Thursday 23 February 2017

Beached Statue





 Ever since Planet of the Apes, a disaster-wrecked Statue of Liberty has been used frequently in movies and on their posters to symbolise ruined America.



  
 







  

It's a cliche that started in literature, and actually goes back to 1887: the oldest occurrence I've read is in J. A. Mitchell's novella The Last American, which featured illustrations like these...



 ..and which, along with Planet of the Apes, led to numerous book, pulp magazine and comic covers featuring Liberty in various states of disrepair and repurposing.










Now that a horrific deluge of utterly unoriginal post-apocalyptic self-published fiction has been unleashed by Amazon, it seems only fitting that these books without new ideas should also feature covers to match.







It's mildly unfair to include Warday here, in that it was first published in the 1980s by a respectable firm, but Streiber abandoned his career as a writer of obvious fiction in order to become a wildly disreputable purveyor of alien-abduction bullshit and plagiarist, so fuck him.

4 comments:

Karl said...

I like the "Lady Liberty trying to limbo" that appears in that rash of indie covers at the end. I suppose it would be pedantic to point out that this sculpture is made out of copper sheet about as thick as a shirt cardboard, and would probably be the first thing to collapse, crumple, melt, disintegrate, and generally disappear in the event of most any kind of apocalypse ...

Anyway, here's yet another one, from 1964: https://sciencefictionruminations.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/amazing_stories_196402-1.jpeg

JRSM said...

Yes, she'd blow alike like ashes, I suspect. Thanks for that cover; I'll add it to the post.

Turan, Emissary of the Fly World said...

I feel obligated to note, in defense of "Mighty Samson," that one of its defining features was depicting how various real New York City landmarks were faring in its post-apocalypse world. Pretty much each story was a visit to one such place: Central Park (a jungle), the Bronx Zoo (overrun with giant mutated animals), the subway (home of mole people), etc. So, a story built around the Statue of Liberty was a natural extension of the formula rather than copying.

JRSM said...

That I did not know: thank you! I need to see if some of those old comics are available on the public domain comic sites.