Ever since Planet of the Apes, a disaster-wrecked Statue of Liberty has been used frequently in movies and on their posters to symbolise ruined America.
It's a cliche that started in literature, and actually goes back to 1887: the oldest occurrence I've read is in J. A. Mitchell's novella The Last American, which featured illustrations like these...
..and which, along with Planet of the Apes, led to numerous book, pulp magazine and comic covers featuring Liberty in various states of disrepair and repurposing.
It's mildly unfair to include Warday here, in that it was first published in the 1980s by a respectable firm, but Streiber abandoned his career as a writer of obvious fiction in order to become a wildly disreputable purveyor of alien-abduction bullshit and plagiarist, so fuck him.
3 comments:
Yes, she'd blow alike like ashes, I suspect. Thanks for that cover; I'll add it to the post.
I feel obligated to note, in defense of "Mighty Samson," that one of its defining features was depicting how various real New York City landmarks were faring in its post-apocalypse world. Pretty much each story was a visit to one such place: Central Park (a jungle), the Bronx Zoo (overrun with giant mutated animals), the subway (home of mole people), etc. So, a story built around the Statue of Liberty was a natural extension of the formula rather than copying.
That I did not know: thank you! I need to see if some of those old comics are available on the public domain comic sites.
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