By Patrick Luce Mar 12, 2009, 0:54 GMT
In time for the 50th Anniversary of the cult classic series, The Twilight Zone is set to enter a new dimension with a series of graphic novels based on the show’s original scripts and published through Walker Books for Young Readers.
The first two of eight graphic novels, Walking Distance and The After Hours, will be published this fall (October). These two classic The Twilight Zone episodes from October 1959 and June 1960 are based on the original and unedited scripts — in their entirety — written by Rod Serling himself.
Serling worked as a writer and producer throughout his career in television, and he has won the most Emmy awards for dramatic writing in the history of television. He wrote over seventy-five episodes of The Twilight Zone series for which he won three of his Emmys. He was also the show’s creator, host, and narrator.
In a press release, Carol Serling stated: “I suspect my husband, Rod Serling, the ‘Father’ of The Twilight Zone, would heartily approve of this ‘new dimension’ of his stories. The adaptations and fine graphic pictures in this grand new series have truly caught the feeling and climate of that wondrous world of imagination.”
Artists from the renowned Savannah College of Art and Design’s Sequential Arts Program (SCAD) have taken on the challenge of creating this new dimension, a dimension that will allow fans to make the journey from black and white video tape into the full-color imagined world of the graphic novel.
By releasing the stories as graphic novels, Serling’s narrative is given a new opportunity to be both more artistic and more stylized than what was captured on a 1960s soundstage. The book’s scripts are adapted to artist panels by professor of Sequential Art Mark Kneece – who stated in the release he hoped “from some nearby fifth dimension, Serling is smiling at the prospect of these books.”
Kneece co-wrote a story in Alien World in 1987 for Pacific Comics and discovered a talent for comics writing. He has written stories for Hellraiser (Marvel/Epic), Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (DC Comics), The Spirit: New Adventures (Kitchen Sink Press), and Tarzan for the syndicated newspaper strip (United Media).
In 1993, he came to Savannah College of Art and Design and helped found the sequential art department. Since then, he has taught comics writing as a professor of sequential art at SCAD in Savannah, Georgia.
In Walking Distance, Serling’s most personal The Twilight Zone script, Martin Sloan takes a literal walk down memory lane and steps back into a summer day on the Homewood street of his childhood.
In The After Hours, we meet Marsha White, a dissatisfied and somewhat confused shopper, who tries to make a customer service complaint at her local department store, only to find that she isn’t who she thinks she is.
Check Out some of the cover art:
Walker Books for Young Readers, a division of Bloomsbury Publishing USA, began publishing children’s books in the early 1960s and was acquired by Bloomsbury in 2005.
The imprint publishes such acclaimed books as the Caldecott Honor–winner Gone Wild written and illus. by David McLimans, The Signers by Dennis Brindell Fradin and Michael McCurdy, the deGranville trilogy by K.M. Grant, the Lily Dale series by Wendy Corsi Staub, the perennial favorite The Period Book by Karen Gravelle, and the ever-popular Miss Malarkey picture book series by Judy Finchler and Kevin O’Malley.
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