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!

That brain you see hanging out in a ThinkGeek ad owes its existence to FRIDA KAHLO (1907-1954), whose stark self-portraits eliminated the boundaries of the body and put the four-chambered hearts, fetuses, and internal organs where we can see them. Frida’s work is weird at its most personal. She wore her inner pain on the outside, beautifully rendered and impossible to ignore. Her paintings will make you flinch, but just try to look away. Go on, we dare you.

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!

TERRY GILLIAM‘s (1940- ) marvelous and surreal animations for Monty Python featured cut-up Victorian photos and bulbous drawings of giant feet, but his movies are twice as unhinged. Gilliam’s jumbled films invite us into fantastical parallel dreamworlds where anything can happen and usually does, whether it includes time-traveling dwarves (Time Bandits), bureaucratic cities of documentation in triplicate (Brazil), an incomprehensible Dr. Gonzo (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), or Matt Damon with a goofy haircut (The Brothers Grimm).

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! Let’s kick things off with one of the most indisputably weird storytellers of all time…

Somewhere, a parallel universe exists where FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924) survived his illness, agreed to have his stories translated into English, and became Weird Tales‘s second superstar alongside H.P. Lovecraft. As it is, he has to settle for posthumous recognition as one of the greatest authors of all time. In his works, a man turns into a giant cockroach; another starves himself to death for the amusement of onlookers; a third is held in endless thrall to a mysterious castle’s bureaucracy; and a fourth, deemed a criminal, must have the judge’s “sentence” carved into his flesh by a fiendish justice machine. But they are all the same man, and that man is Kafka.