Customer Reviews

EC Archives: Weird Science Volume 2 (v. 2)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

First of all, the book is not flawed in any physical way. The printing is great, the binding is great, and the color is great.

What's flawed are some of the stories. But the flaws are fascinating! For instance, in a story about going to the moon written the decade before it actually happened, we have a man, in a space suit, granted, falling back to earth through space and merely floating to the ground with a parachute. Nevermind the whole tendency to catch on fire when entering the earth's atmosphere at several hundred miles an hour.

Fabulous! I mean it. Far from being a negative thing, such a flaw really points up the refusal of writers like Feldstein to let ignorance get in the way of a good story. It's great to see him stretch a plot to make way for an effect, too. Like introducing a character called "peach pit" (because he likes to suck on peach pits of course) in order to allow for an alien seed to get into his body to be "born" in a way that anticipates Alien, once again, by decades. You would think the government would be pretty careful with such life-threatening cosmic nuts, wouldn't you? Well, I won't spoil the ending. Hilarious!

Even the flaws reveal Feldstein's wonderfully playful talent for either making up altogether or finding stories like these and adapting them to comics. He was so unafraid! For instance, what do you do with a multi-dimensional creature that appears only partially as a floating blob in the air? You theorize about it a bit before harpooning the thing and tying it to a couple of trees with some good, stout rope, that's what you do! And why? To destroy it of course. After all, it's already made the neighbor's cow go poof! That's humanity in a nutshell.

These comics are a monument to the power of the imagination to do the best it can with whatever it has to work with in order to have a little fun (or to defend the planet, presumably . . . without all the red tape). Even the flaws are fantastic!

I have absolutely loved all the titles in the EC Archives and am so disappointed that the publisher has evidently ceased publication. Missed release dates and no word on future releases tells me that this incredibly fabulous series of EC reprints is coming to a close. I also like the 8 1/2"x 11" size of them; they're bigger than the DC comics archival reprints. If you're a fan of these great '50s comics, you can't go wrong with any of the books in this series. The colors are bright, crisp, and the paper is extremely high-quality.

Although I personally find this series of the EC Archives less engrossing overall than the others (VAULT OF HORROR, SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES, TALES FROM THE CRYPT), it is still fun to read. It's too bad that the EC Archives appear to be going the way of the rare collectible; perhaps not perfect, perhaps formulaic...they, nonetheless, have a charm of their own.

WEIRD SCIENCE presents six artwork packed issues per volume, beautifully colored, and masterfully drawn. At the end of each issue, there is an essay sharing background information on the artists or on that particular issue. The science may seem "primitive" to our more "advanced" eyes, but it doesn't matter. It's that famous EC surprise ending we all wait for...and sometimes guess in advance. The stories themselves have no shortage of handsome leading men and curvaceous females, not to mention a plethora of aliens. The Letters pages are a bit difficult to read because of the small text and italics originally used but still entertaining.

The men and women of EC were definitely dedicated to their art and the respect they always demonstrated for their audience through their stories makes this series worthy of your archives collection.

This book like the rest of the EC collections Gemstone Publishing has put out is done very well. The printing and binding are of a very high quality.

Now for the stories, you need to remember that these stories were first published in the early 1950's. You need to read them as entertainment and not pick the stories apart for the lack of modern science behind them.

If it were not for the Gemstone collections, you would need to pay hundreds it not thousands of dollars to be able to read these stories.

I really loved Volume 1 but Volume 2 is very disappointing. Simple and silly Ideas stretched out on 6 to 8 pages. It was very boring to read and I had to force myself to continue to read. Absolutely no twist endings and there is nothing new even for the fifties beside the on story in which a Man gets pregnant by eating a nut from space and undergoes an operation and gave birth to an octopus monster which will be killed by TNT.
I would recommend to buy Shock Suspenstories Volume 2. There are 6 science fiction stories out of 24 stories and each story contains more ideas and suspense than the whole Weird Science Volume 2. And the art is also much better in Shock Suspenstories.

In general, the EC WEIRD SCIENCE stories are excellently rendered, with mediocre writing by Al Feldstein. Feldstein essentially recycles tried and true plots with "twist" endings that stop being a surprise when you come to expect a twist. Things don't end well in EC comics, so it becomes formulaic. The Comics Code Authority, influenced by Werther inspired furor, reacted against this notion, and demanded a different formula, one where all's well that ends well - both formulas are equally predictable and contrived.

The art, of course, is spectacular. Not only did EC hire top artists, Gaines paid them top dollar. Comic artists got paid by the page. EC's rates allowed artists to spend more time on each page, since it gave them a higher monetary yield. Simple economics - when these artists were getting paid half the rate to work for other companies, they simply had to put out twice as much work to make the same amount of money, so they couldn't spend the same amount of time on it.

In this volume there are several excellently drawn stories by Wally Wood, and Joe Orlando, and a few by Jack Kamen. Orlando had just been hired by EC, and was determined to make an impression, his work stands out in this collection. There is one Harvey Kurtzman comic (the best written story in the volume of course). There are a couple stories by George Roussos, and one by Feldstein.

Unfortunately, the computer coloring does not jibe with the old comic illustrating techniques. These guys were not expecting a colorist to fill in background detail for them, nor were they expecting colorists to try to mold depth into faces, bodies, or folds of clothing. The artists created depth with rendering. The modern coloring creates strange patterns. Faces just look odd, and folds in clothing look like random patterns due darkened shades of computer colors over rendered inks.

Comic Artist Frank Thorne said of computer coloring "...it's too gaudy and slick. The technicians try to model the form, but it seldom is convincing." I have to agree. Whether or not they are following Marie Severin's color scheme doesn't matter, the new techniques don't really accomplish what they set out to do on modern comics, and they just get in the way on these masterpieces of rendering.