“ for Marvel Studios which was released in the same year) infuses the story with a lot of romance and heartache. Gaines and Feldstein, true to form, tell an almost film noirish tale about gender struggle in which the seductive, duplicitous seductress was punished in the end. What is also interesting to see, is the different approach of two artists, each with their own unique sensibilities. While the story itself was illustrated by Williamson (with Frazetta and Krenkel helping him on the inks once again), the issue came with a cover that was created specifically for “50 Girls 50”“, however the artist commissioned for the job, took some interesting liberties. Perhaps Wally Wood didn“t know the script, or he simply chose to interpret it in a way that seemed right to him, or the changes Wood made were even mandated since this provided a better shock value. In any case, the contrast between Wood“s cover and the interiors is jarring. For starters, on his cover Wood only depicts female “sleepers”“, with the translucent hibernation pods stacked on top of each other in a rotating shelf. The women are all equally young, gorgeous, long-legged sex-goddesses who wear revealing outfits and ooze sexuality from every pore. By contrast there is one guy who is awake, and even though he is placed in the center, he is small by comparison. And he is old, a middle-aged guy with a bald head and heavy glasses. He is as ugly as the brightly colored clothes he is wearing which make him look like a guy on a golf course pushing retirement age. While the woman, despite their in-your-face sexuality, seem to have class, the guy comes off as vulgar and crass. And he isn“t shy when it comes to broadcasting his intentions either: “Alone in space with fifty frozen dolls, just waiting to be thawed! Now let“s see! Eenie”¦ meenie”¦ miney”¦”“ The implications, and the guy“s openly lurid intentions weren“t lost on any reader who had hit puberty. All in all, this was a salacious cover that had one purpose: to sell comic books. The story itself was a bit more subtle, but it did push the envelope in many ways. However, what made the proceedings a bit more palatable came from the distinct, vastly different look of the actual story“s protagonist. Williamson“s character design for Sid was diametrically opposite from Wood“s for his stand-in on the cover. Sid was young, a handsome blonde dude, molded in the romantic ideal of the artist. In that he wasn“t far removed from Rodney Simon, but less intelligent and less intent on exploring new worlds but getting with the ladies. Like in “Passengers”“ the tale started with Sid waking up aboard the spaceship that housed fifty men and fifty women on route to a new solar system, all of them still in hibernation but him. He had spent just two years in his pod for a journey that would take one hundred years, but this was all according to a plan. However, via the captions, Feldstein had Sid reveal to readers that something was off. After all, Sid had been fooled, but that was something to be revealed at the end of the story. In the present, the young man turned his attention to a beautiful blonde woman, Wendy, who was still sleeping in her pod that like all the others came with a transparent cover. But Sid had no intention of waking her, not just yet. Instead he selected another female. A dark-haired beauty called Laura Masters. As it got explained via flashback how the journey had come about, these one hundred people had been selected from among twenty-thousand volunteers, and they could undergo the hibernation process just once, Sid woke Laura from her artificially induced stasis. Like with Jim Preston, the protagonist of “Passengers”“, who also happened to be a mechanical engineer like Sid, he told the woman that her hibernation system had failed, leading to her getting thawed prematurely. With just the two of them awake on the whole ship, Sid has an easy time to seduce the lovely woman. But then, when he got tired of her, he snuck into her sleeping quarters holding a ray gun. Interestingly, Al and his art team made no effort to hide the fact that she was nude under the blanket. Laura got what was going on right away. Sid was bored with her. At gunpoint he forced her back into her unit, knowing full well it meant certain death for her. Without looking back, he was on his way to the blonde depicted earlier in story when Sid had already revealed that it had been Wendy who had planted the idea in his mind that manipulating the freeze-chambers wouldn“t be a bad thing. The blonde woman had seduced him easily with Sid failing to realize that this might have something to do with the access he had to their ship“s hibernation system since installing some of the units fell under his purview. Though Wendy“s plan sounded crazy at best, Sid had long fallen for her when she“d told him what she wanted to achieve. Two or three months before the end of the journey he was supposed to wake from his slumber. He would be free to act and wake her up. Together they would disconnect all the other units to keep everyone in their hibernated state, even once they had landed on their target planet: “Then, one by one, we thaw them”¦ so we can control them”¦ make them our slaves!”“ Wendy would be queen of this new world and Sid was going to be her king. How exactly Wendy intended to make everyone else her slave was entirely left to the readers imagination. But the way Williamson and his mates depicted her in her high slit dress, she was the perfect seductress like Rita Hayworth in “The Lady from Shanghai”“ who she most resembled with her short, wavy hair. And if this did not give you the idea where she was going with this, one only needed to look at Sid who had fallen under her spell very easily. But like he had already admitted in the first caption, a technique Feldstein borrowed from the voice over that often started a film noir with the protagonist in a hopeless situation that had been caused by some femme fatale he had met, he“d been played for a fool. No sooner had he thawed Wendy did she pull a blaster on him. It was his turn now to go back into his freeze-chamber. There was someone else on the ship, a guy Wendy had long intended to serve as her king. The story ended with Sid lying in his pod slowly freezing to his death. Wendy“s face hovered above him and the transparent cover so he would take this image of his defeat to his grave. In a way, Feldstein had written a perfect crime story which was a pastiche of the stories by James M. Cain, a journalist turned writer he often referenced when writing for Jack Kamen, who together with Johnny Craig had these tales down pat. But by putting it all into a science fiction context, he might have tricked Williamson into doing it and doing it as well as he did, with Frazetta and Krenkel as his brothers in crime.
But there was something else to “50 Girls 50”“. Not only did Al Feldstein use the story to express a lot of male anxiety towards women, woman who were beautiful and could not be trusted, he also used some deft methods to deconstruct the romantic male ideal Williamson favored so very much. Surely, Sid was a fool for being so easily seduced by Wendy when he should have stopped to realize that her attention maybe did have something to do with his job of getting the freezing system installed. But he was also dishonest to her. He“d spent time with Laura at first, whom he simply discarded once he was done with her. On a sexual level, Sid was one of the explorers Williamson liked, and right as if the other Al was in on the dark joke, he dressed Sid in a flight jacket, jodhpurs and knee-high boots, signifiers of men with an adventurous spirit. But the story came with a double twist that further undermined the heroic ideal one could expect from a man who looked like Sid. Clearly, he hadn“t waited until months of their arrival, but had allotted just two years passed for himself, then another year for Wendy after he“d spent a year with the ill-fated Laura. This meant that Wendy would be long dead before the vessel ever reached the orbit of their new world. Apparently, he“d not wanted to go through with her original plan after all. But not only would she grow old aboard the huge spaceship, she would also be without a mate, a male one at least. Fearing any competition, Sid was weak after all and definitely not a hero, he had made another modification to his erstwhile lover“s plan when he had co-opted it for his own needs. While he lay dying, as he was getting frozen to death with Wendy watching him taking his last breath, with the last caption, Sid let every reader know that he had outsmarted her after all: “When she thaws her ”˜real lover“”¦ she“s going to watch him turn putrescent! You see, the first phase of my scheme was to kill every man on the ship”¦”“ While Feldstein did deliver a perfectly dark, deeply cynical tale and Williamson surely delivered with a little help from his friends, its effectiveness might not hinge on how one viewed how pretty it all looked. Maybe the striking counterpoint the art provided works for some reader or it does not, maybe the stark realism of somebody like Wood or Kamen would have worked better than the feather-like art and linework that came from Williamson, and which was retained throughout the inking process. What can be said with certainty though, other writers seemed to better suit Al“s sensibilities. And those were available to him. As mentioned before, Gaines was in the habit of “borrowing”“ ideas. When he did this a bit too obvious with two tales by then upcoming science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, the author wrote them a letter. Not a cease-and-desist order, mind you, but a simple note: “Just a note to remind you of an oversight. You have not as yet sent on the check for $50.00 to cover the use of secondary rights on my two stories”¦ I feel this was probably overlooked in the general confusion of office work”¦”“ Payment was promptly made, but not only this. Gaines wasn“t a guy to not seize an opportunity when it knocked him over his head, after all Bill had first made Al Feldstein a writer and then an editor, and he had done the same with Kurtzman. He liked what the author had also mentioned in his note, that the guys at EC Comics might want to take a look at some of his other stories, these were available and easily adaptable. Indeed, Bradbury was at that time a prolific writer of short stories which lent themselves to be adapted into eight pages long comic book stories. Ray Bradbury was working in all the genres EC was successful in. He“d had written crime stories, horror tales and most of all he was a rising star in the science fiction community. Clearly, the writer wanted to get his name across to a younger demographic, future readers of his prose work, and he not only offered EC great material, but something Gaines dearly wanted. His name brought respectability and prestige. So, a deal was struck. All told, EC adapted around two dozen of Bradbury“s stories over the next four years. Like he was wont to do with his own scripts, Al Feldstein, who adopted them into comic book stories, allocated the Bradbury tales among the artists, with some surprising decisions and equally surprising results. The horror tales went to their resident horror master Graham Ingels, naturally, and the crime stories to Craig and Kamen. The science fiction stories that did make up the bulk of the stories Gaines purchased, these went to Orlando, Kamen and Wood, also pretty obvious choices. Going to Crandall and Krigstein was a bit more out of the box thinking, while getting a new duo on two stories was absolutely inspired. Severin and Elder, one more a war and western artist, the other one for humorous stories, did indeed deliver magic with their adaptations. Strangely though, considering Bradbury“s very poetic style, Williamson, another obvious choice for science fiction stories, was allotted only three stories in total, which the artist almost did back to back. The first one out of the gate was “The One Who Waits”“ which appeared in Weird Science No. 19 (1953). This was a proto-typical Star Trek story if there ever was one. Seven astronauts land on an unknown planet on which they make a startling discovery. In the middle of the scenery there is a stone well. However, there is a lifeform that lives inside the well which is invisible to them. Unbeknownst to the others, to experience what it feels like to be complete again, the lifeform invades the body and mind of one of these Earthlings who begins to act strangely. Suddenly, Jones knows things. Like what the well is for and what it is called: “It is called a soul well. It is a place where waiting things”¦ things that once had flesh”¦ wait and wait”¦”“ Right after he killed the man he had just been talking to, he drops down. The astronaut couldn“t take the strain of being physically and mentally invaded any longer. While the other men surmise that he must have died from some kind of shock, Captain Sessions is the next to get taken over by this unseen invader. He does try to put up a brave fight, and finally he manages to scream a warning to the remaining men, but then the lifeform forces him to shoot himself in the head with his gun to prevent the Captain from revealing too much. With four men left, the command of the unit falls to crewman Samuel Mathews. The Captain gathers his men and urges them to listen. The being takes control of all four and they march to the well. They all look inside the stone structure and then they fall to their death. The story ends with the arrival of yet another rocket. This was once again a co-production between Al, Frazetta and Krenkel. And even though the backgrounds do look a bit uninspired, almost like the cardboard props and matte paintings used in old TV productions, there is a clean matter-of-factness that permeates the story like the lifeform does. It feels less like a story and more like a documentary about an alien predator stalking its prey. The artwork is a testament of Al“s growing grasp of layouts, though. He makes each panel as small or big as he needs it to be and each panel hangs on the page like a photography which adds to the realism. There is no poetry here except in the language which has the alien lifeform convey its feelings via the captions. The next story, in which Williamson did indeed got to draw a spaceship with a soul, or at least a sentient vessel, was poetry in motion. With “I, Rocket”“ from Weird Fantasy No. 20 (1953) Ray Bradbury delivered one of his most poignant tales. The language the writer uses when he speaks for the ship is as beautiful as the images provided for the adaptation by Williamson and Frazetta (Krenkel helped on the inks and Marie Severin brought her usually superb color palette). The story started with an old, rusty spaceship that wasn“t in use any longer. But readers got to witness its birth and its glory days, all told through the eyes of the ship itself. The ship views its crew as part of its organism for better or worse. There is a war going on and the ship is deeply invested in the emotions of the men. When two crew men plan a mutiny, the ship takes care of them like a body does with an illness. After the war ended, the ship“s captain and crew left and the ship itself was converted into a cargo ship, that was until it was too old for that. Left on a foreign planet to rust away in the sun, the ship waits. But finally, the old captain returned. At first, he pauses to savor the memories from his glory days when he and the ship were much younger. But he is back for another reason. There is another war on the horizon. Captain Lamb gets the ship ready to go into battle once more. If the war theme feels a bit ham-fisted and cumbersome in this highly poetic tale depicting the cycle of life and the value men and machines have even in old age, it is worth considering that the short story this was based on was originally published in 1944. But sadly, there is always a war going on it seems. Be that is it may, “I, Rocket”“ stands as a high point in Bradbury and Al“s stellar careers.
The third Bradbury story Feldstein adapted for Williamson to draw, gave the artist maybe some of the best material to work with as far as Al“s preferences were concerned. It did arrive fairly late during the timeline that comprises the “New Trend”“ titles at the publisher. Sadly, sales for their two science fiction books had begun to fall even further. According to Feldstein, these had always been their lowest selling offerings which seems odd considering that B-movies tackling similar themes were going strong and it was the time of purported UFO sightings and nuclear anxieties. Anyway, Gaines and Feldstein had made the decision to merge both books into one that continued the same numbering which was called Weird Science-Fantasy. “A Sound of Thunder”“ appeared in Weird Science-Fantasy No. 25 (1954), and this time around, Williamson did the cover himself. And this was pure Williamson indeed. The cover showed five modern-day hunters facing off against one fierce-looking T-Rex with only their rifles. Rich guy Mr. Eckles is graving for some old-fashioned adventures. But since Mr. Eckles lives in a future which allows for time travel, he and a bunch of like-minded men can book a trip via an outfit called “Safari, Incorporated”“, a company which offers would-be big game hunters a trip into the past, sixty-two million two thousand and fifty-five years exactly, where these amateur hunters can stalk the most dangerous game, not any dinosaur, but an actual tyrannosaurus rex. They“re accompanied by their guide named Travis who looks like a man who follows a code of honor and who is as manly as he is handsome. While they travel with a futuristic looking machine along a silvery track suspended above ground, both of which are provided by the company, they carry firearms that are very 1954. While this is going on, there was also the small matter of the election for a new president that took place on the day before. To the relief of everyone it seems, the better candidate had won the highest office in the country. And his name was not Lyman, a candidate everyone feared would bring about the worst kind of dictatorship. The manager from Safari, Inc. even told the men that he had many phone calls from clients who rather wanted to live in the past had Lyman won the election. As far as the actual hunting expedition was concerned, there was a catch. Under no circumstances must the men leave the path. What unfolds is a visual feast with great linework by Williamson and inks by Krenkel and Torres. Compared to the swamp in his first story, Al showed how superior his skills had become. The vegetation of the pre-historic jungle the men travel in is varied and exciting. Each panel is filled with underbrush that is well-shaded and thinly delineated. The linework is delicate but conveys enough realism. The machines the men use are equally imaginative and come with a real-world functionality in appearance. As for the story itself, of course, everything goes wrong. Eckles makes a fool of himself, and worst of all, Travis realizes that there was mud under the soles of his shoes. He must have left the path. Eckles insists that no real harm can come from this. But not only has Eckles mud on his shoes. Among the soil, there is the crushed body of a butterfly. And when they return, their world is a very different place all of sudden. And yes, Lyman, the man with the iron fist, is the president. Though Williamson made the most out of the material he was given from the Bradbury stories and he also illustrated a story by another upcoming science fiction writer for EC Comics, namely Harlan Ellison, unsurprisingly, it was a story by a writer who had made his name in the past and during the pulp era of the 1930s, that would serve as the basis for his arguably best work for the publisher. Other than stories by Bradbury, EC Comics had begun to secure the adaptation rights for stories from one of the greats of golden era of science fiction, a man who was actually two men much earlier in his career. Using the pen name Eando Binder, gifted brothers Earl and Otto Binder had managed to sell their first stories to some of the most popular science fiction pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories at a time when both were just in their early twenties. Of the Binder stories, EC had purchased “The Teacher from Mars”“ for Joe Orlando to draw. Since Gaines and Feldstein liked the results, they began to acquire the rights to some of the Adam Link stories, tales Otto had created without his brother who had retired from writing when he had a family to support. This series, starting with “I, Robot”“ (it was Binder who“d come up with the title first), had been a huge hit in the 1930s. Joe Orlando“s version saw print in Weird Science-Fantasy No. 27 (1955), the first of several stories about Binder“s mechanical man who was more human in some ways than humans were. At this time though, Otto, whose work must have been a huge influence on the almost a decade younger Bradbury, had left prose work behind. When the market for pulp magazines dried up at the end of the 1930s with comic books as the new preferred medium among young readers, he had gotten into comics himself, a field in which their younger brother Jack had been able to establish himself as a popular artist who, for a time ran his own artists shop. Binder became the number one writer in comics rather quickly and being the main writer on the books built around Fawcett Comics“ wildly popular Captain Marvel, he was the best paid writer as well. However, finally losing their court battle with DC/National that had been going on for many years, Fawcett agreed to stop publishing Captain Marvel, which put many writers and artists out of work. Captain Marvel“s main artist C.C. Beck opened a bar; Binder looked for work from other publishers. With EC in the Binder business already, it seemed only logical that they would also hire him for some original material. This opened the door for a collaboration that was like a match made in heaven. With “Lost in Space”“, published in Weird Science-Fantasy No. 28 (1955) the stars aligned for Williamson to do a story that allowed him to incorporate a visual language that went all the way back to those five Flash Gordon pages by Alex Raymond that had started his career when he was a nine-year old boy and he lived in Bogotá and his parents were married.
And indeed, right from its opening page, “Lost in Space”“ feels like Al“s audition for Flash Gordon. There are two characters present on what seems to be the veranda of a richly decorated estate. The furniture is tasteful, expensive and exotic. There are exquisite drapes and embroidered carpets. There are even some alien looking pets, the type a young girl might want to cuddle up to in bed and who by now have outlasted that purpose. The night sky, which is dark, red and equally exotic is not of our Earth. But these characters, who are human, don“t seem misplaced in this scenery that is lush and speaks of wealth, yet feels lived in. The girl, who wears a long, back-less dress that looks like it has been tailored for her slim frame, has her upper torso bend forward and her face is buried in her arms. She is crying. A man, older and with a beard and gray in his hair, stands to one side. His posture is regal and stern. There“s a clearly visible tension to every sinew and muscle of his body which conveys a sense of success. Like the young girl“s pets on the floor, he is a bit puzzled and overwhelmed by the teenage girl“s expression of emotion that was as raw as her tears. And if readers didn“t know it any better, these characters looked a lot like Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkov but by way of a melodramatic soap opera in Spanish. And Binder“s language was all Al Williamson could have hoped for and more: “In their luxurious summer home”¦ on far-away red mars, Myra van Dyke sobbed softly”¦ She saw only a tear-distorted view of the unearthly beauty sweeping beyond their veranda”¦ the coppery sands”¦ the golden-tinted distant mountains”¦ the bluish-green desert plants and their brassy blooms, the small twin moons, Phobos and Deimos, dancing swiftly across the azure-violet sky. For Myra“s heart was not on Mars, among the exotic wonders of the red planet”¦ again, she sobbed out her same plea, the plea she“d made over and over for the past months”¦”“ They were Myra and her father Martin, a wealthy owner of uranium mine on Mars. Myra was sobbing because she hated being on the red planet that had two moons named after the servants of the god of war. She hated the moons and the planet that had made her father rich. And she hated being rich since this was what kept her away from her love. Jim was back on Earth and he was but a factory worker. Her father had taken her away since he was a social snob and a bigot at that. Myra knew, or Myra thought she knew, that her dad didn“t want to see the noble line of the family soiled, degraded or disgraced by one such as Jim who came from a lower station in life. While her feelings knew one direction and one direction only and her tears had only one cause, her father“s emotion were complex. For Myra, he had to be “unchangeably firm, sternly gently, patient”“, all of this and more. He told her that he did not want to keep her away from Jim, not willingly, but Myra would not listen. But Martin endured. What else was he supposed to do? He took it, he took the abuse she hurled at him with tears in her angry eyes. Maybe these were not Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkov after all. Maybe Myra was Princess Aura, the rich and spoiled daughter of a powerful man who did not want to see her affections thrown towards a man who was an upstart, who was blonde and handsome and who knew how to work with his hands. If not this, how did one explain that instead of uniting his daughter with Jim, Martin tried to distract the inconsolable girl by taking her out to ride on the back of some alien beast across a terrain that still felt unfamiliar to her as it felt unknown to the readers? As the eyes of any reader marveled at the vast array of foreign locales Williamson and his co-inkers Krenkel and Torres laid out, from desert landscapes, to the cool blue canals and the Martian cities with their many bazaars at which the indigenous population offered wares that spoke of their history and folklore, Myra“s thoughts were with Jim. Martin did not move from her side, but you could tell that he was not possessive, but tried to act as good parent. Even neglecting his other concerns on Earth as Myra was quick to point out who did not see his love and protection. Since she“d found Jim, Martin was like the pets that had been her world but weren“t any longer. She wanted to be with Jim. Even a hunting expedition to Jupiter, to which Myra changed into sensible jodhpurs and knee-high boots, didn“t help his father to take her mind away from her longing, not even when he went down on his knees as if to present the beast he had slain to her instead. But like Aura, Myra knew how to trick her father. Once they“d made it into a canyon that she could call beautiful, she did exactly that, giving Martin the impression that she“d been cured from her heartache, and desperate to believe that finally he“d made progress with her Martin fell for it. Once he gave her a long leash, she snuck away to a speed boat that took her to Jupiter“s spaceport where she bought a cruiser for which she didn“t have a permit, but she had money. With ideas about marriage dancing in her head, she raced to Earth. It wasn“t there. As Martin told Myra when he found her, Earth had been destroyed by a comet. It was gone. So was Jim.
Williamson“s time at EC Comics was indeed one of contrast and contradictions, but in this world of cold cynicism and everyday realism, his characters spoke about the power and potency of imagination. You could live in the past, you could dream up worlds and spaceships that had a soul. Interestingly though, it was not in a story by Bradbury or Binder, but in one by Gaines and Feldstein, which offered Williamson the opportunity to express this idea in the most profound and beautiful manner. In “Two“s Company”¦”“, published in Weird Science No. 21 (1953) he and Frank Frazetta (once again with a cover by Wood) did just that. The first panel showed one of their most handsome man, a lean, muscular blonde guy, clad in a loincloth made of fur. He was Forbes, an astronaut who had crash-landed on this planetoid four years earlier. Next to him, there was the wreckage of his ship, the signifier of a civilization he had left behind. This world was lush, full of vegetation and wildlife that was dangerous, but also inviting, and it had kept him alive all those past years. In the beginning, he had looked up into the sky for people to rescue him. But then he had found the girl that was standing next to him. They had found each other. She was all a man could wish for and more. She was curvaceous, dark-haired and beautiful. She was mute and could not tell him her name, but that didn“t bother him. He had named her Velda. Velda was his companion. Like he, she had come from another place as Velda indicated with her arm raised and her finger pointing to the sky. They both were shipwrecked, but they had each other. They fell in love. He protected Velda, gave her warmth and a home, and together they dreamt of the life they would have once men came to rescue him. Velda would go with him, he was sure of that. And then, after four years, the best of which he had spent with Velda, the men came with their rocket. He was elated and he greeted the men with a big smile and a firm handshake, and he told them that he was “through with rockets and space-travel! Velda and I are going to settle down.”“ But the men reacted strangely. He quickly got the sense that they did not like his decision to leave it all behind, to settle down, once he and Velda were at his home. The men he had once called his friends wanted to stand in his way to happiness. But then they told him that he was alone, that he“d been alone the whole time: “There“s nobody there, Forbes. She“s a figment of your imagination!”“ And when he looked at Velda, indeed, she began to fade away. The presence of the men did something to her. And even if it was all true, even if she was but a figment of his imagination, as Carter and his other erstwhile friends and colleagues told him, Forbes didn“t care. He wanted Velda back. It was then that he whipped out his trusted blaster. He killed the men, and then he destroyed the rocket ship with which they had come here to rescue him. Forbes was utterly broken, he cried, and he begged Velda to come back to him. Suddenly, he heard a voice. There she was, as exotic and beautiful as she had ever been. Her arms were outstretched, and she was calling to him in more ways than one. Velda could speak now. And in her lovely voice she simply asked: “Isn“t that what you want, Darling?”“ “Yes, Velda. That“s what I wanted!”“ This story, which gave Williamson and Frazetta (who both worked on pencils and inks) ample opportunity to render the kind of characters, pre-historic creatures and lush vistas they both loved (once again beautifully colored throughout by the uber-talented Marie Severin), came with a surprising message, even more so in that it came from Gaines and Al Feldstein. The writer-editor and his “idea man”“ often reserved the end of their stories to deal out some harsh punishment, or ever so often they would leave their protagonists in a somewhat ironic fashion worse off than they had found them. But this time around, though on a literally level this was a story of a man gone mad in isolation, the end was comforting. Even if you found yourself alone, if you used your imagination, it was a powerful tool to create beauty and perhaps even happiness. For the two artists it was also a message of nature and a simpler life versus the cold efficiency of technology and progress. You could live like Forbes, self-reliant and independent and you would be better for it. A better person. There is a certain irony to it still, that Al Williamson, who had an eye to the past with his work, would be so apt in calling the future. Getting inspired by movie serial as a boy, and dreaming, he had willed a career in existence. In a way, when dreaming about that rocket ship that had a soul with the pages of Alex Raymond“s Flash Gordon next to him in the tall grass, Al had been able to see into the future. Very often, his instincts or even premonitions had proven right. Williamson was a rebel in how he approached his art, and it made him a better artist in the long run. He was a hard worker when he needed to be, but he refused to work in the confines other men wanted to define for him. He had a several decades long career and, from all accounts, a long and happy life. He worked in comics, newspaper strips and he helped to find work for the next generation of creators like he did for fan-favorite Bernie Wrightson. His instincts had proven right with John Celardo as well, who eventually had a long run drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip. And in 1966, Al managed to do what he had dreamt about as a boy: he got to do a series about Flash Gordon.
Author Profile
Chris Buse (RIP)
A comic book reader since 1972. When he is not reading or writing about the books he loves or is listening to The Twilight Sad, you can find Chris at his consulting company in Germany... drinking damn good coffee. Also a proud member of the ICC (International Comics Collective) Podcast with Al Mega and Dave Elliott.
