Sunday, March 1, 2020
The Madman!
Don't lose your heads again, but I think we'll stick with the Atlas tales for a few more posts this month. And picking up right where we left (our heads) off last month is another wonderfully weird yarn of cutting edge eeriness, and this time it's from the February 1953 issue of Mystery Tales #8.
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9 comments:
This is wonderful. Tony DiPreta from the credits at GCB but I wonder who did the colors? They're fantastic.
Of course, that line isn't actually in the play, but I don't know that it matters.
Yeesh, multiple attempts to kill a guy just to take over his part in a local production? I like how at least nobody feels sorry for him.
Certainly an interesting one. I like stories where there's a sense of justice behind the horror.
I really like the art in this one. It's dark, dismal, and full of shadows. There isn't a page without heavy shadows everywhere!
Page 6, panel 7 the colorist gets a gold star. The artist forgot to draw in the costume, but the colorist still colored it correctly! The colorist does a overall good job on this one.
The 4 panel sequence on page 6 is really good, especially the way the sword shadow moves through it.
Modern horror owes more to Jacobean Revenge Tragedy (of which Hamlet is a great example) as a genre, than many literary critics might want to admit. In fact modern horror might just be its heir presumptive. The author of this piece seems to have at least a passing knowledge of working in the theatre. Many script writers slummed it, anonymously, in the comparatively well paid world of comics, during the forties and fifties. I wonder if this one was involved in the theatre? If that was the case, I wonder if they purposefully misquoted that last line, or if it was changed by editor?
You'd think the producer would want the best actors in the roles, just for financial reasons, not done nepotistic hack. Let alone a murderous nepotistic hack.
I thought the writing was excellent here. I especially appreciated the slight nod to the fourth wall at the top of page seven--"I'd like to know what he meant by that last line"--as if the group on onlookers had just been reading the script for this very story. The art was pretty neat too, chunky and dynamic with an appropriate attention paid to the facial expressions of its cast of dramatists. And all those solid shadows sliding away from the foregrounds. This is the best kind of art for sloppy color registration in my humble o. The finished document, with all its unforeseen skews and overlaps, is really beautiful to me.
My favorite panel is that last one on page four.
Jeez, I didn't know regional theater was so ruthless.
Thanks for the fun Mr.K. I crafted a clay head in jr. high for art class and named him Yorick. So this was one ending I saw coming.
I have a terrible lack of knowledge of Shakespeare, but it's easy to notice that the actor in Panel 2 of Page 2 seems made up for The Merchant of Venice not Hamlet.
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