Joe Orlando partnered early with Wallace Wood on a variety of science fiction comics, including several for EC Comics. But he quickly made a name for himself and struck out on his own, carving out a long and distinguished career in American comics. Orlando became a mainstay at EC, especially on science fiction, and The Planetoid and Other Stories collects his first two dozen. All of them, scripted by editor/writer Al Feldstein, serve up classic O. Henry-style shock endings, including a mind-bending time-travel twister in which a man visits the past and (unknowingly) romances his own mother (think about it), a gender-switching look at a future where women are the breadwinners and men are the homemakers, another future where marriages are limited by law to three-year contracts, a good old-fashioned ''planets collide'' shocker, an animal rights parable, plus lots of rollicking space opera, aliens, and, of course, interplanetary monsters (some of them human). This volume also includes a co
