Friday, February 7, 2014
Stop the Presses / Man in the Tomb!
Yes-- by all means, stop the presses because there's a man in the tomb! The Tomb of Darkness to be exact, and it's the March 1975 issue of Tomb of Darkness #13 to be even exacter. But stop the presses again because these are reprints that originally appeared in the September 1952 issue of Mystic #12! And for a third stoppage of the pressings, our first story is illustrated by Mean Gene Colan, one of the biggest guns in the history of Marvel / Atlas horror! Shall we stop the presses for a fourth time by revealing the back-up story features Bob Fujitani pencils? Of course! And STOP. THE . PRESSES to infinity because we've also got covers from Sol Brodsky and Sal Buscema too! Man, what a great double header post!!!
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8 comments:
Hi,i know it's irrelevant to the stories but i want to ask if you are planning other monographies with Yoe.Thank you.
Yes, details COMING SOON
Others will go over how good these Atlas stories are (sigh: broken record: new masterworks.)
... but, let's talk about the interesting cover swaps. Reprints were usually money savers for Marvel (especially as this was during the monster boom), but they took the time to have new covers created.
[Side note: Tomb of Darkness had some awesome Kane covers, the one previous is a favorite: http://www.comics.org/issue/76166/cover/4/]
Why did Marvel do this? They obviously thought the originals wouldn't sell as well, and I think they were right. They originals are nice covers, but they are crowded, and even if they cropped to the big panel, they feature many archaic elements (especially in close) and they don't "pop."
The Mystic cover is somewhat drab, but the Buscema (?) cover is bold, well designed, and full of bright primary figures. Somebody in 75 would have passed up the original cover for the new one probably most of the time.
It's an interesting thing on changing practices to catch the eyes of the readers.
Good ole Gene "Dracula's Slacks" Colan! Man, that guy drew better pants legs than anybody else in the universe.
I will speak no ill of Atlas tales, they are always a good read, though like anything, comic readers than and now could come up with variations to both of these tales.
In the first tale, the cub reporter would have a dream of a major disaster (like the tale of Krakatoa) and write about it while at his desk, the story would be accidentally published and the tale would turn out to be true. The slave driving editor would force the cub reporter to turn out more dream scoops and the last one is the story of how an elevator cable snaps sending a certain editor to his doom.
In the second tale, the mobster is locked in the vault but A) the key doesn't fit the lock or B) the mobster meets the original member of the club- a VAMPIRE!
A little imagination and these two tales could be turned into different stories, possibly better than the originals.
I usually like those "shady" characters you're expected NOT TO like, so give me a character like that with a name like "Mugs Vinetti" and I can't help rooting for him get through that initiation.
I notice you never actually see whether he survives or not. The members of the lodge may not have gotten off as easily as it seems.
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