The ironic twist, will be when I get every issue but #70.

Every comic show I get to, I keep an eye out for Twilight Zone #70, which features "The Tyranny of Time," an early story by José Luis García-López. It's great! But so far I've only found a number of other random TZ issues, like this one I wouldn't have thought of at all. From 1991, the Twilight Zone #1, "The Big Dry" Written by Bruce Jones, pencils by Eddy Newell, inks by John Stangeland. Cover by Mitch O'Connell.

 

This was the first issue of Now Comics second series of Twilight Zone, although the first series was only one issue: a Harlan Ellison story, with Neal Adams art and Bill Sienkiewicz cover! Shoot, why am I not reading that one right now? There's a checklist at the end of the issue, and Now was down to this, a couple Green Hornet titles, Married...with Children, and the Real Ghostbusters.

I read a batch of Bruce Jones horror comics a couple years ago for Halloween, and most of them were better than this one: a family on vacation breaks down in the desert, with a milquetoast husband, a promiscuous wife, and step-daughter who already kind of knows her mom's terrible. They find refuge in a farmhouse, but also find a couple dying of dehydration. Advanced dehydration: they seem to have had the juices sucked out of them. There's also an electromagnetic field affecting machinery, as a deputy finds them but gets stuck as well. The wife doesn't mind...

The deputy and the wife both get it shortly thereafter, from the creature; which the little girl has realized must have hibernated like a toad. She encourages her step-dad to get himself together and save them, and he manages to defeat the creature with a supply of quicklime from the basement. (I'm trying to think of a benign reason why you'd need quicklime in the desert?) They escape for a hopefully happier life going forward, even as another creature emerges from the desert sands. Feels like there should be a twist in there, somewhere.