Saturday, April 3, 2010
Corpses of the Jury
After our last fun 'n cheery MAD post full of kid friendly laughs 'n silliness, today's grim tale should come with a red flag parental warning! From the Jan. '53 issue of Voodoo #5, this is a seriously gruesome Nazi atrocity that almost validates the Comic's Code's existance. And over at The Bloody Pulp, Mykal has scans of this story in its equally ugly 60's Eerie Publication reprint version too! Click HERE and check 'em both out to compare the differences.
Karswell: God damn the preacher man! This is one of the hardest hitting comic stories I've ever seen! Even more magnificent in color! Great Post! Sorta leaves you with a sick, wonderful feeling! -- Mykal
ReplyDeleteyou can't imagine what i'm feeling right now(or maybe you can), revisiting this childhood trauma! i'm over to Mykal's now for the final solution!(sorry...)
ReplyDeleteand you were right on about the parental advisory- i'm sure my parents had wished they'd spotted me reading this before it got to me! the panel with the girl lying in the pit with flayed hands- YOW!!!...
ReplyDeleteWow, now that's a great story.
ReplyDeleteA grisly red dripping thing...
ReplyDeleteThat's just too cool! *urp*
Woah...that warped me for life. Again!
ReplyDeleteThis story hits harder than usual of course because of the reality of actual nazi atrocities. We've all heard the stories about human skin lampshades and stuff, in fact check my nazi posts from one year ago this month here:
ReplyDeletehttp://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2009/04/stolen-skin-out-of-grave.html
...these tales, and Corpses of the Jury would just be gloriously silly pre-code entries if not for the spine chilling factual WW2 history we are all now aware of.
Thanks again to Brian Hirsch for donating these scans to THOIA, to Mykal in posting the Eerie reprints (see the link in today's post), to Mike Howlett for supplying The Bloody Pulp with those scans, and also to Magic Carpet Burn's very own Professor for bringing this story to all of our attention.
Okay, back to the traumatizing...
Wow! Those panels with the gloves and the girl with bloody flayed hands laying in a pit of corpses really brought back some memories. I remember reading a B+W version of this tale as a kid in the 60's, so I guess it must have been the Eerie reprint that my older brother picked up from a newstand in the UK. Pretty grisly stuff.
ReplyDeleteYOU HAVE POSTED A FEW STORYS HERE THAT MAKE ME WINCE AND THIS ONE IS NO EXCEPTION..........MAN OH MAN THIS IS THE MOST GRUESOME ONE EVER!
ReplyDeleteMan, that last panel of the flayed colonel with a spike through is neck is enough to haunt a child's psyche.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how the colonel could recognize skeletons, though. And with the hands coming through the door, I initially thought the whole thing was going to be his guilt haunting him and he would end up jumping out the window or something.
It's always a blast to see the Eerie Publication remake side by side, but in this case not much was changed. No surprise considering how horrific the original was.
Thanks to all involved getting these out to us horror fiends!
>Man, that last panel of the flayed colonel
ReplyDeleteWhich brings up a good point: What did the ghosts do with his skin?
Maybe we don't want to know.
Wow ... for some reason the gloves on the tray really freaked me out. More so than the last panel. Maybe because I totally didn't see where it was going. Fantastic. I can't imagine see this as a child.
ReplyDeleteHa! Take that, Karl! You Nazi bastard!
ReplyDeleteOh and this was disturbing and gross. Nice.
Wow, that really was grisly. Interesting timing--my son and I watched Schindler's List just the other night.
ReplyDelete>for some reason the gloves on the tray really freaked me out.
ReplyDeleteI agree Spectregirl, and at the same time there's some sick urge inside me that kind of wants to know what it would feel like to actually put those repulsive things on my own hands... I don't know, maybe not.
>Oh and this was disturbing and gross.
The perfect combo, eh GWB?
>Interesting timing--my son and I watched Schindler's List
Hitler's B-day is on April 20th too Bloomsie... not like I really give a shit, just saying.
I appreciate the comments. And it appears that me and Mykal, and Brian and Mike, and The Prof (and Mary Ann) have all done a mighty fine job of scarring some new souls with this post. Goodness knows we've been trying to do just that ever since we started these damn blogs. Look forward to more scars coming soon, we'll keep trying if you keep coming back and commenting!
Also, don't forget to get your votes in for THOIA in this years RONDO AWARDS! The voting ends at midnight tonight, I'm up for "Best Horror Blog" (catagory #15) so if you have time and don't see anything else on there that strikes your fancy how about giving us a holler. And thanks again to everyone that has already voted for THOIA!
I have the Dec '66 Eerie reprint, but the original is much, much better!
ReplyDeleteOld Bucher der butcher stuck on the wall... dulce et decorum est...
Good riddance to the Ratzi schmuck. There's too many like him all over der welt. They come in both genders and all shades and lingos...
I always make the same generalizations when I read stuff like this. It had been such a short time since the war that a primarily Jewish New York publishing world was working hard to walk the line between exorcising their demons and entertaining their readers. The subject of Nazi atrocity and the scars blasted into the racial psyche must've been like the holes left by pulled teeth: it hurt and it wasn't pretty, but they still couldn't hardly help poking around in there. They had a lot of ugly stuff to get off their collective chests.
ReplyDeleteIn light of all that, I am really surprised by the fact that this story includes a couple of nominally human Germans. Sure, they are still presented here in the act of atrocity on the command of a psychopathic leader, but they are not all that gung-ho about it. They come off like nearly sane people, also unhappily caught-up in the machinery of hate.
If I was Jewish, and this were the fifties, that is probably the single detail of this story that would have pissed me off. It's a challenging detail. It's not all that easy hating villains when they are portrayed as people. As it is I'm impressed by the restraint shown here. Even in a story where a man gets skinned and nailed to a wall, the restraint is the first thing I thought of.
Your timing is incredible, Karswell. Just yesterday my home town was invaded by a bunch of neo-Nazis because of – and I swear, I kid you not – a demonstration against violence against Nazis. And yes, initially, I thought it was a late April Fools' joke, too…
ReplyDeleteI rather liked this tale. Sure, it was vile and gruesome, but on the other hand, you shouldn't expect to find rainbows or unicorns in a comic about Nazi war crimes. What I liked most about the story were actually the two German soldiers who had the unthankful task of throwing the poor girl's flayed body into the corpse pit. I agree with Mr. Cavin, their showing of remorse for their action was a nice counter balance to the irredeemably evil Colonel Bucher.
I really can't heap on more praise for this story than the posters above. There's at least six nightmare provoking panels in this truly disturbing and unflinching 1950's horror comic classic. Thanks for posting it!
ReplyDeleteI can't say any more than has been said about the horrors of Nazism; so I'll just say "Spirits of concentration/death camp victims! 'Recommended' by escaped Nazi war criminals 10-1 over even Israeli commandos!"
ReplyDeleteAs for the last story in the other blog; do you think "The Shoe Bomber" or some other Islamic fascist terrorist ever read that story; or do "great" minds really think alike?:(
DBurch7670