Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Faraday Nelson

This act is analogous with Corman’s career as purveyor of trash cinema: refraining from pushing badfilm’s power to the absolute limit foregoing the gift of ‘second sight’ and content to exist on a marginalized, second-tier, parallel reality to the Hollywood mainstream. In X, a scientist develops X-ray vision, seeing into the fourth dimension and witnessing something so shocking he rips his eyes out. This article addresses the theme of ‘badfilm’ by contrasting films from two of the most well-known purveyors of ‘cinematic trash’: Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). Carpenter contacted both the writer’s agent and Eclipse Comics to buy the rights to both and adapt them himself (scripting under the screen pseudoname “Frank Armitage”) into the film They Live (1988).Recent discussions of ‘paracinema’ have highlighted the re-appraisal of so-called ‘cinematic trash’. It was Bill Wray’s adaptation, not the original F & SF pulp publication of the story, that brought Nelson’s story to the attention of filmmaker John Carpenter, who loved it. When, in 1986, cartoonist Bill Wray adapted to comics the short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson (aka Radell “Ray” Faraday Nelson), published twenty years earlier in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for the short-lived Eclipse Comics anthology Alien Encounters under the title “Nada,” he arguably created something new: a collaborative work with new, unique elements.

Things are better than they were pre-1980, but the illusion that the creator rights battles have been fought and won is a pervasive and destructive one.

In fact, the exile of mere “illustrators” to this limbo of no screen credit is sadly emblematic of the ‘creator rights’ era of comics publishing, save for those key works that were wholly creator-owned and comics-creator originated (e.g., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, Fish Police, The Tick, etc.). Prolix Steve Bissette has a very very long review of STARDUST and observations on the role of illustrators in film and great links and why Charles Vess getting his name on the movie is a good thing and tons of obscure history, like this:

Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Faraday Nelson