I'm using tonight's round of
Friday Night Fights: Boom!, the bout from
Spacebooger where every fight must include an
onomatopoeia, to pay tribute to the beautiful art by recently-deceased horror comics master
Bernie Wrightson, who
passed away this past week.
Tonight's round comes from a comic where Wrightson stepped out of his usual dank horror milieu and tried his hand at a
science fiction setting, courtesy of
Swamp Thing #6, written by co-creator
Len Wein. (This was the second collaboration between the two I'd ever read as a kid.)
Synopsis: Swampy literally falls off a vegetable truck in
Vermont and encounters the kindly couple
Alec and Linda Holland. Two problems with that: First: Linda Holland is
dead, killed in a lab explosion caused by the criminal cartel
The Conclave. And second, Swamp Thing
is Alec Holland. The pair takes him to their home town of
Burgess, a formerly deserted mining town . Judging by the town's name, combined with our story's title
"A Clockwork Horror", it's obvious that Wein was a big fan of
this 1971 futuristic novel. (So am
I, by the way, since reading it during freshman year in college. It's an initially challenging but ultimately very
worthwhile read.)
"Alec" and "Linda" take him to Burgess, where Swampy meets town mayor
Hans Klochmann, who shares the secret of Burgess: Its' citizens, including "Alec" and "Linda" are all
sophisticated androids built by Klochmann himself, the town's sole human resident, using newspaper
death notices to fashion his creations names and likenesses, and programming them without humanity's baser emotions.
Unfortunately, Klochmann's idyllic town is discovered by the Conclave, who bring in armed guards and a giant hydraulically-powered robot of their own to attempt to force Klochmann to work exclusively for them. The little old clockmaker refuses, saying he'd rather they kill him first. The Conclave, needing him alive, takes a
different approach.
The trauma of seeing "Linda" "die" again pushes the monstrous Holland to
seething rage.
RRACK! THRASH!
Eat your heart out,
Magnus!
Tonight's fight song depicts another robot-smashing battle courtesy of the
Flaming Lips.
For more "
feeling the Bern", click
here. And don't forget to
vote!