Thursday, July 16, 2015
The Spider Man!
In our last post we saw the Bat Man, so it's only natural that in our perfectly friendly neighborhood follow-up post we pay some lavish lovin' to that other fearless fighter of crime, that wall-crawlin', web-slinging', champion of justi-- oh wait, nope, different Spider Man. Sorry! But trust me, this entire yarn is just as funny as any cornball Peter Parker line, --crazy as a half dog / half bed bug in fact! From the Nov '52 issue of Chamber of Chills #14, art by Abe Simon.
I hit the "cool" button.
ReplyDeleteThe beasts' yell, "AGGREOW!", as a synthesis of "aggress" and "wow", is a mighty powerful slogan to use with those campus girls.
The story is average, the art is nice (the girls especially), the beasts are lovely.
Didn't see a "half dog, half spider" creature since the days I used to buy Sectaurs figures for my little brother...
OK, story cliche -- but art makes up for every last bit of that plus 20 or 30 times more. There are so many wonderful panels.
ReplyDeleteThe very "Thing"-ish dog/human headed spiders, everything dripping with drool, the great attack panels -- page 3/panel 2 is honestly one of the most silly/awesome things I've seen in one of these comics.
I don't know if this was a limited palette of the artist but it looks like the woman that barely survived in page 3 gets attacked again on page 5. Bad week, it seems!
Page 5/panel 4 needs to win an award of some kind!
This might have helpings of more "AAIIEE!!" than almost any earlier horror comic story, which is saying a lot.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny that for a story set in France, it doesn't have a single "Sacre Bleu!" But maybe it's more original that way.
What a wild tale! Its filled with crazy scary monstrosities, blood galore (who knew a spider-dog could shed so much blood from a single gun shot?) a mad scientist, panic on a university, its the stuff of a B 50's horror flick that should have been made.
ReplyDeleteThe shout AGGRRAA in different spellings appeared in not one, not two but three pages, along with the spider-dog's cry of AGGREOW on two pages. Were they trying to create a new horror cry?
A great horror find Karswell. Thanks!
Man, Harvey Horror never disappoints! (That lipstick monster on the cover is pretty damn great, too.) So this kicks off with basically the same plot as Ghostbusters, just with the large stinkbug mutants that would later be replaced with kid-friendly paranormal research and Slimer. What is it with New Yorkers having not one iota what a spider looks like, by the way? This is not the first time I've found myself going from panel to panel, Rainman-like, counting legs.
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