Sunday, May 4, 2008

All the Shapes of Fear

To mix things up a bit around here I thought I’d give you a dream team example of Bill Everett inks on a Silver Age collaboration with Don Heck working the pencils. It's a really great story showcasing two golden era legends still going strong in the 70's. This issue of Chamber of Chills is actually one of the very first horror comic books I ever bought with my own money as a kid, so it holds an extra special place in my little black heart.

From the March 1973 issue of Chamber of Chills #3






10 comments:

Mr. Karswell said...

This issue also contains a great adaptation of The Thing on the Roof which was my first ever introduction (at age 7) to the works of Robert E. Howard! Of course it didn’t take long to become an REH fanatic after that…

Anonymous said...

very cool story! wild how this looks nothing like either heck or everetts style, more like buscema

Anonymous said...

WOW TOTAL DREAM TEAM! AND GREAT STORY TWIST TOO THAT'S KIND OF SAD AND DOWNBEAT.

The Vicar of VHS said...

Some really wild, almost psychedelic images in here--esp. the helmet designs when they're on the bike, and the eyes ripping through the panels on pg. 4--almost looks to have been inspired by the famous Dali-designed dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound...or am i reading too much into it?

And "WHOK!" has to be one of my top five sound effects. I never knew hitting a kid with a bike sounded like that. Chilling!

One other thing--that "bird beaked demon" on page 2 looks very familiar--it seems to be a design that crops up again and again. I know a member of the Green Lantern Corps looks a lot like that, and it seems to me I've seen the basic design elsewhere too. Anyone with more knowledge than I know its origin? Was it an Everett creation, or just something that haunts the dreams of comic artists through history?

Anonymous said...

Great melding of styles,one sketchy and realistic,one fluid(at times literally!)and surreal.as for the story,Cartman was right.damn hippies.

Mr. Karswell said...

>"bird beaked demon" Anyone with more knowledge than I know its origin?

Maybe from the mythological griffin?

Anonymous said...

Is the writer the science fiction writer George Alec Effinger?

Mr. Karswell said...

>Is the writer the science fiction writer George Alec Effinger?

That is actually a very good question. Of course it's also one that I have absolutely no answer for. Anybody else know anything?

The Vicar of VHS said...

I dunno..it doesn't seem much like a Griffin...

And is it wrong that I now want to write a fantasy story in which one of the main characters is a Griffin named Andy, with a hatchling named Opie?

Probably so...

Anonymous said...

This story's taking on a Fife of it's own!