Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Day of Doom

Everyone seems to be enjoying these Weird Terror tales, so let's keep it going for a few more posts. And wow, digging through my collection I realized I've come close to presenting a few other complete issues from this creepy crazy Comic Media series, so let's finish up the May 1954 issue of Weird Terror #11 with this one remaining Bill Discount tale about The Bomb... fyi: the other 3 stories from this issue already in the THOIA Archives are: "Mark of the Brute" and "Satan's Love Call" (both by the great Don Heck), and speaking of evil history repeating itself-- "Hills of Horror", is actually just a re-titled and slightly re-colored version of Murder Mountain, originally presented in the May 1953 issue of Horrific #5.


Cover art by Don Heck








Vintage AD
at

13 comments:

  1. Mr. Karswell9/14/2011

    Also, if everyone could take a close look at the 3rd panel on page 3 of Day of Doom, and please explain to me what he's doing to her under the narrative of "...fight for one more moment with your beloved..."

    !!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mr. Cavin9/14/2011

    Man, this was really great. Well, I didn't really love the attempt to wring out a surprise ending, but except for the last page and a half this was exceptional. I love nuclear holocaust stories. All those explosions are like catnip. I thought the magical atomic dust was particularly wonderful here.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous9/14/2011

    1. There was a *nuclear war in 1987?* Why didn't someone tell me?:)

    2. And 3. (I'm an aviation buff; so I'll ignore how the "Soviet" bombers were actually British Avro Vulcans. Hey, comic book writers aren't automatically experts on airplanes! I also like how the fighters are US planes in one panel and UN in the next Hey, maybe those right-wing conspiracy theorists are right!)

    4. If you look at some of the survivors; maybe a wheelchair user like me has a chance of making it! Also, did the "evil capitalist (almost) survivors" turn dwarfish or gnomish or were "Our Hero And Heroine" turned into giant Greco-Roman/Nazi wet dreams? :)

    DBurch7670

    ReplyDelete
  4. Frank Forte9/15/2011

    Wow! a Don Heck cover. Why were some cover artists of that era able to sign their names and others didn't?

    ReplyDelete
  5. den9/15/2011

    My question is irrelevant to the story but i am dying to know if you have plans for a Matt Fox book in the future.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Trevor M9/16/2011

    That is P.O.S. on page 3, panel 3, Karswell. As in Pants On Sex. You try and have missionary intercourse with your pants on, through your open zipper, and you too will know what it means to "...fight *FIGHT* for one more moment with your beloved..."

    ReplyDelete
  7. aldi9/17/2011

    Aaaargh! The viewer app from hell just landed!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Mr. Cavin9/17/2011

    "...viewer app from hell..."

    Wow. You said it. This thing is awful. I am trying to imagine how anyone, blog authors or readers, could, in any situation, want this interface. Most bloggers spend time painstakingly resizing their display percentages for fit, so inline thumbs look neat and re-size appropriately when opened. This undoes all of that and effectively takes control away from the blog author. I don't know what Blogger was thinking.

    That said, the workaround is simple. You can avoid opening these images in the viewer theater by right clicking and opening each link in separate tabs. I don't know what you did before, but this has been my strategy anyway, just because it allows me to open a whole story at once rather than having to keep navigating back to the post for each new page. Hope this helps.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Mark B9/17/2011

    I liked your juxtaposition of the last panel with the quote "There is no room for weaklings!" with the ad to become a red blooded man with muscles! Well played sir, well played.

    Um, you think that company is still in business? I could probably handle 10 minutes of fun a day to achieve such results. But wait, isn't the before pic that of a child? Could this be a false promise?

    Thanks Karswell, as always!

    ReplyDelete
  10. sfdoomed9/17/2011

    "...viewer app from hell..."

    I was thrown off at first, but I sort of liked the convenience of just scrolling down to the next image instead of having to open each page individually.

    Favorite line in the story: "But when the world is crumbling, you cannot stop to be personal about your feelings."

    ReplyDelete
  11. Mr. Cavin9/17/2011

    "I was thrown off at first..."

    sfdoomed: well yeah, I can see how that would be great. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but when the viewing theater opens up on my screen, the images are displayed only slightly larger than they appear in the post--basically still too small to comfortably read. There doesn't seen to be any way to re-size the application view, or am I nuts?

    ReplyDelete
  12. Mr. Karswell9/17/2011

    I just want to say I did NOT set the image display to do this... and as I mentioned over at my current Edward Gorey post at AEET, I guess it's some new feature blogger just added... though if you want to see it displayed the regular way like it used to be, all you have to do is click the little white link in the field of black on the left hand side (after clicking the thumbnail.) Took me awhile to figure that out myself.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Mr. Karswell9/17/2011

    >I thought the magical atomic dust was particularly wonderful here.

    Totally, it makes the end of the world seem more like Disneyland.

    >There was a *nuclear war in 1987?* Why didn't someone tell me?

    We didn't mention it because Big Brother is watching.

    >Why were some cover artists of that era able to sign their names and others didn't?

    It probably had everything to do with the publisher. Or what I like to imagine: do you want to be the guy who tells Don Heck that he can't sign his name? *sound of knuckles cracking in the distance*

    >dying to know if you have plans for a Matt Fox book in the future.

    While I do know of a couple Matt Fox projects in the works, I am unfortunately not part of them (yet!) I did contribute some Fox scans to Dan Nadel's very cool "Art in Time" book which is in stores now though.

    >That is P.O.S. on page 3, panel 3, Karswell. As in Pants On Sex.

    Haha, yes, thanks Trevor... I believe we've now covered and defined ALL aspects of the horrors of it all.

    >I liked your juxtaposition of the last panel with the quote "There is no room for weaklings!" with the ad

    Thanks for noticing! I've always tried to make the ads relevant to the story, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I just totally forget to do it.

    >"But when the world is crumbling, you cannot stop to be personal about your feelings."

    So true...

    Okay, once again I apologize for the new "viewer app from Hell" but as mentioned above, totally not my fault. If anyone knows of a way to turn it off or reset it through blogger settings I will, unless everyone is now used to it and doesn't mind. Let me know, and thanks for all the great comments.

    ReplyDelete