Sunday, August 23, 2020
The Couple Next Door!
I get at least a couple of emails a month asking for more vampire stories --more than any other type of tale I post here, in fact-- and after feeling like I kind of gipped you guys with that fake vampire story earlier this month, I hit the vault and not only found a worthy entry from the April 1954 issue of Mystic #29, but one by Vince Colleta that is as va-va-va-voom voluptuous as it is vicious! Seriously, there are so many attractive panels in this one it's insane --page 3 for example is simply a great collection of Sexy Girl on a Bed poses! I could elaborate more on the Sexy Girl in a Coffin panels, or the low-angle leg art on page 4, but let's get this superbly spicy sucker started already, shall we?
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Maybe it's my mood of the day but I'm sorry for the vampire here. At least she wasn't from a culture where cremation is normal. Kind of difficult to return three nights a week to scattered ashes, innit?
You've posted 13 updates every month this year so far. Planning to stick to that schedule?
This one is fun! One thing that stands out to me on page 2 is that in panel 6 it appears that Carol has fangs--and this is before she reveals she's a vampire! Also, I know that this is actually a more modern invention when it comes to vampire lore (beginning with Nosferatu) but I noticed that they took a boat ride out in the direct sunlight and Carol didn't immediately burst into flames or become a pile of ash. Then again, not all vampires are affected by the sunlight depending on how the tropes are used.
Anyhow, there's a lot of sexy art of Carol. I especially like panel 6 with the closeup revealing her face--those eyes and drooling mouth are fantastic. I also really love the first panel of page 5 and the second to last panel of Carol's lifeless body lying almost serene like.
I actually love Bill's ballsy attempt to get his wife to willingly reveal her grave to him. Carol should have cleaned the car out better after her lunch date with Jim. I am surprised that it took him that long to finally realize that his wife was a vampire--but maybe she was more careful before hand. After all, she wasn't killing her other victims in the car, and it wasn't anybody that Bill knew.
I also love how he immediately recognized the tie bar as a present he gave his brother, saw the blood stains on the car and put two and two together so well!
I'm not really surprised at Bill not being remorseful of killing his wife either. She was technically already dead and their marriage was already falling apart to begin with. Also, she killed his brother. I love the bit where he gives her his brother's tie bar. I don't know why, I just find it to be a rather neat touch to it.
The art is relatively clean in this one and has some great advertising quality in places (like the good girl (vampire) pin-ups on page 3.). I'll be the bottom 3 panels on page 3 are lifted from somewhere (and I don't mean this in a bad way but a reference way, which is great.)
On page 4, last panel we get a good rotting corpse girl pin-up!
The splash is pretty misleading, though. This is a fun one, how it suddenly turns on it's end and becomes almost noir-like.
I want to give some extra love to the fighting couple scene, that's done really well for comics that usually try hard to get to the flying eyeballs and such. There's a real look of disdain there!
The character work in this is great. I like the way the story is grounded in this rocky relationship stuff. It's interesting that she has become distant because she's protecting him from her true nature; while he is distant because he's filled with angry revengeance. Everything snaps into place nicely with the sequence of reveals. Frankly, I think he took her out on that sunny lake to kill her; that it was his first plan, but it didn't work out owing to some quirk of folklore. So by the end, he must have also been pretty skeptical of the stake--and yet he goes for it anyway. That's chutzpah! As for the vampire, I like it that she genuinely feels betrayed when her husband stakes her. He asked her to share her secrets with him, and now he's killed her for them. I love that panel, by the way. I love how the letter Es are all shaded differently. That's just fun.
I like the way the people are rendered, too. Sure, this is full of excellent cheesecake, but it's also got two main characters who keep changing clothes and altering their hair--and yet are totally convincing as the same people from panel to panel. An there's no overacting here, either. It's just well handled all 'round. I don't usually like panels with both crosshatching and Ben Day screen shading, but the fifth panel on page two works really well.
This one surprised me! I thought Bill would turn out to be dead, too; I didn't think he'd punish Carol for her honesty. Although I guess he punished her for murdering his brother, come to think of it. What a bad marriage, that admitting to being a vampire couldn't save it. I wonder if he still drinks and gambles.
Nobody mentioned the fact that they've been married for 3 years and what, did Carol not know what Bill's brother looked like? Or did she not care that she was killing a relative? Maybe he just looked too tempt-tasty at all those family get togethers.
>You've posted 13 updates every month this year so far. Planning to stick to that schedule?
Well being 2020, only the luckiest of years deserves the luckiest number of posts per month... I was wondering if anybody was going to notice that.
The work from Colletta was superb. It's a shame he would spend the latter part of his career as an inker (and often criticized by fans of Kirby's work). He and Joe Sinnott still had so much to offer.
Just as Carol looks like a femme fatale (before you know the vampire part), it's interesting that Bill looks like a real "put-upon" character (I could imagine him being played by William Redfield or someone like that). And of course characters like that are always getting some kind of revenge in these stories.
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