The 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!

Our “same planet, different worlds” award for weirdness must go to THEODOR “DR. SEUSS” GEISEL (1904-1991). His tales charm all but the grumpiest readers, but beneath those happy faces, bright colors and wacky inventions lay social commentary torn straight from the hundreds of cartoons he drew for the WWII leftist newspaper PM. Still unconvinced? Seuss taught kids to read and brought anapestic tetrameter to the masses. If that’s not weird, we’re not sure what is.

The 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!

KURT VONNEGUT (1922–2007) made us weep for humanity’s Earthbound woes by unsticking Billy Pilgrim in time and letting him be abducted by Tralfamadorians. He showed us what voodoo-inspired government-sponsored weapons research looks like on the road to unintentional Armageddon. He gave us secret paintings, underwater temptresses, and Federal Ethical Suicide Parlors. His book Slaughterhouse-Five was honored on Time magazine’s “100 Best English-Language Novels” list, and his book Breakfast of Champions includes a drawing of his own anus. So it goes.

The 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!

Countless imitators; only one Far Side. It was to single-panel humor cartoons what Weird Tales was to pulp fiction and The Twilight Zone was to television: a new brainspace where anything goes. Drawing upon Charles Addams’s perfect sense of comic timing and his own encyclopedic knowledge of zoological trivia, GARY LARSON (1950– ) gave us fourteen years worth of unexpected conceptual reversals — and has been immortalized by the scientific establishment for his efforts. Just Google the word “thagomizer.”

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!