“NO ENCHANTMENT UNDER THE SEA“ A COLUMN ABOUT EC COMICS, PART 4

With Science Fiction, it is all in the name, really. Writers of any kind of science fiction literature will have their eyes trained on the shape of things to come. They“ll imagine machines and many futuristic-looking devices that for good or ill will bring about all kinds of implications on a personal and interpersonal level leading to harsh upheavals in our society at large. These machines and devices, either invented or gifted to us by alien visitors as either a gesture of friendship or as a curse, arrived in many forms. In those pulp magazines days of the 1930s, writers envisioned what we would later call the personal computer. They imagined that such tiny boxes would enable workers to connect with one another across great distances and allow for access to the entire knowledge of mankind“s history, accumulated and stored in one place. Any reader could follow bold young people as they travelled to exotic planets they“d claim as their own. Or, like in the poetically narrated worlds created by Otto Binder, a humanoid-looking metal man named Adam might turn out more human than human. Rocket ships came with a soul and felt the isolation of space like they sensed their passengers, or they“d carried you to the red sands of Mars as laid out in the words by Ray Bradbury. And the moon was indeed a harsh mistress and a high-rise building wasn“t only a modern apartment complex but a microcosm of jetpack socialism, if you asked Robert Heinlein or J. G. Ballard. And even in comic books, the medium of choice among pre-teens in the early 1950s or nerdy college kids in the 1960s, there were worlds within worlds. It is not unsurprising that such writers would dream up methods by which they could actually visit future worlds to see such domed cities and golden spaceships for themselves. But not by happenstance like a clueless Rip Van Winkle, but in a controlled fashion that befitted their scientific approach. Having created one of these machines of the future, one that allowed you to do just that, travel through time, the protagonist of “The Chronic Argonauts”“ sought out a time for himself that better suited his forward-thinking sensibilities. But this came at a price. With him having created a time loop, his actions affected the past as well. The Time Traveller, the unnamed hero of “The Time Machine”“ wisely kept to the future, a future that was clearly shaped by his view from Victorian England. Both works, the short story and the seminal novel were the works of Herbert George Wells, one of the founding fathers not only of science fiction literature, earlier called scientific romance, but of many elements his literary successors would adapt and modify for their own works. Wells indeed popularized the idea of time travel and the strange contradictions this caused. Going to the future could have an effect on the past, and if you strictly moved ahead, like the Time Traveller did in the latter work, did you not create many alternative timelines, each distinctly shaped by your own time“s limitations? A writer (and by extension the protagonist) could only ever hope to travel to a future that was a projection of his or her present. In other words, when the Time Traveller stopped his machine in A.D. 802,701, his values were still rooted very much in the 19th Century. He remained an “Anachronic Man”“ like the hero of the former short story. His future was an alternative future that was affected by ideas that were long in the past and which he had carried with him like some excess baggage. It is a strange paradox of this genre that writers, who with their keen, analytical minds tried to figure out what the future might hold, and who quickly seized this new trope, would not travel years or centuries ahead with their thoughts, their words and their protagonists to far flung places in the future, but instead these writers purchased tickets to the past. But the past they would travel to, was a past that existed in a multiverse which itself existed within a multitude of multiverses. It was a past that was shaped by their memories and romantic notions as if their traveller had already caused the tiniest infraction long before he had even started up his time machine. Once in the past, they would often do just that, a subtle change causing a ripple effect to the time stream. Like Mr. Eckles who for $10,000 booked a trip with Safari, Inc. to go on an expedition in the year 2055 to hunt pre-historic beasts 66 million years in the past. Mr. Eckles carelessly stepped on a mere butterfly, but by doing so, he changed the outcome of the presidential election in his present. Hapless Mr. Eckles lived in story by Ray Bradbury which was called “A Sound of Thunder”“. The story first appeared in Collier“s magazine in 1952. This was time for shorter fiction, when authors could sell their stories to publications such as Collier“s or Reader“s Digest, and to have them later collected under their name in one volume. Without any changes, the tale made it into “The Golden Apples of the Sun”“ a year later. When Al Feldstein adapted the story in 1954 for EC Comics with art by Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel, Angelo Torres and Marie Severin, the dictatorial candidate for the highest office in the country had his name changed from Deutscher (which translates to “German”“) to Lyman. The excellent comics version which made the most of the jungles of the Late Cretaceous period and the Tyrannosaurus Rex the men hunt, as well as of the futuristic machine in which the amateur hunters and their guide Mr. Travis travel, ended with Travis letting the men know that they could not return to the same spot in time to fix what Eckles had caused. No, they couldn“t go back. Bradbury“s story ended with “A Sound of Thunder”“. When Travis was confronted with a new reality in which a fascist had taken over their country and with Eckles to blame, he raised his hunting rifle. By killing a butterfly in the past, Eckles had not only caused an evil guy to become president, he had effectively murdered their own timeline. They were damned to have lived a past nobody remembered. And this was a tragedy, a small one, on a very private, personal level.

 

“A Sound of Thunder”“ is the tale that is often credited as the origin of the term “butterfly effect”“. If you were aware of the underlying principle of the chaos theory and you combined it with the physics behind time travel, you knew that visiting the past and subsequently making even the tiniest change to it, could cause dramatic consequences for the present to which you eventually wanted to return. As their guide had explained to the amateur hunters in the Bradbury story, you better not ever returned to the same spot in the time stream anyway, for fear of creating time paradoxes. But even if you were bold and you simply threw any caution to the wind and you indeed tried to go back, chances were high that you“d most likely found the past irrevocably changed. You had created a different past like you had set a vastly different present into motion. But what if there was not one past you could travel to in the first place? What if your mind worked as its own time machine and you remembered the past or certain aspects of the past very differently like Mr. Travis and his ill-fated hunting party were now doomed to do? Didn“t this past exist in its own parallel world right next to the alternative past that would-be big game hunter Eckles had created with his carelessness? Let“s just say you travelled to the 1960s and heard “California Dreamin“”“ in a record store. After all, this was a time when record stores not only existed around every corner, but you could take records into a booth, put headphones on and listen to each track. However, it was José Feliciano“s voice and guitar that you heard in both ears. And when you looked at the vinyl record, the circular label told you that José, and not John Phillips had written this track. Was this really how you remembered it? Or was this the version of the past in which producer and label boss Lou Adler had only bought the song from Phillips? He and his wife and two of their friends had performed as back-up vocalists when protest singer Barry McGuire, a rising star in 1965, had recorded the song for Dunhill Records. Perhaps Lou Adler had simply thanked these four twenty-somethings who were a bit too clean- cut to pass as proto flower children. They never got a chance to record their version, they“d never sell millions of copies. The band broke up shortly thereafter, missing out on the folk trend altogether. Still, back in the booth you started to listen to “Light My Fire”“, this being Feliciano“s Bossa nova-jazz version. Again, the Puerto Rican musician is credited as the lyricist and composer. You seem to recall that it was Ray Manzarek who wrote it for the band in which he played keyboards. You set the headphones on the table and leave the booth. You are a bit puzzled and you ask the girl behind the counter with the long, bouncy hair and too much eyeliner about the version by The Doors. She shoots you a wild glance that tells you that she“s made you for some country bumkin or a guy who has escaped from the coast guard. “Who are The Doors?”“ Behind her, on the wall, there are this month“s sales charts. Right on position 5 where it should say “California Dreamin“”“ by The Mamas and the Papas, writer John Phillips, producer Lou Adler, Dunhill Records, it lists Feliciano“s version. In this past perhaps, twenty-two-year-old Michelle Phillips wasn“t already set on a destructive course that would help to dismantle the band she was a part of from the inside. And perhaps, Cass Elliot, who hated the name Mama Cass because it made her even more conscious of her weight issues, wasn“t fated to die like so many recording artists at a young age. In this time, no one would have the wherewithal to remember such past events. They would never have happened. Maybe you“d simply travelled into an alternative past, a past a fellow time traveller“s arrival just mere minutes earlier had created? You still remembered events differently, but at the moment the changes had occurred in the past, the present from which you had embarked had become an alternative in itself. Like Eckles and Travis knew, this was a present you could never return to. Time was an elusive butterfly indeed. Looking at the sales chart, you cannot help but laugh. One thing had not changed. On the chart, “Elusive Butterfly”“, singer Bob Lind“s latest single charted at No. 6 like it always had. But what if only these few alterations, like a band never having a massive hit, which only affected their personal lives, would cause a ripple effect that was far more serious? In this timeline, another band hadn“t come together evidently. And like Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison had survived the 1960s. Morrison, now in the early 1980s, at the nadir of his career, and pushing forty, a bit overweight and still clad in tight leather pants, was crooning his own kitschy rendition of “McArthur Park”“ to an affluent, upper-middle class Las Vegas audience who was bored out of their respective skulls and who wanted to remember the good old days. José Feliciano, just two years older than Morrison, was still a hip and happening guy. After a generation of college dropouts had lit up to his songs, hippie kids who only a few years hence would begin to work for IBM or as movie producers, or who had already died too young, the Puerto Rican still had his fingers all over the zeitgeist. But his fingers, which once had skillfully strummed the strings of an acoustic guitar, now turned the knobs of a Moog modular synthesizer. After he had created experimental, psychedelic soundscapes in the early 1970s, using the Theremin like a boss and going on an extensive tour with The Man Who Fell to Earth himself, David Bowie, the Moog had literarily expanded Feliciano“s mind. These were good vibrations. By working the oscillator José perfected his own method of time travel. You could go to the past, a past that sounded differently each time you visited it. And you could reach to the far end of time, to the furthest reaches of the endless void. You could generate the melodic flair of a guitar, but you could also create sounds that no human could play on instruments that existed in this universe, becoming entirely transformed, turning into a new man in the process. This was what it must have felt like when a being was born that existed purely out of cosmic energy and had come from the mind of an innovative genius like Jack Kirby. At the threshold to the new decade, José Feliciano, together with Gary Numan and two guys from Germany, Ralf and Florian, had begun to create a new sound for a generation that was anti-punk, pro-consumerism and as uniformly purposeful as the utilitarian outfits the four guys chose to wear on stage when they performed their latest single “I Sing the Body Electric”“, the anthem for new romance kids fifteen years after José Feliciano wrote a song about a December day in California. “I Sing the Body Electric”“ of course wasn“t inspired by the poem by Whitman, but by the episode of the TV show The Twilight Zone, written by its long-time host and corporate pitchman, author Ray Bradbury.

 

“This is a tragedy,”“ the young, intense man said after the first table read to producer Bob Gale. The year was 1984 and had this scene occurred today, you might be well advised to cast actor James Franco for the guy they“d hired as their lead. Bob the producer looked at the other Bob who was the director. They asked their handsome lead actor why he thought that. By then the room had fallen silent. “At the end of the movie, he remembers a past that no longer exists. His whole life up to this point does no longer exist.”“ To get deep into the role, the thespian had done a reverse of what a crush of hopeful child actors had done when Columbia“s TV division Screen Gems had held an audition for the pilot for a new sitcom that would become The Partridge Family in 1969. They had dyed their hair red and had painted freckles into their young faces because somehow these were signifiers of a cute kid during this time, only to see the part go to Dante, the son of a volatile screenwriter, who happened to be a natural ginger and whose pale complexion came with real freckles. However, their actor had cancelled out his freckles with make-up because he wanted to be all serious, and his long, wavy hair was dyed jet-black and hung far into his eyes. His wardrobe was black as well. He knew he was the third choice of the two Bobs and he went all method on them. It was a film about time travel, after all. And going back to the 1950s meant to him to confront a 1980s audience with what the 50s had really been about. They would start from a time that had the sheen of eau de cologne on naked skin in a Calvin Klein TV commercial shot by Peter Lindbergh, glammed-up days somewhere between Joe Jackson“s “Steppin“ Out”“ and “The Look of Love”“ while their country was maybe run by Mr. Lyman, who at a time when his Hollywood career as leading man stalled, had become the head of the Screen Actors Guild, to in turn use his new position of influence to tattle on his acting colleagues to the commie hunters and the FBI. As the two Bobs knew well enough, he“d endorsed the use of the bomb in South Asia after winning the election for governor. And maybe Lyman would have gotten his chance. After he had beaten Richard Nixon soundly in the primaries in 1968. But this was the year when the optimistic, egalitarian jetpack socialism of Robert F. Kennedy, dubbed in the media “St. Francis”“, carried the black vote of the urban slums and the forgotten rural swamps, and he“d carried the youth vote. Nixon had one thing right. There was a new voice in America, one that rang loud and clear and could no longer be ignored. But it was not the silent majority, those people that believed in the blank face consumerism of the new suburbia, but their kids, the baby boomers, the college drop-outs, the unwashed masses who wore flowers in their hair and who had rushed to support the senator who had adopted Feliciano“s “Light My Fire”“ as his campaign tune. Evidently, every dream to had come to an end, and now they lived in a time period that was a dark mirror of the 1950s. Going back to 1955, this meant going back to a time of repression and bigotry, a time of segregated schools, a time during which a very few men told you how to live and how to think and their glorious propaganda tool was the new medium of television with its endless stream of sitcoms about perfect parents, white small towns in which no colored people existed, and the latest model of car that would guarantee happiness. It was the present of the future of Fahrenheit 451. Parents, well-mannered on the outside but agitated by the press, had literally burned books, comic books they had torn from the hands of their children after they had been told that such books were about violence, but who had secretly found themselves unmasked by stories that didn“t speak about the terrors of horrid dwarfs and fairy tale castles that came with trap doors and a torture chamber, but depicted the silent horrors of the Atomic Family, of life in suburbia.

 

EC Comics, and their notorious stories in Shock SuspenStories in particular, would make some of these kids of the Atomic Age seize the box created by another Bob, Robert Moog, to give voice to the anxiety of the world of the 1980s that mirrored their parents“ world, a world they wanted to see exploded in the spirit of post-punk with a near nuclear explosion like the one that Daria imagines happening at the end of the film “Zabriskie Point”“. It is indeed ironic that Michelangelo Antonioni“s film about the clash between the members of the counterculture and their parents“ way of life with its empty consumerism spawning a completely regulated, entirely mechanized and technologized totalitarian prosperity failed to woo its intended audience, causing a massive bleed to studio MGM“s profit and loss statement for 1970. Still, the blast of nuclear proportions which not only destroyed the high-class, high-tech house of the heroine“s ruggedly handsome corporate overlord, but which also set symbols of consumerism afloat in the arid Arizonian air of the Mojave Desert, while the beautifully unsettling soundscapes of Pink Floyd played in the background, delivers a punch to the gut and to the soul alike even of modern viewers. It“s to Antonioni“s credit that by casting two amateur actors the director would deliver an ironic twist well beyond the movie itself, one that might as well could have come right out of a tale written by EC“s chief architect Al Feldstein. Actors Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette who in the movie played characters with the same first names, initially fell in love during the shoot. They moved into an experimental commune in a black neighborhood. Eventually Daria moved on and she married film star Dennis Hopper, who had become something of a poster-boy for all flower power children who had forsaken materialism. Hopper was dealing with his addiction to various drugs during that time. Mark Frechette fell on hard times. He robbed a bank in 1973 and died in prison as a result from a weight-lifting accident. Eric, their lead, did like these kinds of ironies. He liked that in some ironic twist, his director had come up with the idea to put the time machine with which his character was to travel to the 1950s, into an expensive sports car, the type automobile that worked beautifully as a symbol of success and raw machismo. Very 1980s and very 1950s at the same time. The former period was all about greed and excess, the 1950s were defined by the car as a signifier of the new American middle class. Of course, Eric wasn“t born in the 1950s, nor did he grow up during this time period. Born in 1961, he was also too young to have experienced a time of free love and psychedelic experimentation. Indeed, he was a child of the age of polyester and fondue parties. But like with so many other people, he did have an opinion about the 1950s, what it was really like back then. And he felt that their movie should reflect that. It needed to be authentic. If you wanted to see the stuff that was going on back then, you couldn“t look at movies produced during this era, and especially not at television shows. Sure, for a brief period of time, during the Second World War and in the immediate post-war years, in a series of B-movies, later dubbed film noirs by French movie critics, themes of gender identity bubbled to the surface of the American consciousness, but in the technicolor, saccharine worlds created by Hollywood or the “Father Knows Best”“ landscape of television, all of this was lost. Their film was about lives that once had been full of promises and roads not traveled. It needed to be a punch to the gut. There were deep, dark themes of even incest in their movie. This was after all a Bergmanesque relationship drama about the numbing pain of small-town middle-class families across three generations. It all had started in the 1950s, this was when it had all gone so terribly wrong. People had many ideas back then, what their lives would be like and should be like, but they carried an inability to communicate with them which they inherited from the silent generation of their parents. Films and shows of that time period did not cut to the bone, but some of the comic books did. For this reason, he now took out the comic he had wanted to show them the whole time. This was indeed a comic from EC Comics, Shock SuspenStories No. 13 from February-March 1954 to be specific. Eric guided the attention of the two Bobs and the rest of the cast to a story called “Squeeze Play”“ which was written by Feldstein and drawn and inked by Al Williamson with inks by Williamson, Roy Krenkel and Angelo Torres. The tale dealt with the taboo subject of unwanted pregnancy among teens. In this harsh world, the young father murdered his girlfriend and the unwanted child since this added weight of responsibility was definitely cramping his freewheeling style. After all, Harry was in top shape and good looking and he had options. He would not settle for a new model house in a neighborhood with identical looking residences to work a nine to five job at some garage or in a windowless office in the city. Only for him to come home after his shift to a bitter life at their two-story plywood house at the Lyon Estates complex, coming home to a wife who was putting on the pounds by the minute as a physical representation of the disappointment both their lives had turned out to be. In this story, for Harry and Cora, who did look a lot like their lead actress, there would be no magical enchantment under the sea. Eric looked up and he saw that Crispin Glover who was cast to play his father both as middle-aged loser and as a teenage nerd, got him. It was at this point that Bob the producer looked at Bob the director and he could tell that they began to see things his way as well. As it turned out, Universal Studio marketing department did not really know how to sell this partly comedic, partly bitter-sweet drama that hinged around an optimistic scifi premise, but which also came with an undertone that hinted at something much darker and profound. Trying to latch onto the teen audience that had welcomed raunchy coming-of-age comedies such as “Porky“s”“ and its sequel not only with open arms, but with an open wallet, making the original the fifth highest grossing film for 1982, their movie got the tag line: “Are you telling me my mother“s got the hots for me?”“ There were some fabricated stories about an affair between Eric and his female co-star who played his mother and who was engaged during this time to a rising male star currently shooting a movie in Germany, that were leaked to some of the supermarket tabloids in hopes of getting the “mom-audience”“. Opening in 1,200 theaters across North America, the film was already penned by critics after previews. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it “a confused mess”“ and consequently gave it a thumbs down. In the end, as widely reported, “Back to the Future”“ ended up a costly flop for Universal. Not even making it into the top five on its release weekend, the film was pulled from cinemas after just six weeks in release. However, it proved quite popular in France, and once it hit VHS in the subsequent year, it began to build a cult following that has grown steadily over the years. Effectively tanking the career of Robert Zemeckis who had come off a series of costly flops already, Eric Stoltz remains adamant in his assessment. During the run up to the release of a remastered version on Blu-ray, he went so far to call it “The movie I am most proud of.”“ Of course, Stoltz has since directed a number of independent movies to critical acclaim.

 

But we live in a time that comes with a different past, and a past nobody remembers because someone had carelessly stepped on a butterfly. The way we recall those events, The Mamas and The Papas went on to a short, but successful career in the recording industry. Michelle Phillips did destroy the band with her affair with band member Denny Doherty on whom their other female singer Cass Elliot had a huge crush. John got a divorce and Cass broke away to forge a solo career which never took off. Cass did die young, like Jim Morrison. And when José Feliciano was invited to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner”“ in front of an audience of millions during the pre-game ceremonies of the 1968 World Series, Feliciano rendered his own, very personalized Latin Jazz version which proved so controversial at that time that it effectively ended his career. Not unlike Eric in the past of an alternative world, José remains proud of his rendition of the national anthem which now, so many years later, is on permanent exhibition at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Feliciano“s ground-breaking, influential career as recording artist lives in the past of a world in which actor Harrison Ford never had a huge career. Having been cut from “Zabriskie Point”“ altogether, a film in which he had a brief scene, and despite making an impression on Steven Spielberg with his roles in Lucas“ “American Graffiti”“ and “Star Wars”“, Spielberg failed to convince George to cast him as Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”“, a film Lucas was producing. When Spielberg and Lucas offered the role to Tom Selleck, the actor had to turn them down due to his commitment to “Magnum, P.I.”“, but a deal was worked out. Selleck got the part. A deal could not be reached with producer Gary David Goldberg who had contracted Michael J. Fox for the successful sitcom. Having briefly considered actor C. Thomas Howell for the role of Marty McFly, the role eventually went to Eric Stoltz. All Fox could do, while his face was covered in werewolf make-up as he was shooting “Teen Wolf”“ at the same time the sets were being built for “Back to the Future”“ on the Universal backlot, was to return to his TV role, which was indeed as tragic as the role played by Michael Landon prior to his Little Joe days on “Bonanza”“ in the 1950s B-movie their film was loosely based on. Joseph Loeb III, one of the writers of “Teen Wolf”“, would go on to enjoy a long career writing comic books, eventually replacing Paul Levitz as the head of DC Comics. Loeb would be instrumental in the purchase of MAD Magazine, a magazine that had begun its run as a comic from EC Comics. And somewhere in this alternative past exists a version of “Squeeze Play”“ that was penciled by Al Williamson. This was one of Al Feldstein“s darkest scripts, especially when you considered that he had intended it for Al Williamson, and this was all Al Feldstein, without any input from his publisher Bill Gaines. The writer-editor had originally joined EC Comics as an artist when Gaines wanted to put together a teen romance comic of his own in the late 1940s. Feldstein had been working in this genre successfully for comic publisher Victor Fox for some time. Known as one of the top creators of “good-girl art”“, Feldstein laid out the first pages for title he called Going Steady With Peggy. It came with a cover that showed the long-legged, beautiful blonde on the beach with four athletic, hormonally driven boys trying to impress the teen with all sorts of sportive activities. However, with the market for this kind of material on the decline, Gaines and Feldstein had scrapped their original plan and together they had embarked on a course that produced some of the best comic book stories of the 1950s. Initially switching their publishing line away from romance comics and comics about the fight against crime, Bill and Al started up a series of horror titles. With talent like Johnny Craig and Harvey Kurtzman on board, crime comics and war comics soon followed. Then two science fiction titles. Feldstein had been working with Williamson for two years at the time when he wrote “Squeeze Play”“. After Al Feldstein had initially struck out when giving the Colombian-American artist a horror tale to draw, both men soon settled into a highly successful collaboration in which Feldstein let the artist draw what he did best: swashbuckling, romantic space explorers, beautiful ladies in long, flowing gowns and alien-looking otherworldly vistas. A year earlier though, Al Williamson had done one of his arguably best stories for the publisher, a story which came in the crime genre. While for the most part Feldstein wrote stories for Williamson that did come with a certain flair of the fantastical and were deeply rooted in the romanticism he and his friends, who more often than not helped out on the inks, seemed to favor, in his crime stories, which came with a film noir influence but one that was transplanted from the urban setting of novels by James M. Cain and Jim Thompson to the world of suburbia of the Atomic Age, Feldstein went for a hyper-realism that was well suited for artwork by Jack Kamen and especially Wallace Wood. Interestingly, in both the crime story and in one of the science fiction tales he gave Williamson to pencil in 1953, the writer went even a step further. While the former tale had a ranch hand as its lead, a modern-day cowboy, and the latter a mechanical engineer turned space colonist, Feldstein seemingly took great pleasure in deconstructing these highly romanticized tropes of free-spirited manliness. There is a certain raw cynicism in this. Both characters are unfaithful to the woman they are initially involved with and they think nothing by it. And whereas the former man is severely punished for his infidelity, the latter guy is cuckolded. In both tales the women have the power. In “Fired!”“, the crime story, the woman is even the guy“s boss. Not only is Patricia the owner of the ranch on which young, handsome Roy works, but when he offers sexual favors to his female boss to get the job of foreman, she becomes his john and he a male prostitute. In “50 Girls 50”“, which arrived in Weird Science No. 20 (1953), lovely blonde Wendy strikes up a romance with Sid, one of their rocket ships engineers, to exploit the access his job offers to him for her own purposes. He is played by her in more ways than one. While both tales also end rather poorly for the women, it is the men who do not seem terribly bright. Roy thinks he is in control of the situation since he uses sex as his weapon, whereas Sid is so impressed with himself that he never even considers that Wendy might have any ulterior motives, though it is quite evident that it is Wendy who controls him with her alluring charm and her upfront sexuality. But these two stories very much feel like simple warm-up exercises for what Feldstein had in mind when he wrote “Squeeze Play”“, which over the years has become one of the most famous and most notorious stories ever to have been put out by EC Comics during this period of time, a time just before the Comics Code of America made any more sophisticated storytelling in the medium of comics a next to impossible thing. With this story, the author went all in on the deconstruction and complete destruction of the romantic male hero archetype. Not in an obvious manner, though this story offers many ways to look at it. It was however, by no means a requiem for the classical hero of ancient times, though Al Feldstein, either conscientiously or from the place of shared collective memory, deftly uses some of the characteristics that mark a hero of antiquity, a hero who finds himself besieged by the designs of evil creatures that is. But there is nothing romantic about the protagonist of “Squeeze Play”“. This wasn“t a tale about an immortal who had impregnated a mortal woman and who now paid little or no heed to what consequences his seed had spawned. And Harry was no brave, yet frail man who came from Homer“s Odyssey, prone to fall for the female seduction of a crush of mystical women of the sea, and Williamson knew it. Though Feldstein was playing exactly on these kinds of tropes on the surface.

 

After he had been given the art assignment, Al Williamson enlisted the help of his friend Frank Frazetta. The man who had spent the earlier years of his childhood in Colombia and the child prodigy who from time to time would sign his work as Fritz, took the train from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Frazetta was three years older than Al, and whereas Al offered some boyish good looks, Frank was buff. He was into weight-lifting and he exuded the working class charisma of a greaser like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”“. It was not surprising that the men, clad in t-shirts and faded blue jeans, turned the heads of many young women who most likely thought of them as factory hands. Though Frazetta didn“t look anything like an artsy type, he was one of the best illustrators around, drawing rings around many of the more revered cartoonists who illustrated newspaper strips and commercial artists on Madison Avenue. Once they got to Coney Island, Williamson began taking photos. There was electricity in the air. There was Luna Park. And right across the boardwalk, past the sideshows with their fake mermaids, you came to the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone. The air was filled with the smell of salted popcorn and sweet cotton candy. All of this felt a bit surreal, like some alien marketplace on Mars or Venus. Both artists were into fantastic worlds. Al had been inspired to become an artist when he had seen a Flash Gordon serial and pages of the Sunday strip by Alex Raymond that featured the blonde Earthling who went to the planet Mongo to dug it out with the self-proclaimed Emperor of the Universe, Ming the Merciless. Frazetta had drawn a series of astonishingly beautiful covers for publisher Eastern Color“s long running title Famous Funnies which featured Buck Rogers and his gorgeous blonde companion in some perilous situations. Under his pencils and inks, these covers, some of which for issues that had yet to be released, became a symphony of spaceships, alien worlds, the black void of space and bondage. But there was no sleaze to any of this. Everything was of the fantastical. Buck and Wilma did not even wear space suits in outer space. Rogers had an aviator“s hat on and goggles, Wilma wore a short dress. In the 1930s, there were movie serials about both heroes, and Buster Crabbe had starred as both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. And why not, really. It was all make believe anyway. With the sun low now, and the first lights coming up, you could well imagine the scenery like it had been when the first Dutch settlers had named Coney Island for the old spelling of their word for rabbit, or earlier, when the indigenous people who hailed from the tribe of the Lenape had called this place Narrioch, meaning “land without shadows”“ or “always light”“. Maybe they had been able to see into the future. It was Al who had brought Frank to EC when he had followed Wally Wood to the publisher. Like their other friends Roy Krenkel and Angelo Torres, Frank wasn“t really on board, but like they he helped Al with inking, an area in which the young artist needed improvement. They“d collaborated on a crime story for Feldstein for which Frank had handled the inks, with Al doing the pencils. Earlier in the day the writer-editor had assigned Al another crime yarn, though Al preferred to do science fiction tales, either based on Feldstein“s scripts or the works of other writers like Bradbury, Otto Binder or Harlan Ellison. There was something about Feldstein“s stories that rubbed him the wrong way. And this latest story was no exception. The first crime story had been set on a ranch which he had liked, but the new story was set at the boardwalk that came with a beach and an amusement park and a roller-coaster, which would serve as the murder weapon. Frazetta looked at Al while Al took photos he intended to use as reference for his drawings. Al had trained this hard to become an artist who was more than just competent. Frank was a born artist. Born in 1928, Frank Frazetta was the only boy in his family of four siblings who lived in Brooklyn. He sold his first piece of art when he was three years old, to his grandmother that is, but she paid him a nice sum, which considering the amount his original art fetches at auctions today, was indeed some smart investment. When he attended kindergarten at the age of five, his teachers couldn“t believe their eyes when they discovered that he not only drew better than the other kids, but that he found ways to improve anything they managed. With the endorsement from his school“s teachers his parents visited the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts with him. The interview was with Michael Falanga, an award-winning artist from Italy who had specialized in fine arts. He asked Frank to copy a picture of some ducks on a piece of paper with a pencil. After just thirty minutes, when Falanga returned to see how far along the boy was, he had not just drawn the ducks, but the pond and the forest around the pond, all perfectly cross-hatched and shaded, every line perfectly delineated. One needn“t be an award-winning artist to realize that the boy was a wunderkind, but Falanga said it anyway and immediately began teaching Frank about the kind of stuff he was not born with, like technique and what types of pencils and inks you wanted to use. Indeed, Falanga helped Frank to develop his skill set in a very short amount of time, with Falanga entertaining the idea of sending him to Europe at his own expense for further training. But then Falanga suddenly died and Frank was without a mentor. However, in some other version of the past, which might exist in our world or not, Frank would remember these years very differently: Falanga “didn“t teach me anything, really. We never had any great conversations. He spoke very broken English. He kind of left you on your own. I learned more from my friends there.”“ At just the age of sixteen, Frank struck out on his own. He had always thought that it would be fun to draw a couple of comic books and he was quickly hired by artist Bernard Baily for his studio to do clean-ups of other artists“ work. In the same year he moved into inking. In what maybe is an eerie coincidence or the hands of karma getting involved, not unlike many years later his friend Al Williamson would help to further the career of horror artist extra-ordinaire Bernie Wrightson, it was Wrightson“s very own idol artist Graham Ingels, a horror master in his own right, and just a few years later the artist in residence for all the things to go bump in the night at EC Comics, who discovered Frazetta among many aspiring comic book artists. Ingels got Frank a job at Standard Comics, where he drew everything from Westerns to Romance Comics by the way of Fantasy, Mystery and Science Fiction. Frazetta had fun doing this and he rejected multiple offers from Walt Disney to come work for him. Had he not done that, chances are, Frank and Al would never have met. And neither would Frank have met Al“s friend Roy Krenkel who was indeed the mentor to him that he later would claim Michael Falanga never was. The group was rounded out by a couple of other artists, most notably Angelo Torres, and once they began to show up together at the offices of EC Comics at 225 Lafayette Street in New York, Harvey Kurtzman nicknamed the group that had accumulated around temperamental Al Williamson the “The Fleagle Gang”“ after the notorious bank robbers who were active in the Midwest during the Depression Era. But unlike a whole generation of comic book artists who had come before and who had helped to inspire these young men who looked like they had stepped right out of Federico Fellini“s 1953 movie “I Vitelloni”“, Al and his gang didn“t come from hunger. Right before television truly took hold, before the Comics Code and with more kids around due to the post-war baby boom, comic books where everywhere. Frank did not need any work from EC Comics other than the inks and occasional co-pencils he provided to his friend“s work. And while some of the artists who tried out for EC, but ultimately did not leave a lasting impression, perhaps would have killed for a regular job there, especially among such a deep bench of artistic talent Gaines and Feldstein had put together like an all-star team, the trajectory of his career proved Frank right. With just a handful of Buck Rogers covers he achieved two things. He got job offers from legends in the business such as Al Capp and Dan Barry who was working on the Flash Gordon newspaper strip and who hired Frazetta to help him with the artwork for the hero that had Al Williamson want to become a comic book artist. And perhaps, Harrison Ford owes a part of his career to those covers by Frazetta, since George Lucas would go on the record to say that it were Frank“s covers of Buck Rogers that had given him the idea for “Star Wars”“. With the two of them still on the boardwalk, and Al still taking pictures, while a lot of the young women checked out Frank“s muscular arms and his ripped torso which strained against his white t-shirt, he could tell that his friend wasn“t into it like Frank didn“t care for the looks from the girls in their bikinis. That was in his past. Sure, he“d had affairs, what guy who looked like him wouldn“t, but two years ago he had met Eleanor Kelly from Massachusetts. She had just turned eighteen a year ago and he intended to marry her. She had a trim, athletic body and Ellie was really sharp and she could teach him things he didn“t know. But Frank didn“t need Eleanor to tell him that Al wouldn“t go through with it. A story about a working-class bloke who killed his girlfriend when she told him that she was pregnant was not his bag. Al didn“t even need to say a thing. This was the kind of bond you had with your mate back in the 1950s.

 

While in the past of a world of another universe there may exist a version of “Squeeze Play”“ with pencils by Al Williamson, it is hard to imagine that it is as cynical as the version that exists in our past. Like Frank and Al decided to reverse the work process of their collaboration on their earlier crime story for EC, Al had done the pencils and they had both inked his linework, author Feldstein wrote a complete inversion of his first work for EC, the incomplete, unpublished first issue of Going Steady With Peggy. While the cover he had laid out for the teen romance story offered male readers plenty of eye candy in the form of the beautiful teenaged Peggy and girl readers might got a kick out of the guys on the cover who did look like numerous boy bands would look in the 1990s, only clad in trunks for the beach, there was not an iota of romance in sight on the splash page for “Squeeze Play”“. Sure, if you got your education at a liberal arts college, somewhere at the back of your mind you could see traces of a tortured Prometheus, the first superhero of in Greek mythology, in the way Frank drew Harry in a near crouch, with his knees bent and his upper torso leaned forward, his arms hanging between his legs. But Harry was not a titan and he was not on the run from the gods, but from the police. He felt trapped. Like many criminals, by violently freeing himself from one confinement, the one his girlfriend had sprung on him, he had moved himself into a corner. Or more precisely, to a spot under the boardwalk. Right from the start, Feldstein“s prose comes across much more purple and heightened than usually, almost as if to drive home the idea that this dark tale moved at its own frenzied pace. The writing style is a testament to how advanced his storytelling abilities had become: “Harry cowered against the rough concrete pillar that supported the weather-beaten boards overhead, sucking in the warm summer air in great gulps, trying to catch his breath. They were after him, soon they“d be searching down here, down in the damp sand beneath the boardwalk, searching for the killer. Harry looked around wildly. Where to hide? Where to run? And then he saw the shimmering mass of almost naked humanity that jammed the sunny beach”¦”“ This was when Harry stripped down to just his trunks, which gave Frazetta another shot at drawing Harry“s body which was muscular, but almost twisted into a knot with tension by this point. Harry was now near naked, but as attractive as Feldstein“s Peggy had been in nearly the same stage of undress, he was not. Harry was molded in the style of the Ancient Greeks“ ideal of a perfect man, but he was a tortured hero. After this cold open, something Feldstein had most likely learned from many film noirs, with Harry now reduced to the state of the first man, once he had shed his civilian identity and he“d become just one more body on a crowded beach, we slowly learn who this man is whose well-defined physique we find increasingly at ease after he“s managed to blend in. Feldstein goes for a triple approach, which often felt redundant in his earlier tales, telling the events via the captions, the dialogue or thought bubbles and the artwork, but which he and Frazetta manage pull off in perfect synthesis: “Harry grinned. He picked an open spot, between the laughing, perspiring groups of bathing-suit-clad people and sat down. Yes. He was free of Cora. She wasn“t going to tie him down. She wasn“t going to force him into a shot-gun marriage”¦ Cora was dead”¦”“ And from his thoughts we learn this: “Women! They“re all the same. Everything“s rosy, all fun, and then they start trying to grab on and hold”¦ then they start talking marriage”¦”“ Frazetta offered now some shots of Harry“s face that was tightening all the while his body grew relaxed. There were the memories that still haunted Harry. With an extensive flashback sequence, we learn that Cora obviously was the clingy type, at least that was how Harry remembered it now. She had been pestering him about getting married. And then she had phoned him up. They had to meet, she had said. Once again, she had asked him when they were getting married. Once again, he had stalled her. But this time was different, alright. “She“d told him. And Harry“s blood had froze in his veins. He“d been trapped.”“ He had suggested a trip to the beach. While they strolled along the promenade that the boardwalk offered with its smells and its little storefronts, like he possessed a time machine, his mind flashed forward to his future: “Now I“ll be tied down to a crummy apartment, punching a time-clock, sweatin“ t“pay bills, and stayin“ in every night with a bawlin“ brat”¦”“ While one of the shops promised fun in bold letters, his fun times were over it seemed. But then he had seen the solution. The roller-coaster. Like a caveman, he dragged Cora over to the attraction. Cora“s protestations only brought forth a few grins from some other guys. They knew that a girl might say no, but in reality, she meant yes. It was a game. Like Harry told her: “It“s fun! You“ll see!”“ But still, Cora refused to do this willingly. Her brain sensed what was coming, but Harry would not let her get out of this trap. Once they were in one of the open cars, riding high on the wooden tracks, his face tightened, his visage wet with perspiration. This was when things got real. Cora shouted: “He“s going to kill me! Help me!”“ And Harry showed his true mettle: “Shut up, you crummy little tramp.”“ This was the moment when he violently pushed her out of the car. For what seems to be a moment frozen in time, Harry remembers how he“d watched Cora fall to her death: “”¦ how her body“d bounced against the girders, twisting and turning as it fell to the pavement far below”¦”“ However, in a powerful twist, it is not through Harry“s eyes that we see this scene in the flashback sequence. Frazetta chooses instead to put the camera behind Harry“s head, his strained neck and his arched back. We become spectators as well, almost as if we are seated in one of the other cars. We see Harry and we see Cora“s descent to the ground, Cora with her skirt blowing in the wind and her arms and legs stretched out as if they were looking for a point to grab onto, any point, really. And immediately we see Harry“s spiel. He clutches his hand against his eyes, like a cursed man who had an especially damning truth shown to him by an oracle and who wants to purge this image from his mind by choosing to go blind. But once he has his feet back on the ground again, the crowd is not buying what he is selling. While he insists that she fell, the same folks who“d laughed when he“d forced her to go on the ride, now seem to remember things differently. They shout for the police, and even though they hadn“t seen what he had done, they are convinced that he is a killer. This was when Harry began to run, and he ran all the way till he had reached the spot right under the boardwalk. And now, having stripped down to just his trunks, he“s just another guy on a warm day at the beach. But then, to his horror, he sees how police find the place where has stashed his clothes and his other belongings. He is shut off from civilization and he knows it. But then he overhears a group of girls who talk about their car keys. Surely, Harry should be able charm his way into their good graces, a good-looking guy like him. Like this was some teen romance comic, things began to work in his favor.

 

The scene presented by Frazetta did indeed look as if it had come right out of Feldstein“s original draft for his teen romance title Going Steady With Peggy he had been putting together for Bill Gaines and EC all the way back in 1948. But instead of one girl, Peggy who is innocent enough looking, but who is very much designed to attract the eyes of young male readers with her full bust and her long legs, and who is clearly drawn as someone who is in the thrall of her raging pubescent hormones like any reader who made up the books intended audience was most likely as well, Frank presented a guy who was as coarse as they come. Peggy was indeed a “good girl”“, she was intended to be. She was from the new American middle class whereas Harry ostensibly wasn“t. He had working class written all over his near nude body with the way Frazetta drew him. The four young guys who surrounded pretty teen Peggy and who made fools of themselves with their attempts to impress her with their athleticism, looked like they attended some pre-school. Harry had the physicality and raw masculinity of a proletarian. He could take the guys on, all of them, at the same time, no doubt about. And while he admired himself like Peggy had, he was as well surrounded by group of beachgoers from the opposite sex. And these five girls who were sitting or lying on a beach blanket were from a different world, so much so that to Harry they had to seem like they“d been dropped off from an alien planet. While they did not come with the same spoiled attitude of a laissez-faire debutante like the young girl Williamson would present a year later when he adapted Otto Binder“s poetic script of “Lost in Space”“ in Weird Science Fantasy No. 28 (1955), there is still a shift in the balance of power. Peggy and her four admirers share the same socio-economic background. She has all the power because she is one girl and there is four of them who want her. The five Frazetta girls do check out Harry“s impressive physique, but they are all very lovely themselves. They are not fighting each other, and most importantly, they have a car, whereas Harry and Cora had to take the train. They do not need Harry (all of them have boyfriends as it turns out), but Harry needs them. They immediately sense this, and they provoke him by challenging his manliness. They throw his lame pick-up line back at him and they make fun of his over-the-top masculinity by calling him “Tarzan”“. They begin to pull Harry to the water and demand that he performs for them is if he were their own dancing pet monkey: “Show us your back-stroke, lover!”“ Whereas Peggy simply let her body talk, the five girls are less naïve to the way of the world, clearly, and they are aggressive. All five of them pull Harry into the water, commenting that “he“s all muscles!”“ The roles are now reversed. It is Harry who begs like Cora had begged when he had callously forced her to go on the roller-coaster. Cora naturally couldn“t fly, and Harry can“t swim. It is the water that becomes his air now. This water is completely green except for its white foam, which is to tell readers that there is something much darker here, green being the color Marie Severin usually used to alleviate one of the more out-there terrors one of the artists presented. Green meant you had to look more closely. And this is what we do. As soon as the boyfriends of the girls arrive, spots only on the beach, the girls completely abandon Harry like a toy they have lost all interest in. And while you can make an argument that Harry is a brother to one of those brave men who had been lured by the sirens“ song to his cold death, Harry is simply a working-class guy who is fun for these girls for one hot minute. And then he simply isn“t any more. This world of post-war America in the Atomic Age was a world that had no place for the heroes of old. Some women were fiercely independent, and they had no need for a hero. It is no coincidence that one of the girls shouts to her date: “I got the car with me!”“ Not only are the women in control of their bodies which they present more freely to titillate men on the beach, but in a way that tells any would-be pursuer that they are wise to the way men think, they are in the driver“s seat and behind the wheel as well. In that respect they“re a hardened version of Peggy and Cora as they are also much more powerful than the other two women. It is interesting that when Jack Kamen created the cover for Shock SuspenStories No. 13 (1954), the issue in which this story first appeared, his version of Cora very much looks like one of the career girls these five girls seem to be. In Feldstein and Frazetta“s story this is not who she is. Though she does not seem dirt poor, and she and Harry dress up when they are out on a date, Cora is not interested in freedom. Her mind, at least as far as we can tell from Harry“s perspective, is singularly focused on getting hitched. But instead of looking for another guy, one who is as serious about starting a family as she is, Cora is trapped in a relationship with a man who values his own freedom more than Harry values her. She“s an anachronism onto herself, like a time traveller who has landed in a future in which women no longer need a man to be fulfilled, a time when women value their own freedom, a time when women can play-act around a guy like guys were wont to do with girls. The irony was surely not lost on Frazetta who very much had been playing the field up to the point he“d met his future wife Eleanor Kelly who he would marry two years later and with whom Frank would have four children. Frank and Ellie Frazetta, who became his business partner, would stay married until Ellie died in 2009, less than a year before Frank died at the age of eighty-two. Feldstein“s first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife tragically died in 1986. His third marriage lasted until he died in 2014. From his marriages, he had five children of his own and a stepdaughter. As for Harry, Feldstein wrote a fitting, powerful epitaph with which he closed the book on one of his darkest stories: “The girls struck off for shore, waving at their dates, laughing, squealing, never hearing Harry“s anguished cries as he trashed about”¦ And they never even turned around to see the water pouring into Harry“s mouth, his stomach, his lungs”¦ They never even saw him go down for the last time”¦”“ Al Feldstein“s last words on manliness.

 

However, “Squeeze Play”“ didn“t exist in its own world. Like mostly all EC Comics during “The New Trend”“ days Shock SuspenStories No. 13 had four stories in total (and a prose piece to comply with regulations from U.S. Postal Services for a preferred shipping rate). The first story was by Feldstein and Kamen and dealt with a man who found out that his wife was not only unfaithful to him, but that she was planning his murder with her lover. In a twist on the James M. Cain motif Feldstein had been using for many tales of that type, the cuckolded husband receives the face of his wife“s lover when he is treated after what police believe had been a car accident involving both men. Then there was a tale with art by recent hire Reed Crandall about a heavyweight champion who believes that he is turning into a gorilla, a story that reads very “toxic masculinity”“ in current year. These were ok stories at best. But Shock SuspenStories did also serve as a showcase for Gaines and Feldstein“s most thought-provoking morality tales, the so-called “preachies”“. While many of their tales were just that at their core, morality tales, with this series of stories the publisher and his writer-editor Feldstein took on some of the topics that were very much in the zeitgeist and which were either on the forefront of the media and society at large, or which were not discussed at all, or if so, just in the privacy of your own four walls. As it stands, “Blood-Brothers”“ by Feldstein, Wally Wood and Marie Severin (on colors) works not only as an interesting companion piece to “Squeeze Play”“ but it provides a powerful counterpoint to the narrative of the 1950s as a time which by and large was much more pure and innocent. It is very interesting, that in the past as we remember it collectively, director Robert Zemeckis and producer Bob Gale showed their friend and mentor Steven Spielberg a first rough cut of “Back to the Future”“ based on five weeks of shooting, to enlist his advice. The movie, which they intended as a comedy, was not coming together as they had hoped. For it to be a comedy, they needed two things to work. They had to have a lead who was naturally funny, which he was not in the material they had shot so far, and they needed to trick the audience. When Marty McFly goes back all the way to 1955 with a time machine built into a DeLorean, this was a past that only ever existed in the minds of people who had seen re-runs of “The Andy Griffith Show”“. In the fictional town of Mayberry, when you hung out with good-natured Sheriff Andy, his son Opie and Andy“s hapless and highly inept Deputy Barney Fife, who only got and retained this job through nepotism, you could travel to a past that had never been real, not even when the series began to air in 1960. Even in 1984, when principal photography began on “Back to the Future”“, you could just as easily turn on the time machine in your living room to travel to a fictious version of the 1950s in which Richie Cunningham and his friends did all sorts of cool stuff. Though “Happy Days”“ ended its original run in 1984 after ten years on the air since its premier in January 1974, and series lead Ron Howard, who viewers could see at the same time in re-runs of “The Andy Griffith Show”“ when he was still a boy as Sheriff“s Andy son, had long since left the series, there was huge interest in nostalgia and the good old days. A version of the past as seen on television. A past as it was fondly remembered or imagined by wealthy white people in the 80s to whom this time seemed so simple and innocent in hindsight. To make their film work in the way the two Bobs intended, it had to be this version of the past that was predominately white, a past in which bigotry and racism had no reason to have ever existed since without black people around there were race tensions. Surely, having grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, Sheriff Andy Taylor reads as working class, but he did all in his powers to improve the town of Mayberry, to make it better place for white people that is. And this was essentially what Marty McFly did. However, starting the movie in 1985, you had to at least acknowledge that black people existed. And true to form for an America that had become yuppie-fied, the single token black character of the film is highly accomplished. In the fictional Hill Valley, which is located in California, of course, he is Mayor Goldie Wilson. Just this single piece of information creates a whole image of a guy who is positively determined and competent. And Mayor Wilson is a shoo-in for the upcoming election as well. But when Marty goes back into the past, his actions do not only cause a lot of confusion, but he creates a different timeline. When we meet a younger Wilson, he is ambitious, especially when compared to George, Marty“s father who is constantly bullied by stronger kids: “Stand tall, boy,”“ he tells George with Marty observing what“s going on. “Have some respect for yourself. Don“t you know, if you let people walk over you now, they“ll be walking over you for the rest of your life.”“ He surely has some fighting words for George, but the future mayor works as a busboy at the local dinner. This of course plays on the trope that in America you go from rags to riches, which does kinda play very nicely with a liberal 1980s audience, but here the scene is played for laughs. Immediately Wilson“s boss Lou shows up to tell him who owns the place and to better watch it, after Wilson was so bold to call his place of employment a “slop house”“. Yet Wilson goes on: “No, sir! I“m gonna make something of myself. I“m going to night school”¦ I“m gonna be somebody!”“ It is Marty who cannot stop himself from blurting out: “That“s right! He“s gonna be mayor.”“ It is at this point that we learn how Wilson got his demeaning name. Actor Donald Fullilove lets his character flash a big smile in response to Marty“s not well-thought out comment, only to reveal his front teeth, one of which is a gold tooth. And Wilson surely is grateful that Marty has put the right kind of idea into his head: “Mayor!”“, Wilson exclaims with an effete squeal, “Now that“s a good idea! I could run for mayor.”“ The response of Wilson“s boss Lou works as a wink to the audience, because we already know the outcome: “A colored mayor. That“ll be the day.”“ Even when Wilson vows that one day he“ll “be the most powerful man in Hill Valley”“, and that like Sheriff Andy he“s going improve the town, this is played just for laughs. And his boss comes right back at him. “You can start with sweeping the floor.”“ Lou hands him a broom. Wilson stands tall with a hand over his heart as he proudly proclaims: “Mayor Goldie Wilson. I like the sound of that.”“ But he immediately starts picking up George“s dishes which puts him into a lower position than Marty“s father who had been shown as a complete loser throughout the film so far. The other black characters that show up, are the musicians that are set to play during the dance at George McFly“s school which is called “Enchantment under the Sea.”“ The film not only finds a reason for Marty McFly to play guitar with the band which is comprised entirely of African-American musicians, which none of the kids find odd during a time of segregation in the public school system, but unlike Elvis Presley who only one year later would co-opt music created by African-American recording artists most radio stations simply would not play until these songs were performed by a white artist, Marty is the guy who gives Chuck Berry the idea for the musical style that would form the basis for rock ”˜n“ roll. Seemingly, Marty McFly was simply the white kid who could do it all in this revisionist version of the past. By contrast, if you actually looked at Feldstein and Wood“s tale “Blood-Brothers”“ a very different image emerges, one that seems over-the-top, but nevertheless real.

 

This powerful tale also starts with a cold open. A charred cross, its dry oak wood still smoldering is seen in the garden of regular two-story residence. There are some guys who look on while two men carry a stretcher on which a blanket covers the outline of a dead man. And an older guy with a hat, glasses and a pipe in his mouth is seen talking to the dead man“s next-door neighbor, who is middle-aged, but who is buff and whose posture immediately conveys an air of unshakable, manly confidence. The older guy, a medical doctor, tells him that there is going to be an investigation, which puzzles the other man who argues that his next-door neighbor had simply shot himself. With the doctor, who serves as coroner for the county, striking up a conversation with the man he knows, in a way, the investigation starts directly on the man“s lawn as he now begins to tell his story. It all started with one of the neighbors putting his house on the market. Shortly thereafter, our protagonist Sid learns something he doesn“t like at all and right away he goes to see his direct neighbor Henry who, as it turns out, used to be his best friend. It is when Sid tells Henry that there is an offer for their neighbor“s house on the table, “from a negro family”“, that he is first astonished by his friend“s rather nonchalant reaction to the news of such dire prospect, that is until he equally nonchalant tells him something about himself: “My grandmother was a negro!”“ Sid is baffled and demands to know why Henry has kept this a secret from him: “I didn“t tell you because I didn“t think it was important, Sid!”“ Of course, this revelation does not sit well with Sid. The picture Sid subsequently paints for his blonde wife Ella is one of the most shocking kind: “With him living here and, Jed Martin thinking of selling his place to colored folks, the neighborhood“s gonna change! Our kids will be playin“ with colored kids.”“ This is when Sid gets angry. To his relief he learns that at least Jed Martin had some common sense. No way will he sell his house to a black family: “I wouldn“t do that to you and the rest of the folks!”“ That takes care of that, but he“s now aware that he“s living next to someone with “negro blood”“, and by extension, his entire family, including his wife and son, must have “negro blood.”“ Sid knows the solution. Henry and his family need to move away. This was when he started a campaign. Very soon, Henry is shunned by the other neighbors and the folks in town. The children in neighborhood don“t want to play with his son any longer as Sid observes. Sure enough, he also places an anonymous phone call to Henry“s boss. Henry loses his job, and when his wife falls ill and the bank will not give him the loan he needs for her treatment, he loses her as well. Naturally, Sid had warned the bank manager about who he really was. But still, Henry does not want to move. So, Sid put a cross into his garden and lit it on fire. This was when Henry could not take the harassment and abuse any longer. And Sid is fairly proud of how things turned out, even though he tells the coroner that he “never expected him to shoot himself.”“ It is then that the old doctor informs him that “There“s no such thing as negro blood. All human blood is the same.”“ Sid isn“t so sure. The doctor begins to recount a case he“d encountered around the time he“d started practicing in the country. A kid had been involved in an accident with a thresher which nearly took off one of his arms. With the huge loss of blood sustained, the boy was about to die unless he got a blood transfusion fast. Unfortunately, his parents had the wrong blood type and so had he. But then the mother called in George, “the farmer“s hired hand. He was a huge man”¦ strong and muscular. George was a negro”¦”“ His blood was the right type. With both parents asking, George didn“t hesitate. He gave willingly and freely, and he saved the boy“s life. And back in the present, the old doctor asked Sid to roll up his sleeves. After Sid had followed his request, the old doctor pointed at the long scar he“d had for twenty-seven years. “That“s the scar the threshing machine left on your arm, Sid.”“ A black man had saved Sid“s life as a boy, and by his reckoning, Sid now had this blood pumping through his veins. This was not the kind of past you wanted to think about or to return to in a summer blockbuster. In our past, Eric did not have it in his power to steer the production of “Back to the Future”“ into this direction, as he had in the past of some alternative universe. Stoltz was fired from the production after five weeks into the shoot. A deal could finally be reached with Gary David Goldberg who gave Zemeckis permission to work with Michael J. Fox once his shooting for the day was done on “Family Ties”“. With Fox, the film became a huge hit and remained the top film at the North American box office for eleven weeks. “Back to the Future”“ spawned two sequels and its impact on pop culture is still vital today. His trip to the past that had never existed except on television as rose-tinted nostalgia, paid off handsomely for the actor. He, Zemeckis and Bob Gale went on to have long, very successful careers. Eric Stoltz to a lesser degree.

 

Marty McFly“s DeLorean didn“t travel to a past either in which, according to Feldstein another archetype of male heroism had outlasted his meaning and usefulness. Even though they enjoyed a renaissance in the movies of those days and on television, once again, with a revisionist glimpse to a by-gone era, real cowboys had been reduced to working as hired hands on cattle ranches. Thus, nearly a year before the writer assigned “Squeeze Play”“ to Williamson to dismantle the working-class hero actor Marlon Brando had perfected on the silver screen and John Osborne would soon put in the center of his seminal drama “Look Back in Anger”“, Feldstein asked the artist to destroy the cowboy trope. What is ingenious about Feldstein“s story “Fired!”“ which first appeared in Crime SuspenStories No. 17 (1953) is that it anticipates movies by auteur filmmakers, such as John Schlesinger“s “Midnight Cowboy”“ (1969) and Paul Schrader“s “American Gigolo”“ (1980), the film that made Richard Gere a movie star. On its surface, “Fired!”“ is one of the most basic tales you will ever read. One party is the boss and has the say over what happens and what not, the other person is attractive. Sexual favors are traded for a better position and more money soon. The first person finds out that the other party is in it only for the financial benefits and that this person is unfaithful to the relationship that was nothing more than a monetary transaction in the very first place and seeks to destroy the subordinate as best and as cruelly as possible. But Feldstein not only subverts this basic plot by changing the gender roles, thereby giving the female the financial means, he makes her independent of a father figure or a husband, or both rolled into one, who would often figure into such tales. Feldstein had done variations on the “The Postman Always Rings Twice”“ tale more often than you could shake a stick at, and so had Johnny Craig for good measure. This time around he wanted to do something truly original. And with Williamson on pencils and him and Frank Frazetta on inks and Marie Severin on colors, he and the team hit that one out of the ballpark. There was yet another secret ingredient to what makes “Fired!”“ such an effective tale. When the strikingly handsome cowboy knocks on the door of the main house of the Circle Diamond ranch to hook up with owner Patricia Gibson, you half expected to find the lady to be another Norma Desmond, a woman several years past her prime as she was in Billy Wilder“s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Sure, Desmond, like actress Gloria Swanson, had been the most beautiful woman in the world, but when unsuccessful screenwriter Gillis lets Norma put some expensive suits on his back, food on his table and some change for services rendered on the nightstand, she is old and ugly. Patricia however, with Williamson“s linework, but predominately through Frazetta“s heavy inks, is one of the most beautiful women to have ever been featured in an EC Comic. Sure, most guys would fall in love with such a striking woman easily, who in the ranch hand“s assessment, is hungry for a man. And Roy has noticed that she isn“t just looking for a man, but when checking up on her work crew, she had checked him out especially. Sure, this could be the beginning of a torrid romance, but he is not interested in that. He wants to advance his position at the farm, and if he has to trade in some of his freedom for that, this is quite alright. Roy basically sells himself to Patricia, and that Feldstein places the story on a cattle ranch makes the story especially poignant. It is in a male dominated environment in which a tough cowboy, who is supposed to be a domineering alpha male, becomes a prostitute, and is even further reduced to a piece of meat. Clearly, Roy sees it a bit differently and so does Patricia who not unlike Cora becomes very possessive of Roy. But unlike Cora, she comes from money and she“s very much accustomed to buying cattle for breeding purposes. In her mind, she owns Roy. And very quickly, the other men on the ranch realize what is going on. Though he had asked Patricia to make him foreman of the ranch, he owns the title in name only. The other workmen do quite well understand how Roy got that sweet gig and they don“t muster any respect towards him. And when Roy starts to stray away from Patricia“s arms, because Roy has to reassert his manhood, his beautiful boss tries to put a leash around him. It is no coincidence that at this point in the story, both artists start to make the scarf he is wearing at all times look more like a collar. Still he strays, right into the arms of a rather ordinary singer at the local saloon with whom he strikes up an affair. Though Amy, who Roy calls “Miss”“ and not “Ma“am”“ like he does with Patricia at the outset, is not as beautiful as his boss, it is more important to Roy that she“s on a lower level socially than he. This means he can be fully in control of the situation. He has the power once again. And Amy is as free-spirited as he is. Just looking at the artwork, which is beautiful and highly suggestive at the same time with Patricia constantly wearing extremely tight sweaters, and Amy is first seen in a very low-cut, clingy dress and with fishnet stockings, all this had to have been rather confusing for any ten-year-old boy, especially during the morally repressed 1950s when every other form of visual media followed much tighter guidelines with the content they put forth. And while this most likely was not the type of story Williamson enjoyed doing, Frazetta went all in. Frank had done plenty of romance stories up to this point in his career His women were as curvaceous as the pin-up models of those days, and they all had a sultry look to their faces. This raw eroticism on display must have felt pretty shocking for adults as well, at least at the time when the story was first published. Even more shocking was what came at the end. In many other stories Al Feldstein wrote around this time, women were presented as transgressors, and in those tales those women usually found a very gruesome end. Shock SuspenStories No. 8 (1953), published right around the same time, featured not one, but two women who violated the norm. A beautiful woman, who murdered her husband with her lover, his younger, more handsome brother, was killed by shark (off panel). In “The Assault”“ an underage girl, who has been sleeping around with older men and who is indirectly responsible for the death of an old guy, gets shot in the face several times by one of her lovers. When in “Fired!”“ Patricia finds out that Roy has been two-timing her, clearly, she has reason to feel hurt and betrayed. After he breaks up with her, she lures him back into her house where Patricia lets him know how she feels about the situation: “You forgot our deal, Roy! I made you foreman, and you got what you wanted! You“re mine, Roy!”“ This is when she pulls a branding iron from her fireplace, the metal with the insignia of her cattle ranch glowing white-hot. “This says you“re mine! It“s my brand! The Circle-Diamond!”“ And with that, she goes right for Roy“s attractive face. The cowboy was not only put back on the leash. He now bore the very symbol of ownership of a powerful woman.

 

But what if you could go back and make everything alright again? What if you hated the times you found yourself in and you knew everything was better in the past, it simply had to have been? And with some minor adjustments your life in the present would be much better. If this does sound familiar, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein did indeed present their version of Doc Brown in “A New Beginning”“, a story originally published in the last issue of Weird Science, ironically, No. 22 (1953). Disgusted with the high-tech world they“re living in, a world in which even giving birth is handled by machines, a young woman and a young man hook up with an old professor who has invented a time machine. They can go back to the beginning of mankind and make things right this time. But in order to populate this past quicker, the professor is sure they“ll need the propagation equipment used in their society in which conception is achieved with mechanical incubators. But being the gray-haired inventor he is, he has built a miniaturized version. He sends the machine back to pre-historic times and before he sends the young people, he instructs them to take good care of the sensitive device since it needs constant monitoring and calibration. The woman is not so convinced of this approach and she convinces her mate that there is a better way. They don“t need the machine. In fact, they won“t need any equipment to make a fresh start of it. It“s only then that the names of the two protagonists are revealed. They are Adam and Eve. This was the kind of story that was perfectly suited for Al Williamson. It isn“t without irony, that this tale about time travel exists twice. Al Feldstein, always on the lookout for new talent, had just hired a new artist and he“d tasked him with inking this story. While Bernard Krigstein would go on to become a masterful illustrator, this was not a good match. Like Williamson himself had done with his first story for EC, the artist nearly drowned the delicate linework in India ink. When Al Williamson saw the results, he was furious. He quickly made last-minute arrangements for his friend Frazetta to re-ink the story from the photostats of his pencils. Frank once again pulled off a marvelous job. Under his brush, Eve received the same alluring look he gave all his female characters, but this time around he very obviously worked from photo references since she became a dead ringer for a young Elizabeth Taylor. For Adam, he only needed to look into his mirror. It is interesting that in some way both versions exist at the same time, and like with two parallel universes, there are several points of incursion. Frazetta didn“t manage to re-ink every panel and some of Bernie“s original inks remain in the story as published, with the effect being rather jarring, especially since Frank and Al“s mentor Roy Krenkel also pitched in. Though Frazetta“s involvement with EC remained limited, the artist created a cover which offered more than a brief glimpse into his future. The art was for Weird Science-Fantasy No. 29 (1955), and it powerfully depicts the confrontation between a blonde hero and a group of barbaric cavemen. To say that the kinetic energy the artwork exudes is visceral and dynamic is indeed one bold understatement. The cover is in the same vein as artist Angelo Torres“ only solo tale “An Eye for an Eye”“ which EC could not publish due to the restrictions of the new Comics Code. While Torres“ story would see print as late as 1995 when publisher Gemstone returned it to the issue Feldstein had intended it for, Incredible Science Fiction No. 33 (1956), Frazetta“s cover clearly hinted at something new, something that would not be possible in the changed world comics now found themselves in. He continued his work for Al Capp, a partnership he ended in 1961. He then briefly returned to comics, and later to comic magazines as these were not regulated by the Comics Code. When in 1966, Lancer Books began to reprint Robert E. Howard“s short stories centered around his most famous creation Conan the Barbarian, Frazetta did eight painted covers in total for the series of twelve paperbacks. In 2009, Frank offered one of these original paintings for sale at an auction. His work “Conan the Conqueror”“ changed hands for the incredible sum of one million dollars. During his long career, Frank became the top artist for fantasy. Wherever Frank“s barbarian heroes travelled, they needed no roads. And neither did Frank.

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.

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