The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

The atmospheric film Wings of Desire saw two angels wander the streets of Berlin, contemplating love, suicide, and Peter Falk. Then writer-director WIM WENDERS (1945- ) brought us Until the End of the World, the story of a falling nuclear satellite intersecting with the saga of a genius who can record human dreams. In The End of Violence, Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks” comes to moving, breathing life while a surveillance agent probes Los Angeles from the digital ether. The soul and the machine: Wenders knows both well.

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1912–1997) was just another scion of the ruling class who shot his wife (and paint cans against canvases), did an enormous amount of drugs, appeared in both On the Road and a Nike commercial, declared that language was a virus from outer space, taught at a city college, wrote novels by typing up pages and then cutting them to ribbons, outlived virtually everyone he knew, and retired to Kansas a fine old-money gentleman. You know — one of those types.

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

The TV series based on CHARLES ADDAMS’s (1912–1988) life and odd creations brought weirdness to prime time, well before the term “goth” was but a bloody tear in a suburban teenager’s angst-filled eye. But The Addams Family show was just the most populist tip of the freakish iceberg; thanks to Addams’s 40-year career as a cartoonist for The New Yorker, not even the well-read and well-bred were safe from his dark visions. Legend has it that one of his cartoons was used to gauge lunacy levels in asylum patients.

What’s new: a Broadway musical version of The Addams Family is in the works!

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

DOUGLAS ADAMS (1952-2001) imagined a spaceship whose engine was powered by highly unlikely coincidences; a temporally bifurcated alien who convinced Leonardo to whip up six more copies of the Mona Lisa; and a bathrobe-clad hitchhiker who lamented to a friend, “You’re turning into an infinite number of penguins.” Across a multimedia array of novels, screenplays, and radio dramas, Adams was Grand Master of the absurd; we would weep over his premature evacuation from the planet, but we’re still too busy laughing at all he wrote.

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

If this were an “85 Awesomest Storytellers” list, it would certainly showcase Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; since it’s the “85 Weirdest,” we’ve got to honor STEVE DITKO (1927– ). As an artist, he gave us Spider-Man’s gallery of gruesome grotesques — the Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, et al. — as well as the comics medium’s greatest eldritch mystic, Dr. Strange, who faced a pantheon of Lovecraftian horrors. And let’s not forget the philosophical weirdness of Ditko’s most mysterious creation, The Question.