Comics and Lafferty make a fascinating story, given the place comics occupy in his work as both an influence on his techniques and a subject in their own right. Think of the Toonerville Trolley and its influence on “Interurban Queen,” Rocky McCrocky, the cartooning of Enniscorthy Sweeny, Dorg and cave art as cartooning, and so on. There is an alternate universe in which Lafferty’s stories get adapted during the second flourishing of horror anthology comics in the 1960s and ea

The largest church in my city is that of a Christian sect that will not show the cross. It is built in imitation of a style that requires the cross, and the simple elimination of it would leave an emptiness and discordance. What is done to disguise this gaping omission? There is not permitted to be seen one right angle in the entire building, not one natural congruence of horizontal and vertical line. There are asymmetrical spires all over the place, there are twenty-nine deg

Technology is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other. —C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures These were sometimes criticized, but mostly by persons of standards derived from an earlier age, from the pre-postliterate age. — Serpent’s Egg Lafferty sent this little piece off on February 2, 1975, for the “Oklahoma Authors” series in Oklahoma Librarian. It appeared eight months later in the October issue, alongside a great Lafferty photog