Aether Flying

Sometimes you read something you found in a bookstore and you know that you're still reading something very few others have. Dick Lupoff and Steve Stiles' The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle & His Incredible Aether Flyer is definitely one of those experiences.

The edition I picked up was published in 2010, and I was working in a bookstore at the time.  It stuck around for so long eventually I had a good look at it, because I kept mistaking it for some kind of companion book for someone's book series (it's exactly the size for that sort of thing).  In fact, I lost track of how long it'd been sitting on the shelf.  It almost became legendary, just some oversized, thin volume that sat there for what seemed like forever, and all that time I had no idea what it actually was.

Well, the bookstore and the whole company went out of business last year, and during the liquidation process this oddity of course lingered just like it had since the store got it, and so I had more opportunities to have a look, and to my surprise I discovered that it was basically a graphic novel.  This was a little weird to discover, because the store definitely had a graphic novel section, and this was something that had haunted the sci-fi section.  Maybe it was a fluke of categorization (though some notable graphic novels could be found in the biography section, so this wouldn't be the only instance where a graphic novel was not listed with the rest of the graphic novels).

And yes, as the title suggests, there's a certain goofy charm to this thing.  The "aether flyer" is basically a steampunk spaceship, and Lupoff's inspiration was a parody of the books he'd been reading, sci-fi published between 1880 and 1920, basically the golden age of the genre.  You can enjoy Professor Thinwhistle completely on its own as a totally ironic story that might have been made into a typically bad Ed Wood flick in another lifetime, or appreciate how it reflects the somewhat warped sensibilities of an era when science fiction really was science fiction, before the technology boom heralded by Edison and Tesla.  It's like John Carter as viewed through a kaleidoscope.  As the movie John Carter recently bombed, it shouldn't be a surprise that Professor Thinwhistle seems to have bombed, too.

Its road to publication is as convoluted as anything else about it.  Lupoff tried to make a graphic novel of it in the 60s, but only got any interest at the suggestion he turn it into an actual novel, which he did, Into the Aether, published in 1974.  Then Steve Stiles, one of the friends Lupoff originally discussed the project with in 1966, helps him create the graphic version for Heavy Metal magazine, and eventually the whole thing as originally envisioned becomes a reality in 1991.

It's the definition of a passion project, and geared toward aficionados who may not exist in the numbers some might have anticipated.  But it's a fun little curiosity, and well worth my accidental devotion.