“Now that I’ve been awakened, I know they’ve been among us almost all the time, hypnotizing the entire human race. I understood EVERYTHING, including the fact that if I gave any sign of alarm, the ‘Fascinators’ would instantly command me to return to my original state... And I WOULD OBEY.”
They Live is definitely one of the masterpieces of world cinema. Written and directed by John Carpenter in 1988, the story follows John Nada, a drifter who discovers that the ruling class is actually a race of aliens capable of passing as humans. From the anonymity of their disguise, these extraterrestrials work tirelessly to manipulate humanity into obeying the system, embracing capitalism, and accepting the status quo without question. A highly relevant work, of course: they achieve such domination through subliminal messages in advertising and the media... What a coincidence!
From Short Story to Comic
It all began with a story called Eight O’Clock in the Morning, written by Ray Nelson in 1963 for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The original tale involved an alien invasion in the vein of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it lacked most of the social commentary of the film.
Many years later, in 1986, that story was adapted into comic book form, under the name “Nada”. With Nelson himself handling the script and artist Bill Wray on illustrations, it was this adaptation that would finally captivate and inspire John Carpenter to write and direct the most prophetic of his films: “They Live”.
The 1986 Comic
“Nada” is seven pages long and was published in the magazine Alien Encounters in 1986. The comic closely follows Nelson’s story, and there are strong similarities between the plots of They Live and Nada, especially the climax of storming a local television station. The only difference is that the famous Hofmann sunglasses do not appear in Nelson’s story or Wray’s comic. Nelson’s hero, George Nada, goes to a theater to see a live hypnosis act, and when he hears the command to wake up at the end of the show, he suddenly realizes he is surrounded by aliens.
Both in Nelson’s story and Wray’s, it is revealed that the aliens, the Fascinators, are disgusting creatures with many eyes and pustules all over, who control humans through hypnosis. However, the cruelty with which George Nada handles the matter makes him an unsympathetic character and even suggests, at times, that he might just be seeing space bugs everywhere because he is a delusional madman.
When he sets out to “wake” others, Nada first gets violent with his fiancée, ties her up and gags her, then shoots his roommates, whom he sees as aliens. The ending, which does honor to the title of the original story, clears up any doubt about that, but we don’t want to spoil it for you. If you want to read it yourself, head over to SAP Cómics, which has some very clean scans, like the ones we’ve included below as examples.
