Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Dripping Terror / Out of the Deep!
Sometimes the "horror on the high seas" can find its way after you, even OFF the high seas, as displayed in today's double doomed shock soakers. First up: "Dripping Terror" from the May 1953 issue of Beware! Terror Tales #7, (my copy ironically enough is a bit on the water damaged side), followed by "Out of the Deep!" from the April 1953 Avon one-shot Phantom Witch Doctor #1.
Granted that Enoch deserved to die, but the ending of “Dripping Terror” would have been rather more satisfying if Mauna had decided to drag Joseph to his death as well.
ReplyDeleteHowdy,
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw the title "Dripping Terror", I thought it would be a Rudy Palais story!
Brian Riedel
Just one thing: Good story, but something doesn't really "bother" me, oh, let me put it this way: Why in these comics (and in George Romero or George Romero-type zombie movies) do(es) the zombie(s) no matter how recently they've become zombies *always look like everybody in the morgue went on a 2-week or 1 month vacation and forgot to pay yhe power bill; or else there was an extended power failure; or, else, sombody at the funeral home watered down the embalming fluid or put fake stuff in the corpse? I've been seeing a ad for some laptop where some engineers are arguing whether to put some drop resistant chip in; and one of them imagines a power failure causing sour milk turning people into flesh-eating zombies; and demands that the chip in question be put in*!
ReplyDeleteDBurch7670
DBurch7670—
ReplyDeleteI think that we have to take much of the art in these horror comics as more ideogrammatic than representational.
Granted that a first- or second-order artist, given an appropriate amount of time, could have conveyed a sense of transformation (decay or gross loss of affect) in some way closer to what one might expect actually to see if these things happened in real life. Most of these stories are illustrated by artists of less talent or with less time, therefore using a sort of visual short-hand informed by cultural expectations.
Hey; makes sense to me! (Hanging head contritely!)
ReplyDeleteDBurch7670
The colors in the Dripping Terror may be my favorite example yet of the so-called "tutti-frutti" style or using mostly intense, nearly shadow-free color fields to indicate stacked depths within the panel. Look at the artistry on display here, using a style that is often dismissed as lazier than more naturalistic color schemes. Those two-toned ocean backdrops on page three and the meticulously rendered Fletcher Hanks-style hate lines at the top of five and particularly fine.
ReplyDeleteThough you'd think Enoch would have sorta figured out after the first day that the longer he puts this off the grosser she's gonna get. Sort of like if Griffin Dunne had been the American Werewolf's boyfriend.
"Someday you'll thank me for posting all of this stuff..."
ReplyDeleteWell hey, thank you!
Seriously, this blog rocks and I love classic horror comics.
So once again, with a bloody severed head on top, thank you!
>When I saw the title "Dripping Terror", I thought it would be a Rudy Palais story!
ReplyDeleteHaha! The Rudy Palais Sweat of Horror routine, playing regularly here at THOIA-- just check the archives. Thanks for the comments, as well as your various thoughts about the rotting dead and the tutti fruitti terroruttis!