Monday, December 16, 2019
The Suitcase!
It's that time of the season again when everyone seems to be completely out of their heads! I know the holidays are definitely a love / hate thing with my family, so what better way to get in the unspirit of things, than with a story that has absolutely nothing to do with xmas! And yes, it's another weird one from the final issue of Adventures into Terror (see our last post too!)
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6 comments:
Now that's an Atlas tale! Let's get the crumby printing out of the way, it's really blurred on the splash, but other than that, this is a tightly paced little thriller.
This is another one where you know the guys fate from the middle of page 2, but I love the slow methodical chemical mixing ... every panel creeps closer and closer and it still catches me a bit by surprise (the cutting off of the head to join the others.). No explanation needed for the origin of the suitcase, it just works.
The last page is great, the head shrinking sequence, the reach for the knife, and then the "it begins again" ending.
All in 4 pages! A+!
Thank you Mr.K. for this fun tale of crazy weirdness.
Without realizing it, this comic shows us how our nation has changed since the innocent times of the fifties- if a suitcase is left abandoned in a train station today, Amtrak Police, Homeland Security and the bomb squad would be called to the scene in minutes.
What a different ending this comic would have had if the bomb squad had blown up the suitcase with the shrunken heads inside. Maybe a passerby would have found the instructions on how to make shrunken heads and the story would begin all over again.
Great tale and great find as usual, Karswell.
I have a question: If the shrunken heads are forcing you to follow the instructions to create a head shrinking potion--what if you don't happen to have some of the ingredients on hand? I mean Joey just so happened to have ammonia and iodine and salt inside his closet. Do the heads silently command you to go to the nearest grocery store to get some? When questioned by the cashier/store clerk, do you just shrug your shoulders and say that you're trying a new head shrinking recipe?
Nifty bit of quite literal foreshadowing in the art of this one. I mean, long before that classic Atlas four-frame transformation sequence at the top of page four, we get panels like the ones at the bottom of page two and the top of three, in which Joey's head is pictured as diminished relative to the shadow it's casting on the wall behind him. That's a pretty clever visual device.
Meanwhile the writer missed an opportunity for a little foreshadowing in the splash. No reason why the newspaper our man is reading can't have a headline about the previous Headless Corpse Murder.
I always like it when you're expected to feel bad for the small-time criminal in one of these stories (not that I don't anyway, a lot of the time).
Nearly the best example of that is Willie Loomis on DARK SHADOWS. His relatively small crimes accidentally lead him to become Renfield to Barnabas Collins' Dracula.
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