Thursday, February 13, 2014
House of Blood / Junk Man's Treasure
Thai student "MP" writes in requesting an Eerie Publications remake called House of Blood with art by Ruben Marchionne. Unfortunately, I didn't have it, but a quick screech for help to Mike "Weird World of Eerie Publications" Howlett and suddenly we are in business! Howler's scans come from the January 1972 issue of Horror Tales Vol. 4 #1-- and since the story itself is so short, I thought I'd round it out with an encore presentation of the original precode version (as featured here at THOIA back in 2007) called Junk Man's Treasure, from the August 1954 issue of Out of the Shadows #14.
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ReplyDeleteEerie's need for blood & guts messed up their version a bit; first, it pulled the reveal early (not like it wasn't obvious), and second, it meant we missed the text where one of our "bad" guys thought the junk man was rich, which made the story confusing.
ReplyDeleteBut, as Mestiere said, the art is much more effective in the Eerie redo, but not just because it's black and white -- the camera angles and staging are much better, and the artist used the lantern casting shadows to great effect. It's interesting to see that kind of work going into an Eerie pub redo.
The text of the story is almost identical except for one glaring omission - "You're worse than an old worman". An early form of PC'ism in the 1970's? Even though the Eerie version was before my time, I'm surprised that this was considered offensive at that time.
ReplyDeletePlenty more precode / Eerie Pub remake comparisons in the THOIA Archive, use the search engine at the top left of the page for more! Thanks for the comments
ReplyDeleteI love these comparison posts. And while I typically do not love horror art from seventies mags, I have to admit that the stuff Fass actually had completely redrawn for Eerie stuff tends to be my favorite from the era. I think the fact that it was likely deemed old fashioned at the time, and often used the original pre-code paneling layout as a road map, appealed to me and Myron for different reasons, but what the hey. What he thought of as cheap product I think of as classic workmanship, straight-up storytelling without all the wavy psychedelic paneling, undefined shapes, and overacting. Anyway, the art here, as everyone before me has also said, was great! The seventies clothes and mustaches were just icing on the cake. Possible dialog balloon substitution:
ReplyDelete"Tonight! We'll rob him tonight! We'll shoot a porno until it's time."
haha
ReplyDelete