Since it began appearing in works like H. G. Well’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, the ray gun has been a sci-fi fixture. Clowes’s superhero comic The Death-Ray (2011) features a special kind of ray gun, a weird home-made, blow-dryer-looking device that disintegrates its victim, leaving behind no traces. The ideal weapon for Clowes’s disturbing exploration of adolescent power fantasies, it’s the kind of gun many of us fantasized about using after we’d been bullied. Not a loud and messy “BLAM!” but a quick and clean “POP!” and the deed is done, the bully eliminated from our life forever. The perfect weapon for the perfect murder.
As Clowes has discussed, The Death-Ray owes a debt to Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man comics; Ditko drew and plotted the first few dozen issues, which were released in the early 1960s. Reading these comics while a teenager in the 70s, Clowes strongly identified with the home life and exploits of the teenaged Peter Parker.
But Spider-man didn’t carry a gun, let alone a death-ray. Perhaps the young Clowes, who loved comic books, read a comic that did: “The Secret Story of Ray-Gun 64.” Set in space in the 24th century, this sci-fi tale appeared in Mystery in Space #5 (1951) and then in DC Super-Stars #9. Subtitled “The Man Behind the Gun,” this DC anthology was released in 1976, around the time that Clowes came up with the original idea for The Death-Ray, which he would eventually set in America in 2004.
[Pulpy titles by Clowes and Broome.]
Written by John Broome and elegantly drawn by Frank Giacoia, “The Secret Story of Ray-Gun 64” features a POP!-delivering gun that anticipates the weapon Andy’s father makes for his son, a ray gun that works only when Andy holds it. I‘m not saying that Clowes knew this story, only that he draws on classic comic-book ways of representing a disintegrating death-ray in action: POP! in red, a shower of black lines, and a yellow background.
[Two Clowes panels above two from Broome and Giacoia]
For more on The Death-Ray, see our last post. Also, I talk about Clowes, Ditko, and superheroes in two essays and one story introduction in The Daniel Clowes Reader.
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