Number 1795: Spacy Stories Week: Wallace Wood “Deadlock!”

This is the third and final posting for our theme week, Spacy Stories.

EC publisher Bill Gaines had a word for them: “springboards.” Springboards were ideas he got when going through books and magazines. The less generous in use of language would call them swipes, since he was stealing someone else’s ideas. (He and editor/writer Al Feldstein got caught at it, too, by Ray Bradbury.)

“Deadlock!” (here in the form of scans from the original art, thanks to Heritage Auctions) surprises me, not by being a swipe of Murray Leinster’s 1945 story, “First Contact,” but by the notation in the EC reference book, Tales of Terror!, “Wood plotted; probably scripted.”

Published in Weird Fantasy #17 (1951).

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