The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

Countless imitators; only one Far Side. It was to single-panel humor cartoons what Weird Tales was to pulp fiction and The Twilight Zone was to television: a new brainspace where anything goes. Drawing upon Charles Addams’s perfect sense of comic timing and his own encyclopedic knowledge of zoological trivia, GARY LARSON (1950– ) gave us fourteen years worth of unexpected conceptual reversals — and has been immortalized by the scientific establishment for his efforts. Just Google the word “thagomizer.”

The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

Like a brain surgeon who falls in love with the tumor, DAVID CRONENBERG (1943– ) sets out to explore the mind and winds up exploding some heads — sometimes those of his characters (Scanners), usually those of his viewers. Each film is a sci-fi psychology dissertation written in hallucinatory gore, where men transform into flies (The Fly), grow vagina-like maws in their belly (Videodrome), or fornicate with the leg-scars of car accident victims (Crash). Foul but fascinating, and never without a purpose.

What’s new: Cronenberg testified this week before Canada’s Senate, criticizing a proposed change in tax legislation that filmmakers fear could be used to stifle artistic expression.

The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

The first space alien rock star, DAVID BOWIE (1947– ) has at various times portrayed a dehydrated space traveler, the Goblin King, a vampire, the Elephant Man, a spooky clown, a blue-skinned religious zealot, and Nikola Tesla. He brought rock & roll rebel attitude and artistic credibility to movie roles and lyrical ideas (“Look out your window, I can see his light / If we can sparkle he may land tonight”) normally the province of geeks. He made weird cool.

The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

We’ve met a few poseurs in our day; ergo, we assert: the comic book writer-rockstar-mage thing only works if you’ve got the skills to pay the bills. Enter GRANT MORRISON (1960– ), who consistently transforms the surreal and non-linear into a crackling good story. Who else has the moxy to turn good old-fashioned superheroes like the X-Men and Justice League inside out, twisting their narrative structures until it’s as unsettling to read about them as it would be to live in the world alongside them? It’s tempting to ask “How does he do that?” — but we know that, as with the great magical texts, Morrison’s secrets are hidden in plain sight. He could tell us, but then he’d have to kill us.

What’s new: In addition to his ongoing gigs as writer of All-Star Superman and Batman, Morrison is at the helm of the giant DC Comics event Final Crisis, which begins the last week of May.

The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

Next time you see one of Gregory Maguire’s reworked faerie-tale novels on the shelves, take a moment to thank his predecessor, ANGELA CARTER (1940–1992). The English author spent the ’60s and ’70s ripping apart old-fashioned concepts of fantasy and myth and putting them back together in stranger, more modern shapes, from the short-story collection The Bloody Chamber to the novel The Magic Toyshop to the werewolf movie The Company of Wolves.

The fiction-review site The Fix raves over our anniversary issue: “Weird Tales #349 is an almost perfect issue. I’d say ‘you can’t get much better than this,’ but Weird Tales has been steadily raising the bar. It’s excellent and getting even better.” And hey, they really liked #348 too!

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

Skulls and curlicues collide in rickety Victorian mansions while pale outsider heroes encounter terrible yet cuddly beasties. Mired in death but bathed in amusement, the films of TIM BURTON (1958– ) transform a singular gothic vision into something universal. While quite a few folks make strange movies, what sets him apart is that he makes strange blockbusters, from Beetlejuice to Batman to Edward Scissorhands. Sure, there’s some Edward Gorey in there, but admit it, there’s some Spielberg, too.

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

As editor of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds through the second half of the 1960s, MICHAEL MOORCOCK (1939– ) shepherded in a younger, weirder generation of authors more interested in straddling, crossing, and breaking literary boundaries than in defining them. And as creator of the dark, moody epic fantasy anti-hero Elric of Melniboné, Moorcock offered the new wave of readers a brooding, angst-ridden — dare we say emo? — mage-warrior-king whose fallibilities they could identify with.

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

CLARK ASHTON SMITH (1893-1961) was the only one of his contemporaries that H.P. Lovecraft regarded with awe, writing: “In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, [he] is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living.” In the space of five years, Smith gifted the world with just over one hundred ultra-imaginative tales of “inconceivable fear and unimaginable love.” (And that’s not counting all the poems!) He managed to depict cosmic outsideness tinged with human fraility. » Read the whole story…

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

When SALVADOR DALI (1904–1989) expressed his support for Spanish dictator Francesco Franco, the other surrealist artists expelled him from their group. Dali’s response: “I myself am surrealism.” He had a point. From his paintings (melting pocketwatches) to his filmmaking (ants in the hole in my hand) to his theatrical public quirks (stole Velazquez’s mustache), Dali may have defined weirdness for the 20th century more than any other single figure. Plus, “Visage of War” would have made an incredible Weird Tales cover.