Friday, August 3, 2018

Queen of the Shrunken Heads

Here's a fast moving, grimy jungle gem of horror where the ugly American does some ugly stuff and thankfully gets what is coming to him in a wonderfully ugly manner. From the April 1952 issue of Fantastic #9, art by Harry Harrison and Ernie Bache.















Hang tight... we'll do another one from this issue UP NEXT!
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7 comments:

  1. Diablo6668/04/2018

    WoW! I would hafta dig DEEP to find a more entertaining tale than THIS! Shrunken "Heads Off", the BEST tale of jungle skullduggery in memory!...Thank you, Karswell, for your uncanny Rain Forest comic book archeology unearthing this "Happy Ending" horror show!....Who says the bad guy doesn't get any "Head"..??! ....Loved the artwork, n' you say there is yet another sordid story from this same book??!I might hafta acquire this issue for my own creepy crypt collection!! Hoo-HAH!!

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  2. Mr. Karswell8/04/2018

    Haha, indeed Diablo! Coming up in a few... stay tombed!

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  3. Glowworm8/04/2018

    Mala should have known better than to bring a knife to a gun fight. Yet Twitch should have known better than to bring a gun to a shrunken head fight.

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  4. Brian Barnes8/05/2018

    There's a lot of interesting stuff in this tale. First, is anybody really good in this? Note that while he shot Mala, the text seems to point out that her tribe was making shrunken heads of the ranchers that didn't pay up.

    I love the pacing of this, it's quite different than your regular being chased by shrunken head tales (yes, there's enough of them to be a genre!). It gets right to the heads, on page 2, and every other page is the chase. It's a lot of fun!

    Last page, panel 2, is just awesome. Now thats a great panel!

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  5. Todd8/06/2018

    I sure do love me some Brazilian pesos.

    I also love how the ending stresses Mala's wickedness, when she didn't exactly strike me as the supervillain here.

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  6. Mestiere8/09/2018

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. Mr. Cavin8/16/2018

    Ah regicide, rare Brazilian headhunters, and beautiful old yellow paper. Wild jungle adventure makes for great problematic fifties horror. This strikes me as a perfect candidate for the Sam Raimi, or perhaps early Peter Jackson, treatment. I can just picture all those hopping, chattering heads chasing Bruce Campbell out the window (I guess somebody untied the mouths before siccing 'em on Twitch, huh?).

    The "mosquitoes fever thirst" panel row was my favorite thing about the comic. An expedient sock in the nose, heady and unexpected.

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