Buy ultra tramadol

by Stephen H. Segal

Weird Tales might be the world’s oldest speculative-fiction magazine, but here on the inside we feel like the youngest. We spent 2008, our 85th anniversary year, trying our damnedest to act as an ambassador for SF literature, reaching out to engage readers all across the diverse sub-circles of the modern geekosphere.

For starters, there was our big initiative to name “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” Our public call for input received more correspondence than any other project in the twenty years since Weird Tales’s resurrection — and in the end, our readers and writers delivered an unprecedented portrait of the modern imagination, detailing the web of bizarre ideas and aesthetics that linked Philip K. Dick to Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson to Madeleine L’Engle, and H.P. Lovecraft to Frida Kahlo to that German guy who founded the “Body Worlds” exhibit. We first “published” the 85 Weirdest story on 85 bright blue pages emblazoned across the walls of our anniversary suite party at Norwescon, where guests wandered from corner to corner reading the write-ups, drinking their Unrepentant Harlequins and Headless Thompson Gunners, and pausing to laugh when they saw Jim Henson linking David Bowie and Neil Gaiman on the headboard in the master bedroom.

Aside from those pages on the wall, an awful lot happened on the pages inside the magazine in 2008. We devoted a regular space to publishing chapter excerpts showcasing all sorts of SF-related books and publishers, from Stephen Hunt’s alt-Victorian adventure The Court of the Air to Ekaterina Sedia’s tragic fantasy The Alchemy of Stone to an amazing essay on resurrecting gholas from the BenBella anthology The Science of Dune. We published deep, provocative interviews with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, urban fantasy phenom China Miéville, and legendary animated filmmaker Bill Plympton, among others. We hired popular blogger Amanda Gannon (that’s Naamah-Darling to you LiveJournallers) as Weird Tales’s first-ever arts & culture editor; in her new department, “The Bazaar,” she’s begun spotlighting weird fantasy-inspired artisans ranging from the steampunk taxidermist Jessica Joslin to the mythic maskmaker Andrea Harris. We sought out unique, world-quality creative nonfiction for our “Weirdism” department, and we launched Ira Marcks’ indescribably odd pseudo-comics series “Harvey Pelican & Co.”

Of course, the heart and soul of Weird Tales remains the tales themselves, and 2008 was quite a year for our stories. Fiction editor Ann VanderMeer could have sat back and enjoyed the accolades for acquiring an all-new Elric novella by Michael Moorcock, an original sword-and-sorcery battle by Norman Spinrad, an unforgettable dark-superhero story by Tim Pratt, the return to short fiction of Kathe Koja, two brilliantly disparate pieces by O. Henry Award winner Karen Heuler (a comedy with fish and an allegory with beetles), and an all-international issue with stories from Serbia, Spain, Israel, Singapore, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and the Philippines. But instead, Ann delighted in introducing readers to an onslaught of newer writers who are sure to become some of tomorrow’s superstars. We saw the likes of Ramsey Shehadeh’s post-apocalypic fable “Creature”; Chris Furst’s twisted history “The Last Great Clown Hunt”; Micaela Morrissette’s culinary hallucination “Wendigo”; Chiles Samaniego’s jazz-club folktale “Time and the Orpheus”; Rachel Swirsky’s passionate dream-scene “Detours on the Way to Nothing”; and Matthew Pridham’s stunning first sale “Renovations,” a haunted-house novelette told in the first person by the house itself.

All these stories had to be illustrated, naturally, and Weird Tales was thrilled to introduce a wave of fantastic young artists to the American SF scene in 2008. Issue #348 gave us the unsettlingly seductive fish-women of Finnish artist Saara Salmi, while #350’s straightjacketed jester marked the cover debut of Jason “Stuntkid” Levesque. Our anniversary issue saw two memorably unique interpretations of Elric of Melniboné: the raw, punk-rock cover painting by graphic designer Newel Anderson, and the elegant black-and-white linework of up-and-coming comic-book costume designer Ming Doyle. Classically inspired dark-fantasy illustrators Daniele Serra and Vance Kelly offered up lush, horrific phantasmagoria, while edgy pen-mistresses Star St. Germain and Molly Crabapple gave us werewolves in sun-dresses and rock stars in goblin suits. Meanwhile, online at WeirdTalesMagazine.com, we dove headfirst into what we’re pretty sure is SF publishing’s very first year-long, single-artist daily painting series: “365 Days of Blasphemous Horrors,” mixed-media artist Steven Archer’s quest to create an original Lovecraftian work every day from one Balticon to the next.

Speaking of our website, WeirdTalesMagazine.com was also the home of 2008’s big Spam Fiction Contest, in which we invited all comers to write 500-word flash fictions inspired by the spam headlines in their email inboxes. It was a tough contest to judge: the broad, populist nature of the competition meant that it perpetuated through the blogosphere fast and furious, pinging some mainstream news outlets along the way, and in a single week we received some 175 entries from around the world, fueled by spam titles ranging from the innocuous “Angelina Jolie splits from Brad Pitt” to the ineffable “Parsimonious Wang.” But first-place winner Richard Howard of Dublin did it with panache, celebrating the success of his piece “Let Yourself Look Spiny” by turning right around and selling us another, full-length story to appear in a future print issue.

Other online initiatives in 2008 included the first installment of our all-new YouTube series, “One-Minute Weird Tales” — a new format for flash-fiction delivery that you’ll be seeing a lot more of soon — and the move to begin publishing inexpensive e-book editions of every new issue at Sony’s eBook Store.

Weird Tales also cultivated a presence in the theatrical world in 2008, officially sponsoring several original works of stagecraft. In Chicago, we sent columnist Kenneth Hite to Wildclaw Theatre’s opening-night gala to introduce their new adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House. During the Toronto Fringe Festival we showcased the Bradbury-inspired drama “Without Whom,” and at Dragon*Con we gave free magazines and books to the ballroom full of kids participating in the live-action roleplaying narrative “Echoes of Devil’s Reef.” Oh, and while it may not exactly be dignified theatre, the Arizona Comic Con’s inaugural Miss Zombie Beauty Pageant certainly was a memorable live performance, and the winning undead princess took home a specially commissioned, one-of-a-kind edition of Weird Tales stories titled “Zombie Love,” lovingly and dementedly hand-crafted by book artist Patricia Lee.

Last but most certainly not least, we got out there to all sorts of events on our 85th Anniversary Tour and we met you. A fantastic celebration at Norwescon featuring contributing authors Jay Lake, Lisa Mantchev, Ken Scholes, and Cat Rambo. A full Weird Tales panel at the huge New York Comic Con. A VanderMeerian duo at I-Con with Norman Spinrad joining the fun. A Weird Tales lecture at the Library of Congress, starring editor emeritus George Scithers. A weekend full of spectacular fan interaction at Dragon*Con, ranging from the multimedia Weird Tales presentation to artist Steven Archer’s performance with his rock band Ego Likeness to my own turn on the overflowingly packed steampunk panel. An overseas trip to Prague, where Ann was a special guest at the Parcon festival. A standing-room-only Weird Tales group reading at New York’s infamous KGB Bar, featuring the inimitable Jeffrey Ford. And an incredible Worldcon in Denver, where WT contributor Carrie Vaughn headlined a Weird Tales reception full of great art, stimulating conversation, and lycanthrope-inspired Moon Pies.

Readers, writers, artists, friends — we thank you all for making 2008 the most exciting anniversary celebration Weird Tales has had since its 65th in 1988, when it returned from the dead. If you’ll forgive me for badly mixing my SF metaphors, we think this is one techno-magically revivified zombie beast of a magazine that’s still got a whole ‘nother cycle of regenerations left to go.

* * *

Stephen H. Segal is the editorial & creative director of Weird Tales.

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 4 of 10.)

Season of Mists is widely considered one of the best Sandman arcs, if not the best, and for good reason. I remember loving the heck out of this one first time around, and sure enough I loved it all over again.

Neil Gaiman manages to take eight issues that are, when you boil it down, mostly talk — and spins something engrossing out of it. Plenty of drama, intrigue and trickery; not only important for the overall saga, but just plain making for a gripping tale. Season of Mists was a chance for the author to flex his mythology muscles, playing with characters from a variety of cultures and seeing if they fit. The intrigue here comes not from the stunning events unfolding in Hell — events that would lead to a spinoff series featuring the Gaiman version of Lucifer — but from the interaction between mythic beings from differing pantheons.

They all want something from Dream, you see. They want the keys to Hell, which Lucifer has abandoned, and Morpheus has got to give them to somebody. And while these gods and demigods from around the world will beg, borrow, cheat, lie and steal to get their prize, the core of the story is really the audience Dream gives them all. Their machinations are secondary to Dream’s reactions to them — and from this perspective, we realize that while Season of Mists is a very, very key event in the overarching Sandman saga, it’s perhaps even more importantly the deepest examination of the Morpheus character to date.

It all begins with a family meeting: the first issue of this story and one of the single best Sandman issues overall. Gaiman’s Endless are a superb mix of deviousness and otherworldliness and the typical squabbling of human families we all know and love. What makes these personifications of concepts like Desire, Despair and Death so powerful aren’t the concepts themselves, but the very relatable personalities behind each one: Destruction the black sheep, Desire the attention whore — even Delirium, a loopy LSD victim of sorts, has an endearing little-sister quality. This family interaction is the heart and soul of Sandman. It’s also what kicks off Season of Mists.

This volume’s title refers to the time during which Hell is empty, a time when restless spirits descend upon the world and the dead seem to live again in their ghostly way. We get an inside glimpse at this in Chapter 4, a fine story though a needless distraction from the arc: Chapter 3 leaves off with Dream welcoming the aforementioned host of divine supplicants to his realm, and then abruptly we get this interlude about a student stuck at boarding school while dead students repopulate it. It’s a poignant little vignette, but its timing is maddening.

But otherwise, what’s not to like? Morpheus isn’t the most likeable chap in the world, yet the reader can’t help but he drawn to him. He’s rather curt, the sort who tells it like it is without much emotion. (Unless his pride is hurt… but that’s another discussion.) He suffers neither fools nor politics. That’s why seeing him deal with the likes of a decidedly less grand Odin, a falsely humble representative of an Asian deity, a horrible demon in the guise of an adorable little girl, and many others is so — well, endearing. Sure, Dream is kind of a cold and distant bastard, but he’s just the sort you want to see these manipulative folks facing. In other stories they would play their victims like fiddles. Not here. Dream does not get played.

Not by these people, at least.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of Season of Mists. Lucifer bails out on Hell, leaves Dream to make the decision on what to do with it, and Dream spends a load of pages listening to entities make their pitch. And it’s fantastic.

Sandman might be at its best in shorter stories and one-shot tales, but among the longer arcs Season of Mists stands out as one of the very best: a fascinating dose of political drama that could — amazingly, given that it’s fourth in a ten-book saga — be read on its own and still be eminently satisfying. Wonderful stuff.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 3 of 10.)

You wouldn’t think a collection of one-off stories would be where Neil Gaiman finds his voice, but that is exactly the case. Dream Country, the third collection of his acclaimed Sandman, is made up of four one-shot stories. Each is different from the last. And each one is excellent.

The real treat here, however, is that this collection pushed Sandman out from its light-horror/dark-fantasy origins and finally showed the world what the series was capable of being. Which is to say, it can be almost anything.

I think that was Gaiman’s idea. The very concept of who and what Dream is was in part to allow him to do a wide variety of stories; whatever suited his fancy at any given time, he could go there. We’re not limited to tales about serial killers and demons. Time nor place nor tone is an obstacle. Sandman can be ANYTHING, and at times it is.

Part of what makes the series special, this.

The first story here is “Calliope,” a tale in which the muse of the same name is kept captive for a greedy, selfish writer. This is probably the weakest of the bunch. That’s no insult, though, as Gaiman manages to blend mythology and horrid people and a satisfying ending. Still, it’s rather mundane, all things considered, with nothing that screams “SANDMAN!” A “careful what you wish for, you just might get it” tale and little more. This could have been a John Constantine story or a Swamp Thing story and you’d not bat an eye. Oh, there is a dream sequence, sure, but it’s not essential.

Of course, as with all things Sandman, seeds are planted here that will bear fruit later. Dream has a son? How interesting …

It’s followed by the wonderful “A Dream of a Thousand Cats,” in which cats ponder ruling the world (and, as in many stories, we see yet another aspect of Morpheus). The art is perfect for the story, a sort of twisted fairy tale come to life, and the writing … well hell, the head kitty’s monologue inspired me to dream of cats ruling the world. Quite poetic. I liked this one because it underlines an important idea: that dreams are potent, world-changing things.

This is a theme that runs throughout the series. Dreams — the stuff of ideas and inspiration, of beauty and love and fear and horror — can change who we are and what we become, and in turn we can change the world around us for good or ill. Ideas are powerful, and even more powerful is man’s willingness to be inspired by them. The world is what we make of it. It is a reflection of who we are.

This is, I think, one of the foundations upon which Sandman is built.

Third out of the gate is the award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which picks up seeds Gaiman dropped in a one-shot story featured last volume. (Again, our refrain: NOTHING is “standalone” in the world of Sandman.) How he manages to hold this one together, I do not know, but he does. The story jumps from scene to scene like a frog on a hot plate. First we’re seeing a brief exchange between two characters, in the next panel it’s something else, and in the third it’s something else yet again. The dialogue jumps back and forth between excerpts from Shakespeare and the story. The whole thing just flips and flops and is all over the map. There is little to no sense of continuity here at all.

Yet it works. Somehow, Gaiman’s approach makes this tale almost dreamlike, like a fevered vision seen at dusk, when the shadows begin to come alive and the day withers in the face of the night. Quite appropriate, given the subject matter.

I don’t think this is the finest of the Sandman one-shots — that one comes later — but it is fine. Overpraised (sorry, folks, it is), but good.

Finally is “Façade,” in which Gaiman scoops up an obscure old DC Comics character (Element Girl, though she’s never named) and … well, I won’t spoil what happens with her, but it’s a tragic tale with a happy ending, an examination of isolation and feeling alone and wanting so badly to end it all but not being able to do it. Quite an affecting work, with bleak and moving artwork by Colleen Doran. There are some truly haunting moments, such as an awkward dinner scene, and Gaiman does an amazing job of getting across this woman’s pain. Though an utterly inhuman character, she’s one of the most human people you’ll ever read. Fantastic stuff.

So: four stories, four wildly different approaches, four entirely different spins on who and what the Sandman could be. Nice vignettes that serve to show us “business-as-usual” Dream before we launch into the world-shaking events of Season of Mists.

Gaiman’s chess pieces are now in place. From this point forward, the game truly begins.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book for the next ten weekdays.

The Doll’s House picks up seemingly throwaway threads from Preludes and Nocturnes and creates story out of them. Builds mythology from stuff that appeared to be mere tone and atmosphere building.

This is what Gaiman does. This is what Sandman is. And even at this early stage, when he’s still getting a feel for the world he’s creating, it’s brilliant.

When we caught glimpses of troubled sleepers and people struck into dreaming comas in the first story arc, it appeared to be little more than attempts to vividly paint the impact of Dream’s captivity. Gaiman was showing us a world without Morpheus, letting us see why he’s important and using a series of tiny arcs to do it. We saw people caught in an endless slumber, a woman tragically raped while in a coma, a man destined for insanity, and more. These were passing references to a slew of people, unimportant to the main story save for adding texture to it. Just the stuff of atmosphere building. Or so it seemed.

But we were wrong. One of those little “atmosphere” arcs becomes central to The Doll’s House.

We begin with a prologue that feels as if it’s a standalone story, something largely unrelated to the whole. This is an illusion, of course. Nothing in Sandman exists in a vacuum. Throughout the series Gaiman proves to be a master of using even the smallest of story elements and passing references as springboards to larger tales. I’m not talking clunky comic-book stuff, either, those “gotcha!” revelations or retroactive explanations of what happened between another book’s panels. Gaiman doesn’t do clumsy. Here we’ve got the sense that a mythology is being built — not a make-it-up-as-you-go-along mythology, but a true, coherent, densely interwoven, real mythology.

For instance, this prologue, “Tales in the Sand,” appears to be the story behind a brief encounter Dream had while in Hell, as shown in the first volume. It was nothing more than a fleeting interaction with a lover who’d allegedly wronged our protagonist, a hint at something in Dream’s past. In “Tales in the Sand” we learn this lover’s tale and why she is in Hell. It seems like this prologue is unconnected to The Doll’s House, but what we don’t realize is that this story will also serve as the roots for one of the most important arcs of the entire series, the forthcoming Season of Mists.

Are you sensing a pattern here?

Anyway, The Doll’s House. You can feel Gaiman starting to shake the Alan Moore dust off his bones with this arc, breaking free from his mentor’s influence and juuust starting to create his own voice. (It’s not a stretch to call Moore Gaiman’s mentor. It was Moore, after all, who showed Gaiman how to write a comic script.) The influence is still there in the way Gaiman handles his serial killers and in the lyrically self-aware narration, but it’s a big step forward from the very Moore-esque Preludes & Nocturnes.

Gaiman shows himself to be adept at creating strange, surreal characters here — and I don’t mean the murderers! Our protagonist, Rose, who’s searching for her missing kid brother, is exactly the sort of intellectual young everygirl who’d be likely to find herself amid a posse of weirdoes, and indeed, her roommates are an odd but interesting and likable bunch. Though, yeah, those serial killers are well realized, too. Gaiman has a knack for establishing character without needing lots of strokes; any one of these side figures could probably sustain a story in their own right.

We also see some playing with the comic form. Nothing groundbreaking, but stuff that keeps us on our toes. Typewritten letters as narration; lettering being used in creative ways; pages being turned on their side to represent Rose being turned on her side (figuratively, not literally); a twisted dream sequence that puts us into the psych of her roommates.

Lots and lots of good stuff.

There is an interlude here about three fifths of the way through the arc, “Men of Good Fortune,” that I can’t help but think should have been moved to Dream County in the collected editions. It’s a standalone story, albeit a very good one, and feels out of place in the midst of this extended arc. (Of course, once again, it’s not really a standalone: this one is later extended in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and a part of it comes up in Season of Mists. Let it be a lesson learned: take nothing in Sandman for granted.)

The arc wraps up with a satisfying resolution that never feels cheap and leaves us without any doubt: We’re reading the start of something special.

The astonishing thing is, Gaiman isn’t even there yet. He’s not yet firing on all cylinders. With this arc, he’s still working to move away from his influences and to find his own voice. And yet it’s really quite good. Not yet UTTERLY BRILLIANT, as this series will soon become, but quite good indeed.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book for the next ten weekdays.

I would be exaggerating if I said I approached a reread of Sandman with trepidation. Sometimes you read something, think it’s great, but years later you wonder if it was really as good as you remembered. I had no such feelings when thinking back to Sandman. I knew what I had read was brilliant and was confident it wouldn’t lose its luster over the years.

So, I wasn’t surprised when Preludes and Nocturnes remained an excellent read. What DID surprise me was that it was far better than I recalled. The first volume is often seen as the weak link in the Sandman chain, the shaky start readers must get through in order to get to the truly brilliant stuff. Maybe in our desire for people to read those remarkable high points, in our eagerness to share the awesome with them, we forget how good this first set of stories truly is.

Thing is, for all the depth we attribute to Sandman, Gaiman’s grand saga begins with something very simple. Dare I say, a cliché. Our protagonist must Go On A Quest and retrieve Items Of Great Power.

Wait, no. It doesn’t start there. It starts with the titular Sandman naked and huddled in a cage. Weak. Powerless. A captive. But he is Endless, and patient, and he will wait. Even as the world of dreamers falls apart, he will wait.

It’s a pretty ballsy way to open a series, really.

Gaiman is smart. He doesn’t inundate us with information. He doesn’t outline his whole mythology right out of the gate. We’re left to guess at aspects of Morpheus’s nature and power and personality. This not only involves us in the story by forcing us to invest a little of ourselves in it — smart stories almost always do this — but it also leaves him wiggle room to invent, create and interpret over the course of the next 75 issues.

But I’m getting into big-picture stuff here when really I want to discuss Preludes and Nocturnes. Yeah, it’s better than I remembered and isn’t at all the just “okay” start Sandman fans (including myself) sometimes insinuate. Right off the bat we’re getting heaping helpings of mythology, dark magic, and a clear sense that Dream isn’t a humanlike figure with godlike powers. He is something other. Something alien. A being who can be many things. This is utterly vital to what the series would come to be.

Sure, in the context of the smart series that is Sandman, Dream’s fetch quest is kind of a dopey fantasy trope, but it works. It works because it’s a great excuse for allowing us to begin exploring this world. It doesn’t always work. Gaiman makes a misguided effort to tie Sandman into the main DC Comics universe — something thankfully all but forgotten as the series goes on — but by and large Dream’s quest shows us slivers of the kind of realm in which we’ll dwell. And I’ll be damned if the execution isn’t excellent right off the bat. The writing is VERY strong. His ear for dialogue is not perfect, but his narration is poetic and moving even at this early stage.

That said, much of this first volume is kind of standard dark fantasy stuff. Good, but in the years since it came out we’ve seen a TON of stuff like this (a lot of it from Vertigo, the DC Comics imprint that built upon Sandman’s success). The Alan Moore influence is pretty heavy in the early going, and at times it’s distracting. “Listen,” Gaiman writes as a repeated motif over a few issues, and every time he does so I think of Moore. “24 Hours,” the story set in the diner with Doc Destiny, was a somewhat misguided effort to delve into the kind of disturbing darkness Moore dabbled in with Swamp Thing. Gaiman can do better than this sort of gimmicky thing. It’s disturbing, yeah, but it’s also a bit cheap and easy. Gaiman at his best disturbs us with smarts, not shocks. At his best he gives us interesting characters in extraordinarily magical situations, not cheap shock.

It all ends well, though, and we get the sense that this whole story arc was nothing more than a grand beginning.

And it was.

When we get to the coda featuring Dream’s sister Death, we fall in love. We realize we’re reading something that might turn out to be very special indeed. We realize that maybe we’re in store for something that won’t be an ordinary comic book.

Rereading these initial stories reminded took me right back to when I first got sucked into Sandman. I had read non-tights books before — Hate, Cerebus and others were all on my reading list before I ditched comics in the early 1990s — but these were the books that told me I could keep reading and loving comics even if I no longer cared about superheroes.

Did this first volume of Sandman hold up? It sure did. This was very strong, stronger than I remembered … which means I can’t imagine how good the later stuff will be.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

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!

Oh, ALAN MOORE (1953- ), how do we love thee? Let us count the ways. 1. V for Vendetta. 2. Watchmen. 3. Promethea. 4. Lost Girls. 5. D.R. & Quinch. 6. Voice of the Fire. 7. All those “Future Shocks” for 2000 A.D. back in the ’80s. 8. The simple fact that he’s held the title of Most Revered and Respected Creator in Comics (By Pros & Fans Alike), de facto, for more than two decades. Need we say more? Okay: 9. Devotee of Glycon, a snake-deity-slash-sock-puppet that probably never existed. 10. Performance art involving same. There: a veritable decameron of strangeness.

What’s new: While Moore has disowned all the Hollywoodizations of his work, it will nonetheless be of interest to many that the trailer for the film adaptation of Watchmen, the seminal “deconstructing superheroes” graphic novel, has just been unveiled today.

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!

Few artists have so widened the possibilities for how to create graphical narratives than DAVE MCKEAN (1963– ). And even fewer artists have the ability to pack so much storytelling into single images. Yet McKean, known for his work illustrating writers ranging from Neil Gaiman to Jonathan Carroll to Tori Amos, possesses something rarer still: the uncanny ability to create images that spark an instant visceral reaction in the viewer. Powerful tools for a wielder of weird, these. We thank our lucky stars for his breathtaking body of work.

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!

Weird Tales’s premier interior story illustrator in the ’30s, VIRGIL FINLAY (1914–1971) influenced a generation of fantasy artists, who passed his influence along, unheralded, to the next generation. His forever unmatched scratchboard technique melded on the page with his unerring ability to zero in on the most arresting angle in the most compelling scene in the most unforgettable narratives. Without Finlay, our monsters and heroes would never have reached the same extremes of unearthly beauty and unspeakable horror.

Note: These images are but two of the hundreds at the Imagenetion archive, which is a treasure trove of fantasy art but is very difficult to navigate.

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!

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.