Dec 06
Click for full imageHex Comments: What is THE THING? I’m not sure, but possibly a giant meatloaf with a rubber arm and a pair of huge headlamp eyeballs.
Published 1963
Many thanks to Hex!
(Average: 8.55 out of 10)
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Hex Comments: What is THE THING? I’m not sure, but possibly a giant meatloaf with a rubber arm and a pair of huge headlamp eyeballs.
Published 1963
Many thanks to Hex!
(Average: 8.55 out of 10)Loading...
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December 6th, 2010 at 9:03 am
At first glance, I’d say Sarah Palin is searching for her eyeglasses…
December 6th, 2010 at 9:05 am
Also notable:
Apparently the author is a sea-lion (see the parenthesis under his name). This must be the first and only time in history that a marine mammal writes a monster novel. But perhaps he had a ghost-writer…
December 6th, 2010 at 10:01 am
“All your cookies are belong to me!”
December 6th, 2010 at 11:05 am
The thing seems to be on fire! No wonder he wants water.
December 6th, 2010 at 11:08 am
This was a good episode of lost btw.
HEYYYOOOOO
… I’ll get my coat ….
December 6th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Go for the eyes Boo! Go for the eyes! RAGGHHH!
December 6th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
…You know, I hate to say it but it’s actually kind of cute…
December 6th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
A.R.Yngve: I’m desperately trying to find a punnish way of naming another marine mammal as the author of a monster novel…but failing. Closest I can get is that movie OF GODS AND MONSTERS, which was about James Whale.
I do love these old books with their old prices. This one cost 2/6. That’s 12.5p for younger viewers.
December 6th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
PS I’ve just noticed the typographical error: “from hell?” should have a capital F, surely. This invalidates the whole cover for me!
December 6th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
To me it has more than a passing resemblance to His Noodliness The Flying Spaghetti Monster…
December 6th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Jeff, quite. It’s not a monster, it’s really sweet! Whoza widdle cute meatloaf with one freakish ten-mile-long arm…
I think it’s the huge eyes that do it.
(I do like the careful use of capital letters at the start of not quite all of the sentences.)
December 6th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Cthulhu it ain’t.
I remember naught but the maddening pounding of the native drums and the surf slapping against the hull whilst we fled that great cyclopian meatloaf horror.
December 6th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
I wonder…is that the money I could be saving on my car insurance with Geico?
Perhaps not a funny pun for people who lack the joys of Geico insurance commercials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsHXMxoCXeU
December 6th, 2010 at 7:15 pm
Meatloaf – Bat out of Hell 3
December 6th, 2010 at 9:36 pm
This is such a captivating cover! I keep coming up with different sound effects for the scene…Oh, how I wish I could be like Don Martin, and come up with *THHBLORPNIBSH* onomatopoeiae….
December 6th, 2010 at 9:43 pm
SI wrote:
“This was a good episode of lost btw.
HEYYYOOOOO
… I’ll get my coat ….”
No wait, SI, don’t get your coat. You have a point. That cover is how LOST really ought to have ended.
December 6th, 2010 at 9:44 pm
“What is THE THING?”
-Err, a horror movie that was remade?
December 6th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Adorable. I want to adopt THE THING.
December 7th, 2010 at 5:08 am
It looks like Meat Wad from Aqua Teen Hunger force doing some moonlighting:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2006/08/4836.ars
December 7th, 2010 at 5:43 am
Come on guys! It’s the Spaghetti Monster, isn’t it? Gee he seems to appear everywhere these days
December 7th, 2010 at 6:43 am
Looks like something Dr. Seuss shat out.
December 7th, 2010 at 10:47 am
I don’t think “from Hell” really scans as a possible answer to “What is the Thing?”
December 7th, 2010 at 11:54 am
“From HELL?”
No, uh, from Wasilla, actually.
December 10th, 2010 at 5:39 am
“Dinsdale?!”
December 12th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
OK, Don Hilliard wins this comment thread HANDS DOWN with the snappiest riff of all time.
😀
February 9th, 2011 at 10:13 pm
I finally found out what the Thing is,
http://yvonnelouise.deviantart.com/art/Alien-Pendant-II-196801740?q=in%3Aartisan%20sort%3Atime&qo=185
July 8th, 2011 at 6:49 am
Reminds me of Kelley Jones “The Hammer”…
Has a horrible Chtulhu type monster send a proboscis out and devours cultists who’ve messed up on him.
The hero-
“Hurry! Cthar-Fthagen has extended his Anus and is Sucking them to Hell! Now we act!”
August 3rd, 2011 at 12:21 pm
I can say proudly (?) that I’ve actually read this book. Indeed I may still have that very paperback edition somewhere. The monster is somehow evoked by the declining moral and religious standards of Britain. and is conquered by the power of prayer.. A monster novel written from the viewpoint of an elderly “Daily Mail” reader, if you can imagine such a thing!
November 1st, 2013 at 4:53 pm
There are many bad covers on this site, but this is one of the few that causes me to issue a great guffaw every time I see it.
A less apt illustration of a hell-beast one could hardly hope to find.
November 1st, 2013 at 7:54 pm
Nearly a thousand covers, so I can be forgiven for never having spotted this in my delvings.
But now I’m trying to imagine a sea lion reading the Daily Mail.
November 4th, 2013 at 2:27 pm
“Extry! Extry! PM caught with walrus lady! Read all about it in the Daily Mail Sea Lion Supplement!”
January 14th, 2017 at 7:36 am
Looking at this from the distant future of 2017, and reading Colin’s summary, I bet the author fits the current internet definition of sea lion too…
Who knew creatures from the pit of hell were so cute?
November 15th, 2017 at 5:06 pm
Looking at this from the distant future of 2017, I laughed at Brian B’s Baldur’s Gate reference in 6.)
November 15th, 2017 at 7:41 pm
Looking at this from six years almost to the day since my first trip to the US… re Brian (13), have Geico adverts always been shite? I mean, the current one isn’t even in the top 3 ‘He-Man’ themed adverts of 2017.
Oh, yes, book cover. They seem to be muddling up their Tom Baker stories: the Creature from the Pit looked like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD2NT8fd4Kk
and what they’ve shown on the cover was Kroll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ZN4FRdt4k (guest-starring John Abineri from the Ferrero Rocher adverts as Old Greg)
November 16th, 2017 at 12:53 am
@Tat: the very first Geico ads were okay, but then they changed the voice of the gecko and they got worse. Way before you got to the US. Still, it beats the Cavemen ads. (The Tiny House one made me laugh, I must admit)
Being as this predates the Doctor, I wonder if the writers saw this?
Did anyone ever figure out what the (Sea-Lion) bit meant?
November 16th, 2017 at 1:55 am
@GSS ex-noob: so who was the gecko before Max Branning (which, if you know ‘EastEnders’ is about the least reliable voice you want for anything to do with cars)? And why do they run four or five concurrent campaigns (including one with Skeletor, as well as the ‘take a closer look’ thing, the ‘that’s surprising’ one,the ‘it’s what you do’ one)?
Why can’t they leave car insurance to the Russian-accented Meerkats?
Ans the gulf between the scripted descriptions of Kroll and Erato and what we got on screen was immense. Bob Holmes reading this, though, is vaguely plausible.
November 16th, 2017 at 4:15 am
This cover looked sort of familiar, so I did some checking. I think the artist might have been ripping off a couple of covers done by Jack Kirby in the 1960s.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/280912095482357305/
November 17th, 2017 at 4:47 am
@Tat: It was Kelsey Grammer, doing a much higher-class gecko. A bit peeved, but trustworthy.
Why they run so many at a time, I don’t know. It does make it slightly less boring when they’re a major sponsor of something you’re forced to watch live.
@Tor: Oh, like if Jack Kirby couldn’t draw. (I met him once, briefly, near the end of his life; splendid chap). (Also, love the new Thor movie)
October 8th, 2022 at 10:31 pm
This cover looks borrowed from The Gallery of Regrettable Food”. I could have picked any one of half a dozen works but the link below will do as well as any of the others:
https://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/ads/62.html
October 10th, 2022 at 12:11 am
I double-checked to make sure this wasn’t another pseudonym of Rev. Fanthorpe.
Nope.
It was, however, first published under the pseudonym “Sea-Lion”.
WTF indeed.
@JJYoyo: Love the Regrettable Food. Various bloggers have taken on the challenge to actually cook them.
October 10th, 2022 at 1:16 am
A little Junji Ito, rather more Muppet Monsters.