Thursday, June 6, 2013
Skin 'em Alive!
Many sites have a preview of the bonkers baseball story, (introduced by yours truly!) featured in the grisly new issue of HAUNTED HORROR #5 --in stores NOW! Today, THOIA delivers an encore presentation preview of the freaky football tale that I originally posted here way back in 2007 from the Feb '54 issue of Mysterious Adventures #18. Hey, if anyone is having trouble finding HH at their local comic shops, please let us know-- we'll see if we can get a fire lit under some slackin' asses for ya!
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9 comments:
The host's bullet hole moves around capriciously.
Surely the ref would insist on regulation footballs being used?
Yeah, as it stands, this story just doesn't work, as everybody and his sister would understand that all of these major sports have long involved the use of regulation equipment.
The story could have been written so that Bill and Frank thought that they'd observed some sort of a switch, and were looking to get proof of it. To explain how a swap were effected, it could have been that the Blue Devils were all in on what sort of ball were used, which would have been an more disturbing scenario than that of just one sociopath.
A terror tale that works when you stop to realize this was meant to chill the young'uns of the fifties, not how it would fit into the real world.
I don't analize comic stories. I just read and enjoy them. In the real world this story couldn't take place (one would hope!) But the realm of fifties comics reality is subjective or suspended.
Maybe things were simpler back then so publishers could get away with a tale like this and not worry about the real life accuracies, details, etc, they just published horror and let the kids eat it up, accurate or not.
Man, I really love the line work on this one. It's blocked out really nicely, too--there's so much in the way of natural storytelling crammed into unorthodox spaces around odd panel sequences here, and it all flows effectively anyway. Excellent four-pager.
It wasn't that much later in the history of the culture that I was a young'un reading comic books; I don't think that my cohort was particularly more thoughtful or informed. We didn't like stories that required any suspension of what we knew of how the world worked, beyond that which was essential.
This would have made a great Alfred Hitchcock story on tv.
From a story perspective, it's interesting to compare this to the most famous comic/sports horror story, Foul Play, June 53, to this story, Feb 54.
I doubt one was created from the other, sports horror stories were pretty prevalent, but in Foul Play, the characters are memorable and have realistic motivations; here they are basically props to get us to the gruesome ending.
It's still a fun 4 pager because it's not trying to be higher art, but just a setup for the shocker.
If you didn't want to get caught, why would you use the chunk of skin with a tattoo? And then obviously skin the faces, even though you couldn't use it! Does he have a nice undershirt made from the left over material?
Mr Barnes, people always appreciate hand-crafted leather gifts.
It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
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