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Sunday, July 19, 2020
The Bones...
If you've ever felt the uncontrollable urge to kiss a moldy old human skull just dug up from an ancient grave, then this is definitely the story for you! From the super spooky, September 1953 issue of Men's Adventures #23, and highlighted with art by mad Mort Lawrence who kindly signed his name right on the tombstone in the splash.
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6 comments:
That's not where I was expecting this tale to go at all. I figured, that the ghost of the ancestor was going to be pissed at his descendant for having his bones shipped back to England. Everything is heavily hinted in that direction, from the gravediggers and their boss being against it and questioning it to the undead stranger in the graveyard agreeing with the descendant about not belonging in his graveyard. (Beautiful panel of that part by the way--complete with the corpse's outstretched arm and the descendant's monocle popping off in shock.) Until the letter shows up explaining the mix-up, this could have simply ended right there. That the descendant died because his ancestor was upset that he had been moved from his beloved Italy.
That does explain those fangs on that corpse and why the descendant was torn to pieces rather than simply found dead of shock or a heart attack.
That doesn't explain why a witch rumored to be a vampire was buried with everyone else in a respectful cemetery though. How nice to give equal burial rights to her!
I also love the panel of one of the grave diggers kissing the skull. I find that to be both funny and touching.
The ending was a nice trick (as Glowworm said, you'd expect that it would be the ancestor rising in vengeance), and the art is great; but I would fail in my nitpicking duties if I failed to mention Domenico's "an idiot ancestor of his" (4th panel, page 2). No, old boy, that's an idiot *descendant*. Thank you.
Yes, it's a good gag on the ending, though a little unfair (it is unannounced) but it's 4 pages and gives one great ending splash.
Kissing skulls? I guess they didn't see Ed Wood Jr's Necromania!
Let's talk about the art in this thing. It's fabulous. It's really ... as I read it, the word came to mind ... lush. It's not crowded or hard to see but it's busy and full of lots of great ink work from heavy to light lines. The first panel with the city in the background is a gorgeous image. Lawrence spent a lot of time on this and it shows!
And the "splash" on page 4 is all sorts of awesome. A vampire/witch/spook screaming "How did you guess!" It's nice to still have such a since of humor after hundreds of years in the grave! Everything about that panel, the sudden appearance of bats, the expression on the the lord, and Mumra, I mean, the vampire/witch is a great image. The color is uniformly good throughout the entire thing.
Winner after winner lately! Everything you publish is great to read but you've been knocking it out of the park the last couple posts.
Whoa, even the little panels between the stunning set pieces are still awesome. The reburial scene on page three, for example--it's mundane, it's crushed by balloons, and it's even broken across two lines--but it's still wondrous with atmosphere and real physical space. This dude's a helluva illustrator.
And the colorist really went to town on this one, too. You know you're in classy hands when you can detect the brushwork in the process screens. Look at the rainbow-colored ground they are digging into on the splash. Usually color is applied in ham-fisted fields, but here you can see it was strategically daubed. That's Prince Valiant-level stuff right there. Somebody cared about this.
Heh, this was sort of fun. Your intro and the cheesecake at the end may have been even better, though! Sorta like a three-course meal.
Thank you kindly for the awesome comments, as well as the continued analysis of our always awesome Atlas month presentations. Lots more on the way, stay tombed...
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