Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Vault
Lines
Vault
22
The
Vault of Horror
22 (December 1951-January 1952) featured an Al Feldstein story with a plot
borrowed from Ray Bradbury and another in which Feldstein developed a tale from
his own premise. Interviewed by John Benson, Feldstein explained the origin of
“Gone…Fishing!”: “I got the idea for that while I was surfcasting. Living on
Long Island, one of my hobbies on the weekends was going out to Jones Beach or
Fire Island and surfcasting, early mornings, late evenings. And I got this idea
while I was surfcasting, and I came to Bill with it, and I said, ‘You always
bring springboards. I’ve got a springboard.’ And he said, ‘Go write it.’ And I
wrote it, and much later it was adapted into that short movie, which they did a
pretty good job on.”
The
film Feldstein mentioned is a French-produced short, The Fisherman, which he happened
to see at a Manhattan art theater in 1966. He called Bill Gaines and said,
“Hey, Bill, we’ve been ripped off.” Gaines contacted the producers and secured
both an on-screen credit (“adapted from EC Comics”) and copies of the film for
both himself and Feldstein. In 1972, this film was shown during the EC Comics
convention at New York’s Hotel McAlpin.
Bradbury’s
Dark Carnival
(Arkham House, 1947) exerted a powerful influence on Feldstein, who commented,
“Our plots came from a conglomeration of sources, movies we’d seen, books we’d
read. I wasn’t doing very much reading in those days. I was letting Bill give
us the springboards, so I would be free in my mind to enter into the more
original areas, if possible, because we weren’t really intending on stealing
stuff. We were looking just for inspiration to give us ideas to come up with
something original. My function was to kind of take the springboards with Bill
out into a new area… Not only borrowings in terms of plot, but borrowings in
terms of writing style. I was very impressed with Ray Bradbury. I read Dark
Carnival and
The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man and whatever else I
could get of Bradbury’s at the time. I was very impressed with his writing
style, and I tried to emulate it, I think, in the comic style. We didn’t
consciously steal from him, you know, but again, we might have been pretty
close.”
With a print run of 3,112 copies, Dark
Carnival
was Bradbury's first published book. It contained 27 stories, and 21 of those
were reprinted from Dime Mystery Magazine, Harper’s, Mademoiselle and Weird Tales. The six non-reprints
were “The Maiden”, “The Emissary”, “Jack-in-the-Box”, “Uncle Einar”, “The Night
Sets” and “The Next in Line”. Weird Tales was the major source, with 16 of the
stories from the pages of that magazine as published between 1943 and 1948.
Thus, the influence of Weird Tales on EC was considerable.
The
life of Bill Delaney (1892-1986), publisher of Weird Tales, Short Stories and World
Astrology,
parallels the history of popular fiction during the 20th Century. During the
years Delaney published Weird Tales (1938-54), with Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy
McIlwraith as his editors, the magazine printed six Bradbury stories which
later became memorable EC adaptations, illustrated by Jack Davis, George Evans,
Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen and Joe Orlando: "There Was an Old Woman" (Tales
from the Crypt
34 from the July 1944 issue of Weird Tales); "The Lake" (Vault of
Horror
31 from the May 1944 Weird Tales); "Let's Play Poison" (Vault 29 from Weird
Tales,
November 1946); "The Handler" (Crypt 36 from Weird
Tales,
January 1947); "The October Game" (Shock SuspenStories 9 from Weird
Tales,
March 1948); "The Black Ferris" (Haunt of Fear 18 from Weird
Tales,
May 1948).
During
the early 1950s, when the 279-issue continuous run of Weird Tales was winding down, a
glance at a newsstand revealed the magazine's strong influence on comic books.
In a 1980 paperback revival of Weird Tales, Lin Carter wrote, "I can think
of no other magazine in history which exerted quite the same sort of influence
which Weird Tales exerted
over the genre it shaped and perfected, and the authors who contributed to it
so devotedly over the years... And there can have been very few fiction
magazines in the history of publishing which have had as many of their stories
dramatized on radio, television and in the movies."
Fifteen of the 27 Dark Carnival stories were later
reprinted in The October Country (1955), some with revisions. Bradbury did
an extensive rewrite of "The Emissary" for The October Country. When Feldstein
wrote “What the Dog Dragged In!” he borrowed the premise of the Dark
Carnival
version, changing the central character of a boy to a young woman.
“The
Jellyfish!” in The Vault of Horror 19 was suggested by Bradbury’s
“Skeleton”. The idea for
“Skeleton” came to Bradbury when a “strangely sore larynx” prompted him to
visit his family doctor, who said, “That’s all perfectly normal. You’ve just
never bothered to feel the tissues, muscles, or tendons in your neck or, for
that matter, your body. Consider the medulla oblongata.” Recalling the incident,
Bradbury wrote, “Consider the medulla oblongata! Migawd, I could hardly
pronounce it! I went home feeling my bones—my kneecaps, my floating ribs, my
elbows, all those hidden Gothic symbols of darkness—and wrote “Skeleton”.” It
was published in the September1945 issue of Weird Tales and reprinted in Dark
Carnival.
--Bhob Stewart
Above: Joe Mugnaini illustration for "Skeleton".
¶ 4:34 PM Above: Joe Mugnaini illustration for "Skeleton".
