Demon With a Glass Hand – A DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel


By Harlan Ellison, adapted by Marshall Rogers (DC Comics)
ISBN: 0-930289-09-9

Long before comics got into the highly addictive habit of blending and braiding parallel stories and sharing universes science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven and Harlan Ellison were blazing the trail. Ellison crafted an extended series of short stories and novellas into the gripping and influential War against the Kyben, even going so far as to break out of print media and into television; consequently garnering even greater fame and glory as well as the 1965 Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Script for a Television Anthology and the Georges Melies Fantasy Film Award (1972) for Outstanding Cinematic Achievement in Science Fiction Television.

Demon with a Glass Hand was written as a teleplay – the author’s second – for influential TV show The Outer Limits, premiering on 17th October 1964, and only later being adapted into a prose adventure. In 1986 the startlingly talented and much missed Marshall Rogers used the original, unedited first draft of the TV script to create a fantastically effective comics adaptation for the experimental DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel series.

Humanity’s battle against the Kyben lasted ten generations and involved all manner of technologies including time travel. Trent is a man with a mission and huge holes in his memory. Somewhere in his occluded mind is a vast secret: the location of the entire human race, hidden to prevent the invading Kyben from finding and destroying them. Instead of a right hand he has a crystal prosthetic that talks to him, but the glass computer cannot restore his memories until three of its missing fingers are recovered.

Dispatched to the dubious safety of the 20th century Trent has been followed by a horde of aliens determined to secure that fateful secret and they have taken over the skyscraper where those missing digits are secured…

Aided only by the apparently indigenous human Consuelo, Trent’s paranoiac battle is as much with himself as his foes. As he gradually ascends the doom-laden building to find answers he may not want, he finds fighting creatures painfully human and just as reluctant as he to be there almost more than he can bear but at least his mission will soon end…

Or will it? Demon with a Glass Hand is a masterpiece of tension-drenched drama, liberally spiced with explosive action, and the mythic denouement – in any medium of creative expression – has lost none of its impact over the years.

Classy and compelling this is a perfect companion to Ellison’s other Kyben War comic adaptations, collected as Night and the Enemy, and it must be every fan’s dream to hope that somewhere there’s a publisher prepared to gather all these gems into one definitive edition…
© 1986 The Kilimanjaro Corporation.  Illustrations © 1986 DC Comics Inc.  All Rights Reserved.