Sunday, October 16, 2016
When Death Takes a Hand
While I'm working on a larger Halloween themed post, here's a minor supernatural quickie with spooky art by Gene Fawcette, from the August 1954 issue of Out of the Shadows #14. This was the final issue of this interesting horror series, and nearly half the stories in this one received the remake / reprint treatment in the Eerie Pubs a few decades later... our current tale in question eventually finding itself retitled "Deadman's Hands" and appearing in no less than 5 different Eerie issues.
I do like the stories that dispense with the EC endings; I love the EC endings but sometimes all you need is a grisly little tale of comeuppance ... and we got two of them, the repetition of the "don't need money where you're going" and hiding the money behind the medicine bottle.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the artist couldn't help himself but to not draw a sexy gam shot not he corpse!
Pretty harsh of the old goat, if you ask me. Though I suspect that, from the advanced perspective of being dead, cutting Alice's life just a handful of decades short doesn't really compare to getting on with your idyllic romance on the far side of the veil.
ReplyDeleteI always though that haunted suit of armor on the cover looked like a Micronaut, or perhaps a Spaceknight.
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ReplyDeleteI have two opposite sets of feelings when it comes to hot villainess characters getting their comeuppance. I only seem to like seeing that happen in adventure stories, where some Bond type protagonist does something about the villainess (usually after some big romance with her). In horror stories and comedies and nearly anything else, I usually like her too much to want her to get killed or even caught. So it's one extreme or the other for me.
ReplyDeleteI love how blunt and quick to the point this one is. "Alice killed her husband!" That's funny, usually it takes several pages to show us that. "Oh it wasn't the way you might expect!" Actually, it kind of was. Horror comics have many a way of showing murder, denying somebody their pills was nothing new.
ReplyDeleteI kind of love that panel of Alice and what's left of Ed going up the stairs hand in hand. Kind of funny how the money was all in plain sight. She hid something from him that he needed, and he hid something from her that she wanted. Nice.
I think Ed deserved his own book.
ReplyDeleteThat little pile is a million dollars??
For some reason Eerie Publishing seemed to be fond of the word "Deadman" (one word) in its titles. So what you mention in the introduction to this one is interesting.
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