We're chomping away on the July '53 issue of
Advs into Weird Worlds #20, and here's a story featuring the magnificently odd art stylings of
Joe Maneely. Hope everyone is enjoying this issue so far-- and hey
Rachel, you're
THOIA Thank You gift is in the mail! :)
7 comments:
This story is actually pretty depressing -- some of the panels, like page 4, panel 3, are right out of the later superhero era of Marvel. If only Maneely would have made it that far. While the hatch work and shading are very pre-code, Maneely could do other styles and he really would have been one of the greats of the Marvel superhero explosion.
Jesse looks a bit like 40s Dr. Sivana!
I'm from Brazil and I wrote on my blog about your excellent blog.
http://anticvlt.com/quadrinhos/the-horrors-of-it-all-os-quadrinhos-assustadores-da-decada-de-50/
It would be good to post the prequel to this story "The Empty Room," from Adventures Into Weird Worlds #19 when issue #20 is posted in its entirety.
It is a very good comics site.
I'm always curious whether stories like this, with titles that really bear little resemblance to the finished piece, evolve away from, or toward, their bizarre names. Did the African adventure-horror part of this story, with its potential scary animals and cannibals, initially take up more conceptual real estate? Or is it possible they already had the headline lettering left over from another project, and so wrote a handful of nonsense into one of the panels just to justify that transplanted title? I mean, it's hard to believe that anyone really looked at this story about future men and mad science and shrinking and and proudly declared "it's those implausible savages that really encapsulate the idea here!"
Man, Maneely was great!
It's also interesting that the "savages" end up coming to the rescue of the rest of the world (whether they know it or not). I don't know how rare that is in an early story like this, but it has to be PRETTY rare.
Another story this one looks ahead to of course is THE SIXTH FINGER, the famous OUTER LIMITS episode. Including the idea of the character trying to justify terrorizing the world by saying that it's self-preservation.
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