Saturday, August 11, 2018

Spider Hider

You wanted the grossest, and you got it! The grossest story in the land-- SPIDER HIDER! From the December 1952 issue of Chilling Tales #13, plus more mediocre art by Vince Napoli. Ugh...













Napoli even swiped himself in this one, compare the panel at the bottom of page 4 with the illustration he did for the 'The Insistent Ghost' found in the Sept '50 issue of Weird Tales:

7 comments:

Mestiere said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
anthrax2525 said...

Vince "Here's your damn pictures where's my damn check?" Napoli strikes again.

Mr. Karswell said...

Nice assessment from both of you, haha

Brian Barnes said...

I have to say the colorist gave it their all on this, that person really managed to salvage some of the artwork and make it interesting.

A tale that could be chilling but the art draws you in sometimes and then out again. I do like the splash, though.

Was there no books in the 50s? No libraries? How hard is it to look up what a spider looks like? I can go outside right now and find a bunch of huge ones! It's not that hard! I always bitch about this but it seems like the easiest thing to fix!

anthrax2525 said...

But how could Napoli do so excellently in that Weird Tales illo and so poorly in this story?

I concur, Brian. If there's any kind of hero this time around, it's Color Guy.

Liz D-M said...

Ugh! Now I've got the crawlies!

Mr. Cavin said...

Yeah! Go color guy! I agree with everybody else about that.

But, uh, I also liked Napoli better this time out, too. Swipes for sure, fine, but the level of super florid, emotive outsider scribbling going on here is pretty electrifying. Yeah, he doesn't seem to bother, you know, drawing the actual things from the story all that much, but he illustrated the mounting desperate madness quite ably. It's more like a story from Raw Comics than from the pre-code Golden Age, and I'm a little bit smitten. The bottom left corner of page five and the (very similar) last panel of the story are both astounding! Or maybe counfuonding! I'll take it.