Wasteland (DC Comics)
Encyclopedia
Wasteland was an American anthology-style horror
comic book published by DC Comics
in 1987-1989 and intended for adult readers. The series lasted 18 issues.
Each issue (with the exception of the book-length final issue) consisted of three unrelated stories written by John Ostrander
and/or Del Close
. For the most part each issue featured a team of four artists, one of whom would illustrate each of the three stories, the fourth supplying that month's cover (which would bear no, or at most only a thematic, connection to the interior contents). Initially, these duties were meant to rotate among Don Simpson
, David Lloyd
, Bill Loebs (credited under his full name William Messner-Loebs
), and George Freeman, but by issue 13 Freeman, Lloyd and Loebs had all left the series (though Loebs returned for the last two issues). Later issues featured Bill Wray
as a regular and such guest artists as Timothy Truman
, Joe Orlando
and Ty Templeton
.
For the most part, the series avoided the sort of gory shock associated with the twist ending horror comics typified by Tales from the Crypt
and The Twilight Zone
television series in favor of more unpredictable and ambivalent stories. The themes of alienation
and psychological dread
often occurred, mixed with grotesque black humor, absurdism
and social and political commentary in the form of satire
. A text page in the first issue mentioned a desire to improve upon what the creators felt didn't work in DC's own House of Mystery
, which had twice folded at the time.
The stories did not take place in the DC Universe
. No established DC characters appeared, and in one story, "Paper Hero", Captain Marvel
was clearly a fictional comic-book character. The only exceptions came in a story entitled "Crossover" in which a few DC characters (and another of Ostrander's creations, GrimJack
) appeared in a metafictional context and in the series' final issue, in which the entire run of the series (including "Crossover") was "rewound" to the beginning of the very first story.
Indeed, some stories were clearly meant to take place in the real world. One portrayed the death of H. P. Lovecraft
. Another pastiche
d the autobiographical comics
series American Splendor
by Harvey Pekar
, with Don Simpson imitating the drawing style of Robert Crumb
. This story portrayed a thinly-guised version of Pekar in one of his acrimonious appearances on Late Night with David Letterman
in which Pekar had denounced General Electric
. Typically, Wasteland both included political content in the story (GE, by that time, also indirectly owned DC Comics as well) and also turned it into a fable
about self-loathing and anxiety
.
One story in almost every issue of Wasteland was an exaggerated vignette taken from the colorful life of Wasteland co-writer Del Close. In one of these stories, Close is voluntarily hypnotized
by L. Ron Hubbard
and is present when Hubbard comes up with the notion of turning Hubbard's Dianetics
into the "religion" of Scientology
. Close also openly discussed in his stories such other controversial topics as his own drug use and his involvement with witchcraft as a religion.
In a famous mix-up, issue 5 was originally released with the cover meant for issue 6. Besides bearing the wrong issue number, this meant that Freeman, credited on the cover, didn't actually appear in the initial release of that issue, and also made nonsense of the issue's letter column. Issue 5 was reprinted the following week with the correct cover (by Freeman) and the next month, issue 6 came out with a blank white cover, "The Real No. 6" where the issue number would normally appear, and a text piece on the inside cover explaining what had happened. Thanks to the blank cover, this was the only issue in which Don Simpson's artwork did not appear, though the cover did carry the usual credit for him.
Wasteland was noted for the lively debates that took place within its letter column
s.
Horror fiction
Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...
comic book published by DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...
in 1987-1989 and intended for adult readers. The series lasted 18 issues.
Each issue (with the exception of the book-length final issue) consisted of three unrelated stories written by John Ostrander
John Ostrander
John Ostrander is an American writer of comic books. He is best known for his work on Suicide Squad, Grimjack and Star Wars: Legacy, series he helped create.-Career:...
and/or Del Close
Del Close
Del Close was an actor, improviser, writer, and teacher. Considered one of the premier influences on modern improvisational theater, Close had a prolific career, appearing in a number of films and television shows...
. For the most part each issue featured a team of four artists, one of whom would illustrate each of the three stories, the fourth supplying that month's cover (which would bear no, or at most only a thematic, connection to the interior contents). Initially, these duties were meant to rotate among Don Simpson
Don Simpson (cartoonist)
Don Simpson is an American freelance cartoonist, comic book artist and illustrator, most noted for creating Bizarre Heroes, Megaton Man, Border Worlds, and the official comic adaption of King Kong....
, David Lloyd
David Lloyd
David Lloyd may refer to:*David Lloyd , chief justice of colonial Pennsylvania*David Lloyd Welsh cleric and translator*David Lloyd , British tenor...
, Bill Loebs (credited under his full name William Messner-Loebs
William Messner-Loebs
William Messner-Loebs is an American comic book writer and artist from Michigan, also known as Bill Loebs and Bill Messner-Loebs...
), and George Freeman, but by issue 13 Freeman, Lloyd and Loebs had all left the series (though Loebs returned for the last two issues). Later issues featured Bill Wray
Bill Wray
William York Wray is an American cartoonist and landscape painter, notable for his Urban Landscape series of paintings, his many pages for Mad and his contributions to The Ren & Stimpy Show...
as a regular and such guest artists as Timothy Truman
Timothy Truman
Timothy Truman is an American writer, artist and musician. He is best known for his stories and Wild West-style comic book art, and in particular, for his work on Grimjack , Scout, and the reinvention of Jonah Hex, with Joe R. Lansdale...
, Joe Orlando
Joe Orlando
Joseph Orlando was a prolific illustrator, writer, editor and cartoonist during a lengthy career spanning six decades...
and Ty Templeton
Ty Templeton
Ty Templeton is a popular Canadian comic book artist and writer who has drawn a number of popular mainstream titles, TV-associated titles and his own series.-Biography:Templeton was born on May 9, 1962...
.
For the most part, the series avoided the sort of gory shock associated with the twist ending horror comics typified by Tales from the Crypt
Tales from the Crypt (comic)
Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror are three bi-monthly horror comic anthology series published by EC Comics in the early 1950s...
and The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone is an American television anthology series created by Rod Serling. Each episode is a mixture of self-contained drama, psychological thriller, fantasy, science fiction, suspense, or horror, often concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist...
television series in favor of more unpredictable and ambivalent stories. The themes of alienation
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
and psychological dread
Dread
Dread may refer to* Dread , a fearful emotion.* Angst, a profound and deep-seated spiritual condition of insecurity and despair in the free human being in Existentialist thought...
often occurred, mixed with grotesque black humor, absurdism
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
and social and political commentary in the form of satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
. A text page in the first issue mentioned a desire to improve upon what the creators felt didn't work in DC's own House of Mystery
House of Mystery
The House of Mystery is the name of several horror-mystery-suspense anthology comic book series. It had a companion series, House of Secrets.-Genesis:...
, which had twice folded at the time.
The stories did not take place in the DC Universe
DC Universe
The DC Universe is the shared universe where most of the comic stories published by DC Comics take place. The fictional characters Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are well-known superheroes from this universe. Note that in context, "DC Universe" is usually used to refer to the main DC continuity...
. No established DC characters appeared, and in one story, "Paper Hero", Captain Marvel
Captain Marvel (DC Comics)
Captain Marvel is a fictional comic book superhero, originally published by Fawcett Comics and later by DC Comics. Created in 1939 by artist C. C. Beck and writer Bill Parker, the character first appeared in Whiz Comics #2...
was clearly a fictional comic-book character. The only exceptions came in a story entitled "Crossover" in which a few DC characters (and another of Ostrander's creations, GrimJack
GrimJack
Grimjack is the main character of a comic book originally published by First Comics. John Ostrander and Timothy Truman are credited as co-creators of the character, although Ostrander had been developing Grimjack with artist Lenin Delsol before Truman's arrival on the project...
) appeared in a metafictional context and in the series' final issue, in which the entire run of the series (including "Crossover") was "rewound" to the beginning of the very first story.
Indeed, some stories were clearly meant to take place in the real world. One portrayed the death of H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
. Another pastiche
Pastiche
A pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...
d the autobiographical comics
Autobiographical comics
Autobiographical comics are autobiography in the form of comic books or comic strips. The form first became popular in the underground comics movement and has since become more widespread...
series American Splendor
American Splendor
American Splendor is a series of autobiographical comic books written by the late Harvey Pekar and drawn by a variety of artists. The first issue was published in 1976 and the most recent in September 2008, with publication occurring at irregular intervals...
by Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar
Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer, music critic and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a critically acclaimed film adaptation of the same name.Pekar described American Splendor as "an...
, with Don Simpson imitating the drawing style of Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
. This story portrayed a thinly-guised version of Pekar in one of his acrimonious appearances on Late Night with David Letterman
Late Night with David Letterman
Late Night with David Letterman is a nightly hour-long comedy talk show on NBC that was created and hosted by David Letterman. It premiered in 1982 as the first incarnation of the Late Night franchise and went off the air in 1993, after Letterman left NBC and moved to Late Show on CBS. Late Night...
in which Pekar had denounced General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
. Typically, Wasteland both included political content in the story (GE, by that time, also indirectly owned DC Comics as well) and also turned it into a fable
Fable
A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from...
about self-loathing and anxiety
Anxiety
Anxiety is a psychological and physiological state characterized by somatic, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral components. The root meaning of the word anxiety is 'to vex or trouble'; in either presence or absence of psychological stress, anxiety can create feelings of fear, worry, uneasiness,...
.
One story in almost every issue of Wasteland was an exaggerated vignette taken from the colorful life of Wasteland co-writer Del Close. In one of these stories, Close is voluntarily hypnotized
Hypnosis
Hypnosis is "a trance state characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation and heightened imagination."It is a mental state or imaginative role-enactment . It is usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a long series of preliminary...
by L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard , better known as L. Ron Hubbard , was an American pulp fiction author and religious leader who founded the Church of Scientology...
and is present when Hubbard comes up with the notion of turning Hubbard's Dianetics
Dianetics
Dianetics is a set of ideas and practices regarding the metaphysical relationship between the mind and body that was invented by the science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard and is practiced by followers of Scientology...
into the "religion" of Scientology
Scientology
Scientology is a body of beliefs and related practices created by science fiction and fantasy author L. Ron Hubbard , starting in 1952, as a successor to his earlier self-help system, Dianetics...
. Close also openly discussed in his stories such other controversial topics as his own drug use and his involvement with witchcraft as a religion.
In a famous mix-up, issue 5 was originally released with the cover meant for issue 6. Besides bearing the wrong issue number, this meant that Freeman, credited on the cover, didn't actually appear in the initial release of that issue, and also made nonsense of the issue's letter column. Issue 5 was reprinted the following week with the correct cover (by Freeman) and the next month, issue 6 came out with a blank white cover, "The Real No. 6" where the issue number would normally appear, and a text piece on the inside cover explaining what had happened. Thanks to the blank cover, this was the only issue in which Don Simpson's artwork did not appear, though the cover did carry the usual credit for him.
Wasteland was noted for the lively debates that took place within its letter column
Comic book letter column
A comic book letter column is a section of a comic book where readers' letters to the publisher appear. Comic book letter columns are also commonly referred to as letter columns , letter pages, letters of comment , or simply letters to the editor...
s.