As if dealing with one deadly pandemic wasn't enough, now
THOIA mauls you mercilessly with another eerie epidemic to have a screaming fit over! From the June 1952 issue of
Spellbound #4, --I've also made sure that it fits into some sort of
Werewolf Wednesday theme as well...
Thank you Mr.K. for this truly hairy tale. Joe's art is always clearly professional. I had fun.
ReplyDeleteThis one is unintentionally funny. I think it's the fact that the two main characters are taking this so seriously--yet it seems so ridiculous at the same time. We have no idea why the dogs are rabid, let alone able to turn others into them. we have no idea how the heck this happened. All we do know is that mankind is going to go to the dogs real soon.
ReplyDeleteI feel like this is the sort of thing a little kid fears--the idea that if a rabid dog bites them--they'll actually become one.
Well that serum obviously didn't work if Toley used it earlier on his scratch. The artwork is perfect for this tale. I love the second to last panel of page two. I also love the last panel of page 3.The final panel of the story is my favorite though. He looks more like a werewolf than a dog. In fact if they didn't keep saying dogs throughout this story, I'd swear it was just a werewolf tale.
Well, the "dogs" depicted through the story look pretty much identical to wolves, or maybe German shepherds. And German shepherds are very similar to wolves. In any case all dogs are just selectively bred wolves.
DeleteVery much a modern zombie tale, but written in the 50s with dogs instead of a zombie plague!
ReplyDeleteJoe really knocks it out of the park with this one. I can't even pick out a bad panel, just a couple "meh" ones. The splash is great, with all the eyes and the giant head. I love the shadows page 2, panel 3, and the last panel is a real winner.
BTW, little experiment. Read the last page but skip the captions. Nothing changes, it would actually be better (IMHO) without the captions.
Page 4, panel 2 could be it's own comic series: Corporate WereDog!
The entire second half of this comic would work better without narration boxes and speech balloons. They're merely a distraction by that point.
DeleteOh man, Joe Sinnott's Wolfen! This is definitely the best day of the week! I love all the panels with dogs. I love all the panes with werewolves. I love all the panels where the characters are growling at each other through gritted teeth.
ReplyDeleteSo page two is my favorite page (man, get a load of that alleyway shot); but the patented Atlas four-panel progression at the bottom of page four is really dynamite, too. And so is the dynamic foot chase at the bottom of page three.
The lycanthropevirus is a well known RNA virus of the group Mythoviridae. It has been known to appear in local epidemic form over a period if centuries, at first in Europe - especially Germany and France - but in modern times almost entirely in North America, except for a couple of cases in Britain, in one of which a group of soldiers was almost entirely killed by people infected with the virus. It is structurally similar to rabies virus but is far more contagious and quick-acting, and has events not just on the sufferer's central nervous system but on his appearance and body morphology. How exactly this occurs has never been determined, mostly because any attempt at research has led to the researcher morphing into a canid resembling a wolf.
ReplyDeleteGood artwork rescuing a predictable story, once again. Extremely good artwork, in fact.
What's this? A pre-Code werewolf story I've never seen before?
ReplyDeleteI probably was rooting for the wrong side here.
I want that splash on a t-shirt!
ReplyDeleteWeredog-rific tale.
This is one of the nicest Joe Sinnott jobs.
ReplyDeleteI kind of like the story.
It seems like a fragment of a larger story, I guess.
They almost have the Zombie story.
there are so many instances where the zombie is partly there.
I watched Hitchcock's the Birds recently and I notice it was the basic zombie story too.
The zombie is certainly the horror story for the times right now.
Chuck Pahlaniuk has a novel that tells of a rabies pandemic called Rant.
THOA great work !
ReplyDelete