Thursday, July 16, 2020

The Baby-Sitter!

The weekend is still a few days away, but who's got big plans coming up? I guess in our current age of social distancing and hot spot closures it's tough to find some of that much needed entertainment and excitement. But when you do find it, oh boy-- call The Babysitter!!! Just be sure you have all of your P's & Q's in order before stepping out, because you never know what frightening frame of mind people are actually in these days. From the February 1954 issue of Marvel Tales #120.











Hahaha...

7 comments:

Brian Barnes said...

Oh Satan below they COMPLETELY conned me!

Even better, there was some tricky captions in there, at the end of page 2, with the wife being concerned with the credentials (which was because who could handle those demon spawn?) they followed up with: "... made sure the baby-sitter is all right" which completely telegraphed the ending but made it seem like the opposite (i.e., the credentials being OK, not the sitter.) That's some either super clever writing or a happy coincidence.

"Cheese it ... da cops!" Awesome.

5 pages of misdirection without cheating. This one is a classic.

My only complaint is the splash, I don't know how well the hand works, but that's super minor.

Mr. Cavin said...

I love the hand in the splash. I dig how subliminal it is, nearly invisible. I like the fact that all it does is illustrate the whimsy of some appropriately overblown narration. So, do we think that's a coloring mistake or did the powers-that-be decide to obscure the fact that Mary's only wearing a bra?

The very mannered art here is super. Very organized and premeditated, like it was cut into wood. Sometimes I don't love that look in comics, but here it really projects the mood with all those weird shapes and texture whorls. The bottom three panels of page three are great. The whole story uses the yellow pass well.

Todd said...

I figured the kids were the bad guys, but this was still a lot of fun.

Wendy said...

Ha, that was an unexpected but not unwelcome ending!

Bill the Butcher said...

This was fun as hell, and obviously the baby sitter was so telegraphed as evil that she could only be the victim. High point: the dancing drunk.

Grant said...

Somehow I expected a relatively light ending, partly because of that taboo about getting kids killed even in a horror story. But like most people here, I didn't expect that particular one.

nutsilica.blogspot.com said...

I like the splash.
It's an unusual solution.
I love this artist.
I think he's underrepresented on The Horrors of it All.
Every story he did was top notch.
He had a unique approach and put full effort into every job.
He's in my top five favourite artists for fifties horror.
Joe Maneely
Matt Fox
Basil Wolverton
Bill Everett
Charles Winter