We have one more creepy
Charlton tale for you this week from the July 1953 issue of
The Thing #9, better artwork today too courtesy of
Bob Forgione who also created the cool cover for this issue. I'll have one more tale for you later this week before I head off to
Toronto for the
Rue Morgue Festival of Fear this weekend... if anyone else is going drop me a line and let me know.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
New Blog To Watch--- TEN CENT DREAMS. Says
TCD creator
Jamieson:
"...it's a Golden Age Comics blog~ with a spotlight slant on the ARTISTS of this wonderous era." So take a look and let him know what you think. Good luck with it Jamieson!
---Karswell
10 comments:
What a nasty little tale. I can't recall the last time I felt empathy for premeditated murderers.
WOW THIS IS A REALLY MEAN SPIRITED STORY....... AND EVER NOTICE HOW PRACTICALLY EVERY STORY WITH A CREEPY SEVERED HAND IS USUALLY ABOUT A PIANIST? GOOD STUFF KARS!!
This sure looks Ditko-esque to me.
Ditko began with Charlton, I believe.
Could his... uh... hand... be in this, too?
Ditko didn't start with Charlton until the spring of '54, almost a year later. And then he did some pretty cool stories for this title. His first published work wasn't until Oct 53, a couple of months after this issue came out, and not for Charlton. According to Bell Blake's well researched book on Ditko, STRANGE AND STRANGER: THE WORLD OF STEVE DITKO.
I meant Blake Bell. :)
Thanks for the info Trevor, and if anyone is interested in seeing other examples of Forgione (and Ditko) remember that you can always use the handy search engine at the top of my blog by simply entering artist names to find more of their stories in the THOIA Archive.
The only thing i can imagine less menacing than a hand crawling around on the floor would be a foot. Terrifying? Certainly. Effective? Not as long as I can kick it.
A disembodied foot would be more disgusting than frightening.
Of course, just yesterday evening I accidentally smashed my own prized glass elephant. So obviously everything on the radio and the TV and the fifties comics are going to be reminding me about it all day.
I love the scene with the maid. I love the way it can be interpreted that she'd be pretty hunky-dory with a crawling, murdering, severed hand--just so long as it wasn't the hand of someone who she knows is also already dead.
Art-wise, I'm as unimpressed here as I was with the last story, though I don't know whether to read something sinister in the fact that Marie's left hand seems to have disappeared at the top of page seven. Maybe that's pretty clever. And frankly that forth panel on page six is really pretty dang excellent, too.
Classic splash page. I agree with ol' anonymous with the stories about hands seemingly always involving pianists. I think we've had the discussion on THOIA before about what common job title appears in pre-code murder-the-spouse stories. What was the answer, circus performer?
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