"Let's see if this old timer can still weave a good yarn." The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television review

Back in the 1990s when my family had the Sci Fi Channel, whenever the channel would run marathons of the original Twilight Zone I tried to tune in and catch as many as I could. I certainly didn't love them all equally -- "The Howling Man" mesmerized me; "From Agnes - with Love" was tiresome; and I was flummoxed as to why "The Lateness of the Hour" was shot on video. All in all, I understood why the television series was so highly regarded. Thirty years after their original broadcast, those shows still stood up. I eventually bought the complete series on DVD.

Recently Humanoids published an interesting graphic novel titled The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television by Koren Shadmi. I had never previously seen Shadmi's work and I'm quite impressed by his style. The art has very clean lines and the pacing is quite relaxed. Somehow Shadmi found a means to tell Serling's life story in less than 170 pages without meandering or rushing through his life; indeed, Shadmi has some very creative ideas about how to approach Serling's life, framing it through scenes of Serling aboard an airplane narrating his biography to another passenger. Shadmi makes the story feel like an authentic account of Serling's life, but the weirdness of the Twilight Zone creeps into Serling's account.

The book is also told in black & white, the format one immediately thinks of when thinking of the Twilight Zone. Scenes set aboard the airplane (the framing device) are cast in deep grey shades, setting them off from the rest of the book. Shadmi spends a fair bit of time on Serling's life before becoming a writer, depicting his actions as a paratrooper in World War II. His wartime exploits aren't explicitly connected to his later career, but these details were very interesting to me. I knew a number of anecdotes about Serling's life and I was pleased to see many of them replicated here - Shadmi recreates Serling's notorioius interview with Mike Wallace and he visits Serling's falling out with Ray Bradbury. I'm a little disappointed that Serling's put-down on Night Gallery as "Mannix in a graveyard" didn't make it in, but the book certainly gets across what a dispiriting experience Night Gallery was for Serling.

I enjoyed learning more about Serling's television career prior to Twilight Zone. I knew of of his productions (and I've seen the film adaptation of Patterns) but this filled in a lot of information about how Serling became a television playwright. For all the acclaim Serling won, it's a little startling to see just how brief that span of his career lasted. The Twilight Zone really secured him a place in television history.

If you're a Twilight Zone fan you'll want to read this; if you're interested in the history of television, you'll find much of interest; if you just want a great biography, check it out.