Million Year Picnic

The Million-Year Picnic

In the summer, 1946 issue of “Planet Stories,” Ray Bradbury published his influential story, “The Million-Year Picnic.” It was the first of a series of Martian stories he published in the late Forties which were collected and published in book form in 1950 as “The Martian Chronicles.” In this first story of the series, which takes place in the far-distant year of 1999, an Earth family of a husband and wife and their three sons land in their “family rocket” on a Mars where water still flows in the canals and in the fountains of long-dead Martian cities. The parents tell their sons they have come to Mars for a vacation, a picnic. When one of their sons asks how long they’ll be there, the father cryptically replies, “For a million years.”

It seems Earth has been fighting global wars for a long time, for decades. Indeed, the family had escaped Earth just before a nuclear holocaust seems to have finally obliterated the last traces of human civilization. “Wars kept getting bigger and bigger,” the father later tells his sons, “until they killed Earth. That’s why we ran away.” His plan is that they will begin anew on Mars and, with the daughters of another family following them in their own rocket, the children will build a new civilization on Mars, free of the hatreds and poisons of Earth. They are the new “Martians.”

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is understandable why Bradbury would wish to escape from into the wilderness and begin anew, leaving all wars behind. Twenty years later, in the mid-1960s, thousands of young hippies were feeling the same way about American society. They wanted to escape the degradations of capitalism and the pollution of the cities and go “back to the land” where they could live simply, free of the trappings of modern industrial life. So they returned to the land and formed utopian New Age communes such as “The Farm” in Tennessee, “New Buffalo” in Taos, “Morning Star Ranch” in Marin County north of San Francisco, “Earth People’s Park” in Vermont, and similar communal experiments in a hundred other places.

Perhaps the owners of the first comic book store in Cambridge’s Harvard Square were still feeling something of that when they opened their business in the mid-1970s, because they called their store “The Million-Year Picnic.” I was living in Cambridge at the time and I began my serious adult collecting and reading of comic books at The Million-Year Picnic when it opened.

In addition to haunting the store for the comix, I also made a point of catching the myriad celebrities the owners brought in. One of them was bushy-bearded Frank Herbert who sat with me and a gaggle of other fans discussing “Dune.” I wish I could pass along the pearls of wisdom strewn about by Herbert in that session...but I can’t. It was a long time ago. I just don’t remember.

But I do remember, vividly, when Wendy Pini visited The Million-Year Picnic in 1978. She was 27-years-old at the time and, with her husband, Richard, had just launched the Elfquest comic. It would become fabulously successful, with Wendy responsible for the resulting graphic novels and Richard responsible for the various text spinoffs. In 1985 Richard and Wendy Pini won a Balrog Award for Best Artist for their “Elfquest” work.

But, in 1978, that was in the future, and that’s not why I remember Wendy Pini at The Million-Year Picnic so vividly. I remember her because she came dressed (or, rather, undressed) as Red Sonja, the swordwoman friend-rival of Conan. She was Frank Thorne’s Red Sonja, the artist who envisioned her first in the Marvel Comics “Conan,” then in her own comic book: Soft leather boots, a knife in a sheath strapped to her naked thigh, a chain mail bikini with large connecting links on the sides imprinting themselves into the flesh of her bare hips, and a flowing, flamboyant red wig. Her leather-gloved hands held a massive sword like they were used to hefting it. This was long before Warrior Princess Xena, or any other chicks in chain mail, and I’d never seen anything like her -- except in a comic book. But here was a savage swordwoman in the flesh! Very much in the flesh. There was about her a certain something, a je na sais quoi, which drew the fanboys to her like moths to a flame, me included. What was it? OK, let me just say it plain: She looked damn good and was sexy as hell!