Thursday, April 16, 2015
The Vampire of Broadway
Another request is one of the oddest vampire tales ever from the February-March 1977 issue of House of Secrets #144. Nice, atmospheric art by Abe Ocampo (I'm sure I would totally die in amazement if I ever saw a giant 3D billboard featuring a vampire girl in a coffin to promote a movie!), and even though the choppy storyline doesn't quite hold it all together, that just makes everything seem more strangely surreal. Still a winner in weirdness factor alone! (For Tanya and Allan :)
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7 comments:
The real horror of it is that everyone just refuse to see the truth. Whatever the truth is.
A very strange kind of vampire, like La Venus d'Ille turned into a bloodsucker. I wonder if those two guys will rise from their graves. Looks like Mr. Ocampo was another fine artist from Philippines I just didn't know.
http://www.alanguilan.com/museum/abeocampo.html
It reminds me of the story "The Girl With the Hungry Eyes"
I think Steve should have aimed at its heart instead of its head, though the end result was the same anyway.
Regardless of the execution (and the convenience of the script) the concept is solid and actually pretty original for a 70 DC horror analogy which were fun but all pretty formulaic.
Anybody notice the repetition in the art on page 2-4, each one a 4 panel close up of our "hero" thinking or talking? And the bottom panel always standing by the billboard? That's pretty cool, and shows some real thought into the script (which sadly didn't translate otherwise.)
I noticed, very nice touch. Some questions no one has asked yet: if the vampire chick was really alive, what happens to her on the sign during the sunlight hours? Does she go back into the coffin, a giant deflatable vampire girl would be a cool touch. Also, when she bites someone with her gigantic fangs, wouldn't the bite marks be massively huge gory potholes on the victim instead of little neck pinpricks? I think a better death for her at the end would've been if the dude drove a wooden stake wedged on the end of a forklift into her heart. *POP!! (if she was an inflatable)
Okay, that was me being all nitpicky for once, haha... still love this one though, thanks for the comments :)
I would very much like to see the big, gorey potholes version of this one; and I had much the same question about daylight hours. I guess that we can assume that the rays of the sun just render her inanimate? Dracula is pretty much like that in the book, too: Powerless in the day, maybe, but not actually destroyed by sunshine. I'd like to see her hop out of that coffin every night and go on a tear through Vegas, or wherever that was, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman-style. She turns into fog when she's scared and Rodan when she's pissed! Break out the silver A-bombs, Nevada!
I don't usually dig the stuff from the seventies, but this was kooky and fun. Love the (even more) dead billboard vamp in the last panel.
Maybe I am wrong, but on the first page the vampire looks like a young Madeline Kahn.
To me, on the first page the vampire looks more like Madonna on the top illustration, and this actor named Jayma Mays, (She was in the show Glee) for the bottom two illustrations.
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