Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard for February 01, 2009

Kind of like the Twilight Zone episode, ‘To Serve Man’. Turns out the book by that name that the aliens had was a cook book.

I don’t remember that episode, but it sounds like a good one!

I remember it (it was based on a short story by that title). It’s alluded to in “Madagascar”, where a lemur holds up a book plainly titled “To Serve Lemur” and shouts hysterically, “It’s a cookbook! IT’S A COOKBOOK!!”

They say we taste just like chicken.

Maybe it just wants to play.

Just kidding. I was referring to those old ’50s sci-fi movies where the egghead pacifist scientist tells the realist military types not to kill the creature since it just wants to communicate and think of all we can learn from it, blah blah blah, and then the monster fries him.

I once read an article about anthropologists who got a chance to interview some members of a tribe of cannibals. According to the translator, the cannibals said that if eating people wasn’t part of their religion, they wouldn’t do it - humans taste terrible!

“To Serve Man” was a short story by Richard Matheson, a far, far too overlooked writer. Many shows of the 60s adapted his stories.

Richard Matheson did indeed write a number of stories for “Twilight Zone”, but “To Serve Man” wasn’t one of them. That story was written by Damon Knight, and it appeared originally in Galaxy magazine in 1950.

Not to take a thing away from Richard Matheson, who is awesome, but “To Serve Man” was written by Damon Knight, who was also awesome.

(Can’t believe I signed up for GoComics just to make that point. :)

“Yum, yum, eat ’em up.”