From the October 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries #14
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Fingers of Doom!
Dark Mysteries Weekend coming atcha! One of my favorite artists from this notorious series is Hy Fleishman, I’ve posted a few of his stories around here before and everyone seems to really dig him. Now dig that splash and just try not to get a shiver up your spine!
From the October 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries #14
From the October 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries #14
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11 comments:
Another "lost" pre-code classic ; this story has it all characters with no morality , dacaying corpses ,etc. especially loved the last page with those panels of the hands rising from their tomb and the one of poor Gus falling in the mixer ...
One more time , Thanks for sharing !
I guess the moral is: don't marry Emma.
Poor Emma was already too far ground up!
Yuhgh. At what percentage do you think her grinding crossed the line into "too far"?
Speaking of this story's strange insistence on quantifying, I love the panel in the cemetery where the officiator's entire elegy seems to consist of an itemization: "ONLY HER HANDS ARE BEING BURIED." I'll give you the special preacher's cut-rate: let's see, on the bill we have hands, quantity two, and then... hey that's it! Just hands!
I am always surprised by these twist endings where it turns out the splash, as good as it is, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the story. Bet you didn't see that coming, kiddies! Two scenarios occur to me: is it that these were churned out so fast there was never a second pass at the draft once the story wandered astray of the initial intentions? Or maybe when the artists were running late they just tacked on a freelance title panel from somewhere else? Either way, it came as a shock to me when, rather than a fingerless corpse, were were treated to the opposite. It does amount to one of those awkward serial cheats from the forties where, lo and behold, Flash really did jump from the burning spacecoach seconds before before it went over the moon cliff last week.
Agreed, the splash is seriously out of joint with the story. I was thinking the writer must have had second thoughts halfway through, with the opening pages already done. The tale suggested in the splash would have been creepier, IMHO.
I LOVED THIS ONE, SO WEIRD AND CREEPY AND HY'S ART IS TOP NOTCH AS ALWAYS.
To me the splash is no more out of joint with the story than say the hundreds of comics with cover art depicting something that doesn't actually happen inside the pages. I mean, should the splash have been a image of her grinding away inside the mixer, thus giving away the murder? Possibly the splash was intended as the cover art (since I think the actual cover art is also by Hy anyway) but maybe changed and just used for the story instead, you know, to throw the reader off from figuring out the entire story plot from page one.
Good comments today already, I like when everyone gets to thinking about stuff like this...
Did EC know that the cryptkeeper was moonlighting for the competition? Blue beatle
Ka-WAY-zee!!! This one may not be particularly good in the logic department, but it sure is entertaining.
I think the knife is the most misleading aspect, since her hands were severed already.
Exactly, Todd! I mean, since we must assume the body's made of cement, I'm pretty sure he'd do better hammering the hands off.
On the hands-in-grave theme, tourists may wish to visit Bernard Capes' undernoticed classic The Marble Hands (pdf, HorrorMasters site) - very short and perfectly, quietly nasty.
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