From Commercial to Lowbrow
UFO and extraterrestrial art made cultural heroes of illustrators such as Frank R. Paul (the first great SF illustrator), Edd Cartier (described in chapter two), Hannes Bok, Alex Schomburg (Deco airbrush), Chesley Bonestell (documentary futurism and planetscapes), Frank Kelly Freas (a master of luminous color), Ed Emshwiller, Jack Gaughan, Richard Powers (whose oddly organic images defined Ballantine paperback SF), Syd Mead (a sleek Futurist with keen interest in industrial design), Vincent DiFate, John Berkey (knife-edge tech), H. R. Giger (creator of the Alien universe); Ralph McQuarrie, the Brothers Hildebrandt, Debbie Hughes, Michael Whelan, and many others. Comic books have produced many ET-SF specialists, highlighted by artists as diverse as Joe Doolin (bug- eyed-monster cover-art maestro with Planet comics); Wallace Wood (a genius of EC Comics’ Weird Science and Weird Fantasy); Al Feldstein (another EC artist, who wrote and edited, too); Osamu Tezuka (creator of Astro Boy); Jack Kirby (who took Marvel superheroes to boggling, eye-filling other worlds); Carmine Infantino (sleek, mid-century hardware, architecture, and planetscapes); Moebius; Philippe Druillet; and Masamune Shirow (epic science-cyberpunk).
So-called Lowbrow, or Outsider, Art—a calculatedly brazen commingling of pulp and comic art, fine art, illustration, and pin-up and hot rod aesthetics—has produced many luminaries, some of whom interpret the UFO/ET trope: Robert Williams (wrap your orbs around Dr. Cinnabar’s Cybernoid Art Ray: Beauty Is Best Expressed); Tom Shropshire (see UFO—A Scouting Party, 2010); Fabrizio Cassetta (who has particular interest in grays); George Bryan Ward (homages to the box art of SF toys of the 1950s); John Robert Beck (see Dancing Discs, 2011); Keith Tucker (Weird Tiki-Comics and other mid-century retro); Dennis Larkins (genre-mixing mid-century; see Abduction of the Innocent); and others often featured in Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose magazines.
Pulp and tabloid journalism has had fun with UFOs for sixty years. One of the greatest exemplars, the late, lamented Weekly World News, conjured some fabulous UFO headlines: “Titanic Sunk by Underwater UFO”; “Aliens Attack Vegas with Death Rays”; “Iran Launches Flying Saucer”; and “Your Spouse May Be an Alien.” This sort of cynical yet joyous nonsense—as well as a great deal of UFO-oriented Outsider Art and other postmodernity—can be traced to a five-cent diversion for children.
Mars Attacks!
The company that created them hid its identity behind an alternate corporate name. Test distribution during 1962 was limited to the East Coast, where kids bought them furiously before parents raised the roof about gory violence and sexual suggestiveness. So great was the outcry that the gum-card set called Mars Attacks! was suspended, and never progressed to national distribution. In the many years since, pristine original examples of single cards run into hundreds, and even thousands, of dollars. Unopened packs are highly prized, and original counter displays designed to hold multiple packs are like gold. Auction houses traffic in once-forgotten concept sketches and finished paintings. If any flying saucer invasion can be termed “beloved,” that invasion is Mars Attacks!
Created by Brooklyn-based Topps Chewing Gum Co. as a philosophical follow-on to a gory card set called Civil War News, Mars Attacks! comprises fifty-five cards developed by Topps creative director Woody Gelman and his young assistant, Len Brown. The pair took cues from the space race and science fiction movies of the previous ten years, and from the dark, sardonically funny EC horror and SF comics of the 1950s. Gelman’s professional experience included cartooning, and he felt comfortable doing preliminary roughs, along with a pair of top SF cartoonists, EC veteran Wallace Wood; and Bob Powell, who had done handsome horror and SF work for Harvey Comics. When final subjects and compositions were agreed upon, Powell did tight pencils on illustration boards measuring barely more than three by five inches.
As he had done for Civil War News, illustrator Norm Saunders converted the pencils into paintings. Saunders brought a blunt, hysterically dramatic style to cards with such winsome titles as “Burning Cattle” (bovine terror when flying saucers light up stampeding cows); “Burning Flesh” (heat rays sear and filet astonished civilians); “Hairy Fiend” (incipient decapitation of a soldier by a gigantic spider set loose by the Martians); and the famed “Destroying a Dog” (Martian heat ray turns Fido into a skeleton right before the eyes of the kid that owns him).
Predistribution censorship came from high-level Topps executives who realized that this new set far exceeded the excesses of Civil War News. Mars Attacks! card #21, for instance, “Prize Captive,” depicts a young beauty’s struggle with a lecherous Martian; Saunders painted the woman with bare shoulders and a plunging neckline; in the printed version, the victim’s blouse has short sleeves and a blue ribbon large enough to obscure any suggestion of cleavage. Card #17, a bedroom scene called “Beast and the Beauty,” presented a similar challenge, with a beautiful girl wearing what Len Brown called “a small, revealing nightie.” In Saunders’s revision, the woman is buttoned up—wrist to shoulder, bodice to chin—in something that looks like white flannel. But she still struggles to avoid violation and death.
The preponderance of cards #1 through #15 focuses on the Martian flying saucers, and the high-tech mayhem they cause. Card #1, “The Invasion Begins,” is the dramatic assembly of saucers preparing for liftoff from Mars, a Martian commander eagerly pointing the way to Earth. The craft are convex discs topped with broad, transparent domes—a design reported again and again by real-life UFO witnesses.
Card #2, “Martians Approaching,” reveals a portion of the vast invasion fleet as viewed by Martians inside a command center. Other “saucer cards” from the first fifteen include “Attacking an Army Base,” “Saucers Blast Our Jets,” “Terror in Times Square,” and “Washington in Flames.” None of this reflected the friendly-alien paradigm; no, Mars Attacks! manifested the rowdier aspects of pop culture, as well as the concerns of the UFO community’s menacing-aliens faction.
The final card of the Mars Attacks! narrative is #54,”Mars Explodes.” (Number fifty-five is a synopsis and checklist.) As illustrated, Mars goes blooey, like an oversized cherry bomb. In the foreground, American rocket fighters speed toward home; one rugged flyer harnessed beneath his bubble canopy looks over his shoulder at the sundered Red Planet and gives a hearty thumbs-up.
Here, then, was the ultimate response to UFO threats real and imagined: resistance and absolute destruction.
Early sets distributed by Topps for test marketing (and credited to “Bubbles, Inc.”) went out as Attack from Space. Buoyed by encouraging sales, the company quickly changed the name to the punchier Mars Attacks! Test sales continued on a robust course, but, inevitably, parents and educators soon involved themselves, spurring Topps to make still more revisions. The aforementioned “Beast and the Beauty,” for example, came under such scrutiny that Topps did a hasty redo of the card’s earlier in-house redo, with Saunders doing a self-portrait—a handsome, mustachioed gent in his fifties—to place over the figure of the frightened girl. The expense of alterations to a few other cards suggested that any further changes would be cost prohibitive. Topps decided to let Mars Attacks! expire.
But Mars Attacks! refused to die. Scarce and “forbidden,” they became a cultural touchstone for two generations of kids and grown-up kids fond of the outré. Much-discussed, particularly by interested people who had merely glimpsed them or never seen any at all, the cards acquired a mythic status.
Collector prices began to escalate in the 1970s, and licensed reprints appeared, from companies other than Topps, in 1984. When Topps reprinted the original set in 1994, the company created enough all-new cards (some based on theretofore unused 1962 concepts by Wood and Powell) to bump the Mars Attacks! total from fifty-five to ninety-eight.
Director Tim Burton’s same-titled 1996 film adaptation perfectly captures the cards’ comically outrageous fascination with UFOs. Although a box-office disappointment, Mars Attacks! found enduring life on DVD, so the Topps- Burton phenomenon remains a small, vivid part of the national consciousness. In 2012, Abrams published a handsome Mars Attacks art book (no exclamation point), with reproductions and backstories of every card (censored and uncensored), rare looks at Attack from Space wrappers and display boxes, and a tipped-in set of four collector cards. The book’s waxy, yellow and red dustjacket mimics the gaudy original wrappers.
Why does Mars Attacks! attract so much devoted, quasi-historical attention?
Although far from “forbidden” in this liberalized age, the cards nevertheless retain an aura of the cultural underground. They exploit and expand upon tropes from science fiction, but also from broader pop-entertainment conventions, particularly the fondness for violent challenges to human authority, and our equally violent responses. Because twenty-five of the original fifty-five cards explicitly reference the U.S. military, the storyline acquires an incidental layer of narrative, and a kind of authority, too, as if depicting secret, insider knowledge that the government does not want us to have. If Blue Book and other government investigations of UFOs were bungled, or purposely subverted, Mars Attacks! is the angry rejoinder.
The cards’ preoccupation with humans as prey can hardly be overstated. The human fear of attack from above—by an animal or another, larger person who knocks us to the ground—is atavistic. Any institution or agency, human or extraterrestrial, that can send forth such destruction, is fearsome. “Slaughter in the Streets,” a card from a follow-on Mars Attacks! set, depicts a scene of bloody urban warfare. Graffiti scrawled on the brick façade of a ruined building reads DEATH FROM ABOVE.