Friday, December 24, 2010

Tomb for Two! / It Happened 'Neath the Sphinx!

Cursing you with the gift of horriday spirit today (THOIA style), we deliver unto all two doomed Atlas classics, one from the June '54 issue of Uncanny Tales #21, and the second from the Sept. '54 issue of Mystic #33 --just heed this one simple warning: Don't open these tombs until xmas!









13 comments:

  1. what a fantastic place is this! Deligthfull!
    Thank you and congratulations.

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  2. Tomb for Two is really something, elevated not only by the utterly quotidian "curse" of the pyramid, but by the deceptively sophisticated storytelling by the artist (Woromay? Really? If they say so). Pages with nine panels on them seem completely uncrowded, the art quite narratively clear, and provide a surprisingly unrushed pace (amazing for a four page story!). And how can you not love that obviously concerned expression on the face of the statue in the splash panel?

    Another beaut, Kars. Have a great holiday!

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  3. Good luck explaining that one to the authorities, Elinor.

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  4. The splash panel of 'Tomb for Two!' truly is a thing of beauty. I love how the statue appears to be looking mournfully at the intruders as if it knew exactly what terrible fate would await the men inside the pyramid.

    Thanks a lot for these Christmas treats, Karswell, and happy holidays to you & yours and to everyone else too, of course!

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  5. The artist on the MYSTIC #33 Sphinx story was Jack Katz, as can also be seen by the initials "JK", but the overwhelmingly powerful inker on this story was Christopher Rule. In fact, it looks like Rule re-drew every female head!

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  6. Inner mixing the Atlas stuff with the Eerie reprint stuff -- and Fass could never touch Atlas as it was still a company -- makes you wonder what Eerie pubs would be like if they could have lifted from Atlas instead of the more low-ball publishers.

    Tomb for Two is a text book perfect twist ending. No expert, but I wonder if that's Stan doing the writing. Seems like him.

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  7. Anonymous12/25/2010

    Who would want to kill the babe in the second story? She's rich and good lookin'.That idiot deserved what he got.

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  8. I would have guessed Howard Nordstrom doing his Jack Davis style in the first story.

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  9. Thanks for the comments and holiday wishes, same to everyone... I hope you all got what you wanted, and to some of you I hope you got exactly what you deserve, haha.

    I'll be turning the horriday reins over to Brian Hirsch for the rest of Dec / 2010, he's got some grand gruesomeness lined up to leave you barfing beautifully right into the New Year.

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  10. Anonymous12/30/2010

    I really like this blog. I even thought of sending the "spider/man" comics to my niece who's a big "(Marvel) Spiderman" fan; and the one about the corrupt mayor who "gets his" (he must have been Democrat and them Republicans or vice versa to my older sister who lives in a Chicago suburb (Elmhurst Ill).

    I have a question, though. There was a situation in the UK where the BBC wouldn't play rock 'n' roll music; so people bought trawlers or other small ships, filled them up with radio transmitters, put them just outside the UK's territorial waters, and set up "pirate radio" stations. Why didn't hte comic book publishers do something like that? (I mean: 1. As I understand it, the Comics Code only applied to *color* publications. 2. Other countries such as the UK, Mexico, and Japan had comics industries. Case in point: in a book called "BatManga; it tels how in the 1960's a Japanese company put out *licensed* Batman manga for their domestic market! i'm sure that, if they had to; the comics could either farm out or "joint venture" or "shell company" the actual printing overseas!)3. "offshore/"pirate comics"; I mean the Comics code was just something like the "Hays Office" in the movies; that is a voluntary sistem; not the law!)

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  11. DBurch: you have your answer right there in your question. The comics code was indeed voluntary, so there was no need to try to circumvent the system. Those publishers who wished to ignore the trend did so.

    The reality was that all the hoopla surrounding the core concept here, that comics were a menace to children, didn't merely convince publishers to impose a code upon themselves. It also convinced many magazine sellers to discontinue titles that ignored the the new mores and convinced many readers to stop purchasing non-compliant titles.

    Were this, in reality, anything similar to the kind of censorship with which you have compared it (censorship theoretically illegal under the US constitution), I am sure that alternate venues would have sprung up to supply bootleg precode-style horror. But the reality is that, all at once, after five or so successful years, society decided to stop producing, marketing, and reading precode comics all at once, and no underground movement was really going to undo that decision until the very late sixties.

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  12. ...and oh yeah, I really dug both stories. I am especially amused that the artist(s) chose to work so very hard making the Sphinx in Giza look like it made out of thousands and thousands of bricks when the most awesome thing about that Sphinx is that it happens to have been made out of just one big rock.

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