And as long as we're linking Dinosaur Comics: The Midas Touch

The text and metatext of this one were just too good not to transcribe for easy reading, with a few edits to fit the new format. I wish I'd thought of the following story. The least I could do was ham up the following image in tribute:



The Myth of King Midas

Midas was a king who was nice to a friend of the God of Wine, and so he gets a wish from the God of Wine! NICE! And so Midas wishes that everything he touched would turn to gold. Instantly the ground he's standing on transforms to gold!

The gold change races across the planet's surface and down into the mantle like a shockwave, transmuting it instantly. In seconds, the Earth's iron-nickel core becomes pure non-ferrous gold, and the planet's magnetic field is lost. Unshielded from solar wind, every living creature begins to absorb fatal levels of radiation. The soft gold of the planetary crust, unable to sustain the weight placed upon it, begins to buckle and distort.

Midas watches in horror as his planet dies a golden death.

He's soon overcome by the terrible sensation of drowning on dry land: any air that touches his lungs is being transmuted on contact into tiny flecks of gold. He suffocates and dies as his lungs fill with the precious metal. Air that touches his cooling body continues to transmute, and he's soon covered in a fine golden layer of ash.

Later, aliens discover Midas' body and use him as a highly unstable source of gold, keeping him in vacuum suspension with magnetic fields. But their ship soon suffers a power failure, Midas hits the floor, and the ship is transmuted. The ship drifts until drawn in by the gravitational field of a backwater planet, where it crashes and causes the planet to suffer the same fate as Earth. We join our story centuries later as our heroes, bounty hunters seeking the near-mythic Midas Flesh, successfully break quarantine and get past the defences erected around the planet. they are the first to land on the Second Golden Planet.

. . . The End?


(As long as I'm stealing Mr. North's stuff and editing it I'm going to go ahead and recommend the incredible Dinosaur Comics collection for your Christmas shopping needs.)