Thursday, April 5, 2018

Murderer's Mask

Getting back into the swing of 1950's precode Golden Age horror with a short but interesting one featuring some nicely detailed art by Mean Gene Colan. From the Winter 1951 issue of Weird Thrillers #2, and highlighted by a gorgeously painted cover by Allen Anderson.









8 comments:

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  2. This story wouldn't work in the days of DNA tests!

    4 quick pages, beautiful Colan art. The heart attack panel with it's shading, the great look of the twisted face, real action in some of the panels when a lot of artists at the time would do very static images. Just great stuff, a real treat.

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  3. Anonymous4/06/2018

    I love that we're getting another story that's so reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode (season 5's "The Masks", of course)!

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  4. What pre-codes have taught me: If you ever see a shop that has suddenly appeared, DO NOT GO IN.
    Clever, tight little tale.

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  5. This seems to be a classic in a lot of old comics--the mask meant to disguise one's true face turns the person's face into an exact replica of the mask--sometimes like in this story for the worse and sometimes for the better.

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  6. Brian Barnes is right, and for that matter, what about fingerprints? But it's entertaining either way.

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  7. Excellent story with great Colan art. It's amazing that, even this young, he is already fully-formed in his sense of dapper male clothing. This guy just exalts in drawing flapping pants cuffs and fluttering neckties. I think page two is jaw-dropping: I love that first panel, with the really impressionistic colored lights falling around the frame with the rain, our hero kicking an open book down the road. Hilarious. I love the way he's flipping the collar on his suit jacket up to go back into the rain by the bottom of the page. That's a pretty concrete depiction of the environment here, more thorough than I'm used to seeing in such a brisk precode story.

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