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.
1 comment:
I'm at a loss as to what the moral of the story is here. Make sure you have quicklime handy? Seriously though, the main appeal of Twilight Zone was the morality tales & social commentaries wrapped up in a nice sugar coated Sci-Fi shell. This just seemed like a typical bad Bruce Jones horror story...which it is. But hey, nice Eddy Newell art though, so it's not a complete loss.
If you ever feel like blogging that Ellison TZ story sometime, feel MORE than free to do that.
Post a Comment