Description

The Planetoid and Other Stories by Joe Orlando, with a foreword by Paul Levitz and an introduction by Thommy Burns

Hardcover – Fantagraphics – Jun 2023 – 204 pages

Joe Orlando initially teamed with Wallace Wood but then went solo and became a mainstay at EC Comics, especially in such titles as Weird Science. This volume collects his first two dozen science fiction adventures.

All of them, scripted by Al Feldstein, serve up unexpected shock endings, including a time-travel twister in which a man visits the past and (unknowingly) romances his own mother (!), a look at a gender-switched future where women are the breadwinners and men the homemakers, a good old-fashioned “worlds collide” disaster, a prescient animal rights parable, and lots of rollicking space opera, aliens, and, of course, interplanetary monsters (some of them human!).

Bonus: EC’s complete “flying saucer report,” with art by Orlando, Wallace Wood, George Evans, and Reed Crandall.