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Sunday, July 14, 2019
The Evil Ministers? / Pet Hate
Ripped from today's headlines comes a tale from the March 1954 issue of This Magazine is Haunted #16. Yes, I don't know about you, but I've kind of suspected that this is what's been going on in our country for a number of years now-- only worse! EEEAAA! GHAAAAA!
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8 comments:
I like the fantastic art on this one. "Laughing fit to kill" doesn't ring a bell with me. I had to look it up. Perhaps it is not used in the Northwest? I enjoy the horror/sci-fi that you post occasionally. That was a wild one-pager. I too liked the dummy's look. Trent would be so mad! Thank you Mr. K..
Ooops, I forgot to add a EEEAAA! GHAAAAA! right back at you Mr. K.
Ah, the old "Everybody's actually an evil alien bent on taking over the world, but no one will ever believe me because they're all aliens too!" chestnut. I feel sorry for the poor newscaster, just wanted to get a good story for his paper and prove what was really going on out there.
Were the aliens actually going to keep their word to the premier though?
The short story with Zingo was hilarious. Never piss off your dummy. He may kill you!
I can't say much about the stories, they are both a bit meh for me. Serviceable.
The art is good. I like the rendering of Dr. Death with the black sunken eyes. There's very few panels in this that lack a background, and it can be a bit busy at times. I love the couple "action Jackson" panels, and some fine good girl art in the secretary. The colors are good but might lean a bit too much on the yellows.
Pet Hate is an interesting shortening of the old dummy kills the ventriloquist story. It shows you can create the same story which just a few panels, which makes it more of a campfire type story (get right to the "splinter" "so it really happened" ending.)
"Evil Ministers" - a classic Cold War narrative.
"Pet Hate" - the splinter in the throat - nice twist!
Dr. Death looks extra menacing in this one. Usually he is depicted as a green skull which comes off more cartoony than menacing, in his current colorized form he has that extra something, that extra level of evil that adds to his presence.
One way the aliens could avoid having their pictures taken and avoid suspicion- they would publicly state that they were exposed to harmful vapors from an industrial accident (think Bhopal) and they now had sensitive eyes and camera flashes would cause severe damage to their eyesight. Either that or they would state they had a superstitious fear of being photographed.
Nothing pleases me more than a good three-panel transformation, and I thought this one was top-notch. This was a pretty neat invader design for sure, not something I've seen before. I might have liked to see several more pages of this story--a chase scene, some subway tunnel violence, a couple of affable beat cops getting death-rayed--to distract me from the end reveal. But mostly that's because I want to see more of this art. That's my kind of stuff: Bold and blocky, with aggressive emotional marks; chunky, with detail stuffed into every corner of the frame. I even like this sort of thing when it's poorly done and overly busy, but I don't think that's the case here. It's a little hard to know for certain because the blacks are crumbling away and the colors are aging. So I'd love to see the original art. But I think it's probably amazing.
There is definitely some authorial snickering going on in that dummy story. Besides whatever that final splinter might be code for, there's the line "how does it feel to have the wood you've been abusing strike back at you?" And in the fifties, both "wood" and "self abuse" were very widely understood euphemisms. That's not any more of a hidden code than if they'd just gone and used the real medical terms for everything.
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