Friday, July 22, 2011

The Phantom Witch Doctor

The title story from Avon's Phantom Witch Doctor #1 one-shot from April 1953 may produce a bit of jungle deja vu in some of you (see our last post), and is it just me, or does it look like a couple of different people worked on this story? The art isn't very consistant from one page to the next... oh well, the black and white illustrated content page by Everett Raymond Kinstler is as fantastically gorgeous as always! (Speaking of, for the weird Kinstler story from this issue, click HERE!)










100 DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN at AEET!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

thank you for this truly terrifying tale of witchcraft mr. karswell. y'oughter post more of these. Truly it is the white man who is evil. B'wana

Anonymous said...

Yes; another "white man acs like a jerk (or worse) and gets his just deserts" story! Not that I didn't like it! No wonder the Europeans (And Americans, in some cases!) got kicked out of about just about everywhere besides Europe first real chance the locals got! :)

I also liked the daughter's (undead) green hair! Is there a Japanese cartoon character in her family tree;or is the local water supply just (naturally) overly chlorinated?:)

DBurch7670

Mr. Cavin said...

It's hard to tell just how much this story has been altered, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's why it looks like it's by more than one artist. The weird nature of the two-part narrative leads me to believe it was monkeyed with structurally, too. At first I thought they'd only changed the hanging scene. It's pretty obvious that the witchdoctor was drawn post-execution at the bottom of page two and panel three of page three--all the erasing and dialog balloons in the world can't really disguise that fact. So why then? I originally thought it was probably just too much, given the US social climate of the time. But then they go ahead and actually show the black man lynched on panel four of page three anyway. So probably it was changed to alter the plot from the original script? Ah the mysteries of Africa.

Mr. Karswell said...

>Truly it is the white man who is evil. B'wana

Hey, I resemble that remark!

>Is there a Japanese cartoon character in her family tree

Haha, good one DB!

>So probably it was changed to alter the plot from the original script? Ah the mysteries of Africa.

Ah the mysteries of pre-code jungle horror! Good points Mr C, I can always count on you to break it down semi-professionally.

Got another double header coming up, one's a request even! Stay close!