Thursday, December 19, 2019
Kill No More!
Got another goofball gorilla tale for you today, this time from the July 1953 issue of Beware #16. I suppose the surrealness of this silly story is the real highpoint here, because the A.C. Hollingsworth artwork feels just as exceptionally uninspired and phoned-in as the slap-dash, crap coloring.
Replace A.C. Hollingsworth with an artist from Atlas or Marvel and add a dash of Stan Lee's wit and this would have been a sterling tale of the silver age.
ReplyDeleteNot to take away from the gorilla-riffic tale. but would like wish Mr.K, and the gang here, Happy Horror-days!
ReplyDeleteHell, add Stan Lee to EC's original horror bullpen and no telling how insanely more brilliant things would've turned out over there, haha...
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks Guy, same to you and yours!
Man is this murky! Could be the inking, or the printing, or both, but parts of this are like viewing it through mud!
ReplyDeleteI don't know if the Julius Schwartz legend is true, but supposedly he saw that gorillas (and the color purple) on covers sold more comics, and so he had gorillas -- and purple ones! -- on DC covers. Here we have an earlier blue gorilla. Were they experimenting? Had they not found the proper color yet? They were close!
I think the tale would have been a bit better if it was a running battle between the gorilla and the hunter, but I can understand them having to go back to (castle? house?) to re-enforce the ending.
I love the gorilla on the splash -- he *looks* human, which is a good callback to the ending. GR-RRRG indeed!
Thank you Mr.K. for this slightly muddy art outing. I enjoyed this new perspective on were-apes. Quite different from the previous exchange of apeness as in the last blog's tale. The splash ape is great. The ending caught me off guard.
ReplyDeleteThank you!
ReplyDeleteI know my comments are spotty (at best), but I truly enjoy everything you post.
It's funny how you expect to find another "Most Dangerous Game" variation (hopefully a good one), but then it goes off into wild areas of its own.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of The Most Dangerous Game, no matter how awful he sounds when he talks about his career, the title made me expect it to end with a "chastened" Lestrang who survives and gives up hunting.
I don't know if that's a nod to the Rue Morgue murders on page two or not, but I'm pretty sure that was actually a red-headed ape.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the art here is a little rough, but I do dig on the odd panel. The page three appearance of the gorilla is a lot of fun--it sort of evokes Kurtzman--and I like the top of four, too (but man, the bottom of the same page is surprisingly bad). Like everybody else I really dig that hep pompadour the blue ape is sporting in the splash. And while the colorist was being totally prosaic, I appreciate the fact that hair colored in this way is supposed to read as blue for once.