Review by C.J. Bunce

Your first journey back to The Twilight Zone after the original television series from 1959-1964 and three revival series involves a departure via a new medium: the comic book.  Submitted for your approval, a new anthology series from IDW Publishing will take you back to those tales told by Rod Serling, only updated for the 21st century.  Writer Dan Watters is joined by letterer and designer Sandy Tanaka and artist Morgan Beem in the black and white of the original episodes with the all-new The Twilight Zone episode, “Blanks.”  What could possibly go wrong when a billionaire has financed a medical treatment that will render the medical community obsolete?

Take a peek, if you dare, into the all-new first issue of The Twilight Zone:

Not every episode of The Twilight Zone was about cloaked horrors just round the corner.  Some were hopeful, like the episode “The Hunt.”  Some were just plain fun, like “A Penny for Your Thoughts” and “Little Girl Lost.”  But the most memorable are the most shocking of terrors, right?  William Shatner in the air in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and trapped in a small town in “Nick of Time,” Billy Mumy and Cloris Leachman having family time in “It’s a Good Life,” Donna Douglas as a patient in “Eye of the Beholder,” Anne Francis on a bad shopping trip in “The After Hours,” Bill Bixby in “The Thirty-Fathom Grave,” there’s room for one more with Jonathan Harris in “Twenty Two,” Claude Akins is the good astronaut in “The Little People,” and the most affecting of all may be “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.”  “Blanks” fits right in in the latter category.

It’s a little bit George Lucas’s THX-1138 with the shock factor of Orson Scott Card’s “Fat Farm.”  And like all of The Twilight Zone episodes, in hindsight they could have been episodes within the Ray Bradbury Theater, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, Tales from the Crypt, Amazing Stories, or much later, Black Mirror, Love, Death and Robots, or Electric Dreams, or plucked from short stories from the minds of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke or Philip K. Dick.

Here are variant covers for the first issue (also available is a sketch cover):

You won’t see Rod Serling’s image here, but you can feel his presence via the narrator’s voice from afar.

What’s next?  Here are coming creators you’ll find over the next few months:

Yes, there have been as many comic book adaptations of The Twilight Zone over the years as there have been reboot television series.  This latest gets off to the right start.  Add The Twilight Zone to your pull list at Elite Comics or your own local comic shop today.