Bat Boy, RIP

I have never approved on magazines like The National Enquirer or The Sun. I've always considered them to be exercises in tawdriness; deliberate appeals to that which is the basest part of our nature. That said, I have always been fond of The Weekly World News. Although it shared tabloid space with those other magazines, I always considered it to be a self-aware parody of those other magazines.

I don't think that the editors of the WWN ever expected people to believe that Bat Boy was alive and well, or that Ross Perot was meeting with aliens, or that Dick Cheney was a robot (okay, maybe the last). The WWN's goal was outlandishness and it did its job well. That said, one thing I especially liked is that some small percentage of their stories would be legitimate, albeit weird (and usually spun in a way to make them weirder) so it was always a challenge to distinguish between the genuine and the faux lunacy.

I sometimes wondered what it would be like to live in that hallucinatory parallel world that it depicted: a place where toasters could be possessed by the souls of the departed, a place where arctic bore holes could pierce the very bowels of hell, a place where zombies formed labor unions. I even toyed with the idea of using it as source-material for an X-Files on steroids RPG game.

I am sad to report that the Weekly World News is soon to be no more. Readership has been declining for years now (exacerbated by a change in owners and editorial direction) and the publishers have decided to pull the plug. The last issue will be printed on August the 27th. I hope it'll have a Bat Boy headline.