Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Shadows in Pawn / Devil's Stones
The final two pieces of the June 1952 issue of The Unseen #5 puzzle... a puzzling issue of high weirdness I mean, as witnessed in our last post HERE about the hunter, but also the story about the giant man-eating caterpillar in the THOIA Archive HERE; the spectral highwayman horrors from an Alex Toth classic HERE, and finally today's Abe Simon entry about a man without a shadow! (Plus a one page bonus filler tale.) Hope everyone enjoyed another FULL ISSUE presentation!
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ReplyDeleteMy response to meeting a man without a shadow: "I have hundreds of experiments to run!" The people in this story: "Tiz the devil, himself!"
ReplyDeleteI art is super interesting in this one. Our heroes are draw in a very advertisement like clean style with thin, crisp lines, but our evil shop keeper is draw with thick lines and dark shadows. I'm surprised we didn't see more of that kind of art in horror comics. I don't know if it exactly works, it's a bit on the nose, but I like it!
"The Devil's Stones" is just like the kind of short, "true stories of the unexplained" that I devoured as a kid. I like how Satan is about ready to drop a damn boulder on his head on that last panel, completely ignoring the caption!
I always found this story to be so weird. How does one even forget that they pawned away their shadow to some creepy nutjob 5 years ago?
ReplyDeleteI liked both stories, though I liked the one pager the best. Sometimes a one pager can get the job done better than a 4-5 page tale.
ReplyDeleteThank you for these great posts.
I assume it was the artist who came up with the plot here--nobody fights for the light to type. The story reminds me of all those days and nights I spent hunched over an art table, lamp in one hand and technical pen in the other, desperately trying to mitigate my own shadow. This guy should have thought about becoming a surgeon or something.
ReplyDeleteAbout the only fly in the ointment for me is that list of physical conditions not having a shadow is supposedly WORSE THAN. Hyperbole is one thing, but the things mentioned are a bit much.
ReplyDeleteLike Brian Barnes, I always like seeing "Fortean" text stories worked into these horror comics. Let alone one that combines one of those "falling stones" stories with a New England setting.
The plot of this story is quite good! Thanks for posting.
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