Friday, September 19, 2014

Weird Vengeance / The Bloody Stream!

We're getting super excited about some of the upcoming Chilling Archives collections from IDW / Yoe Books, in particular Mike Howlett's Worst of Eerie Publications in stores November 11th (click HERE for more info and to pre-order NOW!) So today we have a couple o' Eerie Pub'ers from my battered 'n tattered copy of the April 1971 issue of Weird Vol. 5 #2. The first story is a complete reworking of Nick Frank's tale from the October 1952 issue of Weird Mysteries #1 (I actually meant to post this one with the Jack Davis "Arbor Day" story a few weeks ago for reasons apparent, see HERE), ---and the second yarn by Tony Mortellaro originally appeared in the January 1954 issue of Weird Mysteries #8. Both stories were retitled for the Eerie Pub versions as well.











5 comments:

Mestiere said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mike H said...

Many thanks for the plug!! "Weird Vengeance" is a favorite Larry Woromay story! He and Howard Nostrand were the two best Davis imitators of the time!

The second tale holds the distinction of being the only pre-code reprint NOT from the Ajax/ Farrell vaults! I have no idea how they got a hold of it!

J_D_La_Rue_67 said...

Nice. Was the first story redrawn by the original artist in 1971? Or by whom?
It is Davis-style but also gives me a "Warren" feeling here and there.
I thought "weird tales of the future" was focused on sci-fi, but maybe they lacked material and did horror reprints towards the end. My! Those Mr. Monster reprints are themselves antiques NOW!
In the second story, the first "accusing" fish looks like... the very same fisherman to me. There is a resemblance. And it's nice to see many italian names of artists totally unknown here in Italy.
Roberto

Brian Barnes said...

Good art in these, and a notch above some of the more cut-n-paste jobs you'd get in Eerie pubs (which I love, anyway.) The Davis lift is fun, but much more in line with Davis' mad work than his EC work, but it works here as the story comes off more corny than scary.

There's some really interesting spot work on the rocks in the second story and the attacking fish is done well with the more crappy paper that Eerie used.

Fun stories, silly endings but well paced.

If I frame somebody to get rich, first thing I'm doing is getting a furnace, I'm not hauling wood after all that work to get rich!

JMR777 said...

Otto should have known better than to fish in a spring whose name was similar to the name Piranha (Puraqua).

With a slight twist in the story, Otto's companion could have stocked the spring with Piranha to kill off Otto and get his revenge/gain his inheritance/gain the title or greatest fisherman alive, etc.

You can get quite a bit of mileage out of these stories with a twist here and there (and that is no fish tale.)