Time to hop, skip, and do a jittery little jump on down to the marvelous Atlas morgue of precode horror today, with an odd tale of treacherous terror from the May 1954 (final) issue of Adventures into Terror #31.
Thank you Mr.K. for this nice cover and terrific splash. Shades of Edward G.. I enjoyed the art on this gritty noir fun. Great close-ups really add to the telling. The fattened fingers on the 1/2 ton weight, using the body as a desk are wonderful touches too. Appreciation is sent your way.
Hm, I'm a big fan of Atlas and I usually rant and rave about the stories but this one is ... OK. It's good and a fun read ... but it's very convenient.
The art is also good. The mobsters at the beginning, the weight panel, etc. But nothing that stands out. Best panel, page 3, panel 7.
If this was in another pre-code mag, it'd be a grade up. In Atlas, it's OK.
My favorite panel is page four, number three. Man, that's a pretty spooky body!
The first two pages of this story don't add anything more than interesting background material to the usual circular Atlas morality tale, here confined to a nimble three pages at the end: Coroner kills to cover mistake and then is killed, in turn, an ironically similar way! And yet I liked the first two pages best--that dissolved corpse makes a pretty great surprise (okay, and that's also a pretty spooky body). I think if I rewrote this, I would cut the murder, have had the mad coroner Crockett experimenting with adding the lye to the formaldehyde itself, so the very act of embalming the evidence of his crimes was erasing them. Then, instead of suffocating the coroner in the drawer at the end, our writer (Stan?) could have melted him on the metal tabletop instead.
4 comments:
Thank you Mr.K. for this nice cover and terrific splash. Shades of Edward G.. I enjoyed the art on this gritty noir fun. Great close-ups really add to the telling. The fattened fingers on the 1/2 ton weight, using the body as a desk are wonderful touches too. Appreciation is sent your way.
Hm, I'm a big fan of Atlas and I usually rant and rave about the stories but this one is ... OK. It's good and a fun read ... but it's very convenient.
The art is also good. The mobsters at the beginning, the weight panel, etc. But nothing that stands out. Best panel, page 3, panel 7.
If this was in another pre-code mag, it'd be a grade up. In Atlas, it's OK.
My favorite panel is page four, number three. Man, that's a pretty spooky body!
The first two pages of this story don't add anything more than interesting background material to the usual circular Atlas morality tale, here confined to a nimble three pages at the end: Coroner kills to cover mistake and then is killed, in turn, an ironically similar way! And yet I liked the first two pages best--that dissolved corpse makes a pretty great surprise (okay, and that's also a pretty spooky body). I think if I rewrote this, I would cut the murder, have had the mad coroner Crockett experimenting with adding the lye to the formaldehyde itself, so the very act of embalming the evidence of his crimes was erasing them. Then, instead of suffocating the coroner in the drawer at the end, our writer (Stan?) could have melted him on the metal tabletop instead.
Atlas Tales page says Paul S. Newman wrote this one
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