aucer Attack! is a graphical chronicle of the golden age
of the UFO, the 1950s. Rather than telling the tale in words,
the book uses vibrant reprints of film and civil defense posters,
pictures of magazine and book covers, toys, and more to reconstitute the
zeitgeist of an age noted for its paranoia, naivete and sense of
wonder. It delivers everything from mutilated cows to Air Force cover-ups in crackling color.
The book is divided into chapters, although it may not be apparent at
first because the omnipotent graphics provide their own meta-structure.
The "Fateful Encounter" chapter retells reporter Bill Bequette's reputed contribution to the genre. Bequette had interviewed pilot Kenneth Arnold, who had had an encounter with nine, shiny, flat objects flying in the
mountains. From Arnold's description of their motion ("...they flew
like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water...") came
Bequette's colorful term "flying saucer."
Subsequent chapters focus on Hollywood's treatment of the phenomenon
(It Conquered the World, bubblegum cards from The
Outer Limits) and the inexhaustible armada of toys with a
saucer-theme (Frisbee-types, costumes, puzzles, lunchboxes). There's
also a gallery of comic book covers in which superheros (Hawkman, The
Flash, Green Lantern, even Archie) face down extra-terrestrial menaces.
For fans of the old pulps especially, this is Shangri-La. Magazines
like Fate Magazine, Galaxy Science Fiction,
and Amazing Stories live again to warn "keep your eyes on
Venus." But Saucer Attack! also covers more scientifically respectable magazines such as
Mechanix Illustrated, which hypothesized that, in the future, everyone might have a saucer (it even questioned whether saucers would solve traffic congestion).
A museum of a wondrous time
Saucer Attack! is a minor masterpiece. Just about every
nuance of culture influenced by the saucer phenomenon is represented and
described, with no judgments made. The '50s are what they are, and if
many today might look back with feelings of superiority over an
apparently more naive time, many look back with envy too. That sense of
wonder, the ease of awe in the '50s that supported multiple Hugo
Gernsback science and science fiction-related publications, is not so
easily had today.
Father and son writing team Eric and Leif Nesheim showed wise
restraint with their use of text in this volume, for the pictures can
largely speak for themselves. The graphical and typographical styles of
this era rush to embrace modernism with rock-'em-sock-'em saturated colors
and serif-less, Spartan fonts. Yet most of the visual representation of
this time still seems new and unworldly, largely because of the
widespread use of illustration over photography.
The illustrations of people, saucers and aliens have exaggerated motion and expression (think Mars Attacks! trading cards for an idea of the era's design style). These techniques are similarly used in comic
illustration, and lend the golden age of saucers an air of
hyper-excitement and "dare-to-believe" challenge. In letting the
artwork convey and the text assist, the Nesheims prove themselves
responsible curators of a rich and wondrous time.
