Captain's Library & Theatre CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND Part Three: Contact

In the past Two Days, You Have Read of Close Enounters of the First Kind and Second Kind!

Cover for Cinefantastique V7N3&4 (1977) by Barclay Shaw
Now, join us as we experience a Close Encounter of the Third Kind!

We interrupt the graphic retelling to present what follows after the Mothership descends, which no graphic print imagery (even by Walt Simonson, Klaus Janson, and Marie Severin) could provide...

Wow!

Now back to the graphic novel...

If you're like me, and you've seen CE3K in all three of it's edits (Original. Special Edition, Director's Cut)  you've no doubt noticed differences between the film and the print adaptation!

Luckily, writer/editor Archie Goodwin provided a text feature to explain some of them.
Remember, this was in the dark, primitive days before the Internet, e-mail, portable drives, CD-Roms and other physical media, even DVDs or mass-market videotape...

With all the difficulties they faced, we're lucky this mag wasn't filled with blank pages!

Thank you for joining us on this look back almost a half-century to Steven Spielberg's first alien encounter movie!

Now Go See the New Movie...

Disclosure Day

Captain's Library CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND Part Two: Evidence

We have Already Witnessed a Close Encounter of the First Kind (Sighting)...

Unpublished ad design

...now, we're going to the next level!

To Be Concluded, Tomorrow!

You'll note that penciller Walt Simonson and inker Klaus Janson didn't render the main characters to resemble their screen counterparts!
This continued a trend from Marvel's Planet of the Apes movie adaptations which also did not illustrate the humans like astronauts Taylor (Charlton Heston), Brent (James Franciscus), and mute Nova (Linda Harrison) to look like the performers (though the renderings of the ape characters closely-resembled the prosthetic make-ups)!
(Interestingly, British comics adapting the Planet of the Apes TV series before CE3K did draw the human astronauts Virdon and Burke to look like actors Ron Harper and James Naughton, as we showed HERE and HERE!
For the record, most of the later movie and TV adaptations by the House of Ideas (as Marvel called itself back then) did, in fact, use performers' likenesses.

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Captain's Library & Theatre CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND Part One: Sighting

We Have Already Seen

...unexplainable events are occurring all over thw world!
While they seem unconnected, there are those who believe there is a link...

Here's how it played on-screen...remember , writer Archie Goodwin, penciler Walt Simonson, inker Klaus Janson, and colorist Marie Severin had only two pages to fit all this in!

Now, on with the story...

Again, let's see the actual scene in the film.

Personally, I believe no one could've done a better job rendering it on the page!

Let's wind up the chapter...

Tomorrow: Evidence!
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Director's Cut
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Captain's Library CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND Prologue

With the Opening of His New Film about Alien Contact...

by Stephen Spielberg, we thought it only appropriate to "bookend" it with his first alien contact film from almost a half-century ago...

Tomorrow: Sighting!

Written by Archie Goodwin, penciled by Walt Simonson, and inked by Klaus Janson, this adaptation of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in Marvel Comics Super Special #3 (1978) was a unique experience for the comic creatives!

With no actual danger/threat and little violent "action", but lots of spectacle involving deliberately-nebulous spacecraft with few visual details, Simonson and Janson had to figure out how to visualize alien vehicles that appeared to be made of...light!
In the 1970s, there was no computer color to enhance artwork and do the tricks we're so used to seeing today!
But colorist Marie Severin was more than up to the challenge, producing some of the best work of her career, aided by the fact this was printed as a slick-stock magazine, not a newsprint comic, and that the people who did the hand-cut color separations were given extra time to follow her color guides exactly!
(A luxury rarely-afforded with regular comic books!)
The end result you're seeing is a triumph of artistic skill by every participant over near-impossible to achieve (at the time) graphic requirements!

Sit back and enjoy the ride!
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Director's Cut
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