Essential Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

This isn't comics related, but I found it interesting and wanted to share. The British newspaper The Guardian has composed a list of the 1000 novels you must read, and of those 131 fall into the categories of fantasy, science fiction, and horror (including ghost stories). You can view the lists on The Guardian's website, along with the editors' commentaries, by clicking the link above. It strikes me that most of the titles on the sci fi/fantasy/horror list are pretty clear cut though not completely inarguable. (Is Stranger in a Strange Land really the best Heinlein? I'd opt for Citizen of the Galaxy instead.) A few entries (Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race, for instance) strike me as either not all that essential or, at any rate, more like homework than pleasurable reading. I tried and failed to read that one. But best of all, there are several titles here I've never heard of (Pig Tales?, Institute Benjamenta?); and as a lifelong reader of these genres that intrigues me.

Here's the list in alphabetical order by authors' last names:

1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
5. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
6. JG Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
7. JG Ballard: Crash (1973)
8. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
9. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
10. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
11. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
12. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
13. Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)
14. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
15. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
16. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
17. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
18. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
19. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
20. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
21. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
22. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
23. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
24. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
25. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
26. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
27. Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
28. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
29. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
30. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
31. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)
32. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
33. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
34. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
35. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
36. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
37. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
38. Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
39. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
40. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
41. Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
42. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
43. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
44. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
45. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
46. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
47. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
48. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
49. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
50. M John Harrison: Light (2002)
51. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
52. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
53. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
54. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
55. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
56. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
57. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
58. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
59. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
60. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
61. PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
62. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
63. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
64. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
65. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
66. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
67. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
68. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
69. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
70. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
71. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
72. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
73. C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
74. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
75. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
76. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
77. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
78. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
79. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
80. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
81. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
82. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
83. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
84. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
85. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
86. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
87. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
88. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
89. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
90. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)
91. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
92. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
93. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
94. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
95. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
96. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
97. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
98. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
99. Terry Pratchett: The Discworld Series (1983- )
100. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
101. Phillip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
102. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
103. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
104. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
105. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
106. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
107. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
108. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
109. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
110. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
111. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
112. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
113. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
114. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
115. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
116. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
117. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
118. JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
119. JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
120. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
121. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
122. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
123. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
124. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
125. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
126. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
127. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
128. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
129. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
130. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
131. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

There are certainly some missing titles I believe should have made the list. More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon and A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin leap immediately to mind. Others?

Rand Holmes: In the Footsteps of Wood

Canadian underground cartoonist Rand Holmes was sixty years old when he died in 2002. Holmes taught himself to draw by studying the work of the classic comic books artists Wally Wood and Will Eisner. The influence of Wood on Holmes' style is especially apparent.


The stories he wrote and drew revolved around the standard subject matter for the undergrounds--chasing after and getting high on drugs. His style and pacing, however, were more reminiscent of the action strips of the 1940s and 1950s than of the typically looser, more cartoony underground artists like Gilbert Sheldon and Robert Crumb. This is especially true in book-length stories such as "Hitler's Cocaine" and "Wings Over Tijuana," which followed the high-flying adventures of his iconic protagonist Harold Hedd.

A hippie to the very end, in later years Holmes moved to Lasqueti Island (pop. 350) near Vancouver and dedicated himself to oil painting. Some examples of his later work can be seen at the infinicrow LiveJournal blog. The artist's self-portrait from Fog City Comics (No. 2) is below.

Bob Powell: The Real Plastic Man

If you've read Will Eisner's The Dreamers, you've encountered Bob Powell in the guise of Bo Bowers. He's the guy who annoyed Gar Tooth (George Tuska) so much Gar finally punched him. The story is supposedly based on a true-life incident, Powell allegedly being the sort of person who liked to get under people's skin. His real name was Stanislav Robert Pawlowski (I've seen it spelled other ways), but like so many immigrants of the time, he changed it to sound more American.

In the 1930s, Powell worked for the Eisner & Iger Studio, drawing the beautifully rendered Mr. Mystic strip for The Spirit Section. Always ambitious to make more money, after the war Powell would form his own studio. He contributed notable work to Black Cat, The Shadow, and The Man in Black Called Fate, among other comics of the time. Some of his best work would be for the horror comics of the 1940s. By the end of the 1950s, the comics industry was undergoing hard times and Powell had to let go most of his crew. He did some work for Marvel during their resurgence in the mid 1960s, but it was largely uninspired. At his best, though--in his heyday--he rendered characters in an unmistakable, elastic style that made them seem to want to burst out of the panels. His story ideas and panel designs were often experimental and unique.

The recent hardcover collection Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969 includes what is probably Powell's best-known masterpiece, Colorama, in which he made clever use of the four-color printing process to tell the story of a man losing his sight. The following story, which he drew for Worlds Beyond (Fawcett, 1951), is just as interesting visually. In "Twice Alive," Mitchell Ames goes on a journey through his own body, where he and the voiceless shades of his ancestors are surrounded by swirling shapes--veins, organs, tissues--and even what appears to be the inside of an eyeball! Agh!!!

Postscript: Shortly after scanning "Twice Alive" and writing the above I made one of my weekly trips to the local comic shop and discovered not one but two new magazines with features on Bob Powell. The Comics Journal (No. 290) includes a biographical article by Michael T. Gilbert, as well as reprints of "Colorama," "Twice Alive," "The Wall of Flesh," Walking Dead," and "The Vampires from Venus." All worth seeing! (Thanks, Michael, for reminding me that Powell's style was often reminiscent of pulp artist Ed Cartier's work.) And Craig Yoe's Comic Arf contains reproductions of Powell's original art for "Pit of the Damned," which appeared in Chamber of Chills (No. 7). Man, Powell is in the air!

Hey! It's just like Neo in that scene from The Matrix!

John Carter of Mars Drawn by Jesse Marsh

Recently I was reading a back issue of Comic Art Annual and came across an article by comic historian Ron Goulart titled "Jesse Marsh: A History of His Work in Comics." The article opens with these statements:

"Virtually unknown and unsung during his relatively short lifetime, Jesse Marsh remains today, forty years after his death, one of the least-recognized of the major 20th-century comic book artists. A giftedly inventive cartoonist, he turned out over a hundred and fifty issues of the Tarzan comic book from the late 1940s until the middle 1960s."

Marsh spent his career at Western Printing and drew many other comics in addition to his long run on Tarzan. I grew up in what is now called the Silver Age of comics and was an avid reader of everything from Classics Illustrated to superhero comics. I certainly didn't hesitate to pick up Dell and later Gold Key comics, which were products of the Western Publishing Company (Dell parted company with Western in 1962); but, with few exceptions, I regarded the art on those books as inferior to the comics produced by DC, Marvel, and even the now-forgotten American Comics Group (ACG).

Reading Goulart's article on Marsh, who, admittedly, I had never heard of, my initial reaction was to think that Marsh's stuff didn't look so great. It seemed to me typical of the style of those Western artists who never really impressed me as a kid.

But the more I looked at the examples, the more I began to see what set it apart. Marsh's style is reminiscent of newspaper cartoonists in the tradition of Roy Crane, Noel Sickles, and Milton Caniff. It also evokes his fellow Western artist of the time, Alex Toth, whose style, in turn, clearly influenced Hellboy artist Mike Mignola among others. One can also see in his work a strong likeness to the French comic artist Hugo Pratt who drew Corto Maltese. Marsh was a master of the tricky art of giving his images weight and contrast with liberal strokes of solid black ink. The elegant simplicity of his line was often hidden by the crappy printing quality that was par for the course in those days. Perhaps we'll get lucky and Dark Horse will issue quality reprints of his Tarzan comics one day.

Unfortunately, I don't own any of Jesse Marsh's Tarzan comics, but I do have a couple of old Gold Key reprint issues of John Carter of Mars. Below are scans of some pages that will give you a taste of his work. (You can double-click the images to enlarge them.) I'm not quite prepared to join Goulart in calling Marsh one of the "major 20th-century comic book artists," but I am grateful to him for bringing this artist's work to my attention.


Here is the splash page to a story called "Tyrant of the North" (No. 2, July 1964). I liked Marsh's opening panel so much, with its sleek yacht skimming above the Martian landscape, I adapted it to the header of my blog.


I love the geometric simplicity of this surreal Martian landscape.


In Marsh's work, the architecture of Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom took on a distinct late 1950s to early 1960s design aesthetic.

Forget the Pre-Raphaelite Dejah Thoris of J. Allen St. John or the savage beauty imagined by Frank Frazetta. Marsh's Martian princess favored a sort of double-bun hair style.

Burrough's John Carter arrived on Mars naked and pretty much remained that way until he stripped the armor from a Thark warrior he killed and made it his own. Marsh's John Carter, by contrast, wore a more dashing set of duds. The ladies liked to wear their hair in buns.


The fearsome warrior Tars Tarkas became, in Marsh's hands, a more kid-friendly giant frog with tusks.

FIAWOL: "Battle of Spaceman's Gulch," from Space Western Comics No. 43

After World War II, superhero comics declined in popularity. Looking for the next big thing, comic book publishers flooded the market with every conceivable genre, including jungle adventure, romance, crime, war, horror, science fiction, westerns, and on and on. By the 1950s it must have seemed as if everything had been tried, so why not start combining the more popular genres? Say, for instance, science fiction and westerns…

Who knows? Perhaps those really were the thought processes that went on at Capitol Comics, later known as Charlton, when they created the inimitable Space Western Comics. Sadly, only seven issues were published before the title folded. Apparently, the world wasn't ready for Spurs Jackson and the goings on at his Spaceranch in Spaceman's Gulch. "On every trip to another planet," we are told, "Spurs Jackson brings back some creature which can thrive on earth..." No matter how exotic the alien beast, it was quickly put to work digging in the mines or hauling supplies. Alien critters had to earn their keep just like everybody else on the Spaceranch!

In this story from the April 1953 issue, we learned that Spurs and several several of the ranch hands were knowledgeable science fiction fans, or, make that "fen." Perhaps they enjoyed filksinging around the campfire at night. (Not Hank, though! He seemed pretty fed up with the business.) No doubt the boys were headed on over to an early ArmadilloCon in Austin.

You can double-click on the pages below to enlarge them.













Hey, wipe that sneer off your face, Hank! What fun would a science fiction convention be without spray cans full of insecticide!?!

Basil Wolverton's "The Brain-Bats of Venus"

"The Brain-Bats of Venus" first appeared in Mister Mystery # 7 (1952). The pages scanned for the reproductions below appeared in the reprint comic Mister Monster’s Weird Tales of the Future (July 1987). (You can double-click the images to view them at a larger size.)

In the 1980s, my friend comic book artist Michael T. Gilbert produced a number of reprint volumes for Eclipse Comics under the series title Mr. Monster’s Super Duper Special. For Michael, these projects really were a labor of love. I’ve never met anyone who was a greater aficionado of comic book art past and present, or anyone more dedicated to seeking out forgotten gems and unheralded masters of the form.

Unlike many editors, for publishing companies both large and small, Michael was not content to throw together a sloppily produced product that displayed an old masterpiece of comic art in a bad light. Instead, he went several extra miles to ensure that the artist’s lines were clear, the colors bright, and the paper top quality. I know because I helped him with a lot of the grunt work. The stories he reprinted were often taken from old comics published by long-defunct companies for which original inked pages were nowhere to be found.

In those days, before the use of computers became common, we made high-contrast photos of the old comic book pages and painstakingly applied solvents to remove the “artifacts” caused by the original color. Getting a single page ready to send to the new colorist often took hours of close work.

And in this case… what a colorist! Steve Oliff and his company Olyoptics revolutionized the comics industry with computer-based coloring starting with the English-language publication of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988). The pages you see here, however, were colored with plain old markers, and Basil Wolverton's work never looked better.

Basil Wolverton's "The Man from the Moon"

"The Man from the Moon" first appeared in Weird Tales of the Future #5 (1953). The pages you see here were scanned from the Eclipse Comics reprint Mr. Monster's Weird Tales of the Future, July 1987. (You can double-click the images to view them at a larger size.)

This remarkable science fiction tale is one of Wolverton's finest. It begins with the protagonist, Pete Warren, being abducted by green, bug-eyed aliens from the moon. But these are not the stereotypical malevolent monsters of pulp fiction and 1950s sci-fi horror movies. Instead, they are scientists on a mission of exploration. They take Pete back to the moon, where he lives among them--peacefully and happily--for many years. In fact, the lunarites replace his human body with a mechanical one that both protects him from the harsh lunar environment and allows him to outlive many generations of moon men.

Evenually, they are able to return him to earth, at the cost of the lives of their pilots, where he plans to remain with his own kind. But he finds that in the intervening century and a half humans have destroyed their world, his world. With nothing left for him on earth, he turns the spaceship around and heads back to the moon to live forever among the lunarites. The slight twist at the end is reminiscent of the style of story Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein were famous for, but I would argue that Wolverton here achieves a more affecting pathos than was true for the typical EC "shock" ending.

Wolverton's art is often described as "ugly"by those who haven't studied it closely. Indeed, in a later stage of his career, he specialized in drawing grotesque caricatures. As you can see in the second panel on page one below, however, he was quite capable of drawing standard-looking characters of the type you might see in any comics story. In fact, he could do it better than most of the comic artists of his era despite the fact that he never had any formal art training.

In an interview in Comic Book Marketplace #18 (October 1992), Wolverton explained: "My style, if it is a style, developed like one's handwriting, which can sometimes be unintelligible to others. I was never conscious of trying to whomp up a style even mildly different until the late forties. Possibly it was a case of trying to keep my work from not [sic] looking like that of others, even though theirs was superior." Wolverton was alway modest about his work, but his style influenced many who came later, including, notably, Robert Crumb; and his work is still highly sought after by collectors.