Sunday, July 5, 2020
The Undead!
The cemetery hills are alive with the sounds of, umm, shovels, as we dig into an Allen Bellman Atlas horror entry from the July 1951 issue of Mystic #3. Hmmm, as "one of the most important men of science", you'd think this guy would've thought of the one major detail that everyone will be thinking while reading this terror tale-- it doesn't make it any less entertaining though! Yes, that's entertainment, f-f-f-folks!
Yeah, maybe Anthony should have preserved his wife's body before waiting all that time to finally dig up her coffin and wheel her home. At least she still loves him after all this time. Sorry,there are some unintentionally funny parts to this comic that had me laughing pretty hard. The first one is in panel 2, page 4 when the bartender rather casually remarks "What a mayor! Never could keep still!" when the news reports that the mayor's body moved in its coffin. I also laughed really hard two panels later on the same page at this bit: I ventured out again! What luck! A man stepped into the path of my car...He was struck down. What good fortune! He was dead!
ReplyDeleteWas he hoping for that to happen? It does seem a bit too fortuitous that he just so happened to have his experimental stuff with him when he was out driving.
Also, wheeling Alice's coffin to his car like some sort of morbid take out is unintentionally funny too. I mean, most of the time, the body is simply dug up--not the entire coffin!
The last two pages presents a problem a lot of snap ending horror comics have -- keeping the wife in shadows as to hide the decay just serves to create a big flashing arrow pointing at the ending. It shows how it can be harder to write these stories than most people think.
ReplyDeleteI do like the ending panel, though.
Note in page 2, panel 4 and page 5, panel 5 his new house has nearly the same wall -- close to the same color (I'm going to call printing inconsistencies on it), same picture, same tear in the wall! I guess he really was home sick!
Glowworm made the same comment I was about to. "What good fortune! He was dead!" For one of the important men of science, this guy's been hitting the smurfberry juice pretty hard. I also like how "the serum should have been speedily coursing through the body," what, twelve years after death? I'm surprised there was anything left but bones. But that's Mystic World for you!
ReplyDeleteIt's hilarious how the great scientist forgot that corpses rot.
ReplyDeleteYou know, this art in this fun story is a little amateurish here and there, but I quite like the bottom two thirds of the fourth page for all their brightly-colored villainy, and the last panel of page five is legitimately scary. I also like the splash. On page four, a lot of credit goes to the colorist; and at least part of what I love about page five is the spotty noise that has resulted from the blank ink rubbing off over sixty-odd years. (What's the word for seeing scary figures emerge from random patterns in the darkness? Pareidolia.) But that awesome splash is all Bellman: I love the cardboard coffin, the consoling trio of skeletal judges, the tombstone in Morse code.
ReplyDeleteToday's story did suggest a flight of fancy:
What if the story went another way? Imagine, if you can, a politician you don't even like. He's totally terrible, the worst, making a hash of simply everything. I'll give you a minute to make one up. Got it? Okay, now, image if that jerk were to keel over in office, kick the bucket, buy the farm, give up the ghost. Hooray! But then, at some point in the middle of all your celebrating, some science joker pops-up and casually raises him from the dead for some totally random reason. Like, just wanted to try out the serum. And then, that politician is not only alive again, but alive forever.