OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)
By:
June 5, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THRILLER | ROBERT LOREN FLEMING and TREVOR VON EEDEN | 1983
“She has seven seconds to save the world,” ran one of the taglines for Thriller, a 1983 comic book created by writer Robert Loren Fleming and artist Trevor Von Eeden. It’s a slogan designed to be misunderstood, like nearly everything about the series. As it turns out, the woman whose ghostly face dominates the first issue’s cover, Angie Thriller — no relation to the Michael Jackson album that was then dominating the pop charts — has seven “seconds” in the sense of assistants, all of them uncanny weirdos except for her new recruit. He is, naturally, the narrative’s focal character, a befuddled, blond videojournalist whose identical twin brother has just been beheaded by a pro-wrestler-looking guy with a scabbard for a spine.
Set “fifty years in the future” (one character is a nine-foot-tall “artificial man,” another lives in his Rolls-Royce and has “the storage capacity of several 647 k-byte computers — in my head!”), Thriller begins as a monsoon of half-revealed information and glancingly seen imagery. Von Eeden crams every page with fragmentary panels and thrashing speed lines; Fleming’s dialogue intersperses two-or-three-word pellets with the occasional expository snowball. The plot of the thing usually makes zero sense — an issue-long fight scene on top of a speeding train is somehow resolved by two characters having their eyes magically exchanged with each other’s — but everything seems enormously exciting anyway. (The other ad slogan for the series was “you can’t read it fast enough.”)
It’s not entirely surprising that Thriller burned itself out quickly: Fleming jumped ship after seven issues, Von Eeden an issue later. The series limped to a conclusion with creators who made it much more clear and straightforward, and thereby sapped it of all its fun. Its first few episodes, though, are startlingly weird and frenetic, even 43-out-of-50 years later. What Fleming and Von Eeden got right about their future was its unabated waves of information overload, and the frustrating joy of grabbing a little bit of understanding as everything zooms violently past.
OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on RIDDLEY WALKER | Carlo Rotella on THE FACE | Sara Ryan on DREAMSNAKE | Matthew Battles on THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | Ramona Lyons on HIGH-RISE | Adam McGovern on SHADRACH IN THE FURNACE | Deb Chachra on THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY | Tom Nealon on DHALGREN | Michael Grasso on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | Stephanie Burt on BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR | Nikhil Singh on SABRE | Gordon Dahlquist on VALIS | Miranda Mellis on THE DISPOSSESSED | Marc Weidenbaum on SOFTWARE | Peggy Nelson on THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER | Josh Glenn on ENGINE SUMMER | Mimi Lipson on A SCANNER DARKLY | Douglas Wolk on THRILLER | David Hirmes on ARZACH | Anthony Miller on SHOCKWAVE RIDER | Annie Nocenti on JIMBO | Seth on MR. MACHINE | Alex Brook Lynn on JUDGE DREDD | Joe Alterio on THE INCAL | Jason Grote on JOSIE AND THE ELEVATOR.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!