I keep finding more cool Jess Jodloman stories, so you know what? Let's just give 'ol JJ the spooky Spotlight Artist of the Month and finish out May with a couple more jeepers creepers, --pickin' things up with a cursed doll tale o'terror from the macabre May 1977 issue of Witching Hour #71!
The facial expressions on Nikki's greedy relatives are great. I especially love the panel where Nikki is about to stab the doll with a knife and Lew's freaked out reaction is fantastic. I love how Nikki is only 7 years old yet already knows how to use this doll like a pro. Perhaps before dying, mom gave her instructions? I also like how the lawyer doesn't look that disturbed by the death of the relatives--despite Cynthia's narration that he "almost came unglued!" It's more like "Okay,they set themselves on fire. They were terrible people anyway. Come on honey, I'm gonna adopt you."
ReplyDeleteCyntha's hip lingo at the beginning is a bit unintentionally hilarious!
ReplyDeleteArt is great, though the inking or printing seems a bit heavy in places. He does fine background work, too, which doesn't normally go noticed. Part 3, top two panels, with the exterior of the house and the interior (even down to all the various vases, that's a lot of work!) Very nice work.
Great work with the over-exaggerated expressions. Second to last panel on the last page, though ... what's with the blank space? Was there something there that got edited out? For a comic with so many dense backgrounds it really stands out.
This Jodloman discovery month continues to deliver excellent character work. I really dig the "Nikki's got to die" panel on page two and the whole top row of page five, especially. Jess had a nice touch with keeping the subject distances fresh from panel to panel, too, never relying too often on close-ups or medium shots, etc.
ReplyDeleteI'm less enthusiastic about the kind of heavy background detail we see in nearly every panel on page three. I prefer the look of pages four and five, with some panels opening up space to carve out the action. I mean, I like all the art, I just feel like the sequential story telling is better with some room to breathe. Artists who detail every last little thing tend to turn out pages that feel busy to me, more difficult to resolve, a reading hurdle easily mitigated by the right coloring strategy. But here in the seventies, especially at DC, the house look wasn't doing any of the heavy lifting necessary to sort out frames like this, and for me the story telling bogs down into the unnecessary details.
>The facial expressions on Nikki's greedy relatives are great.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I love most about Jess's artwork as well, those faces!
>Cyntha's hip lingo at the beginning is a bit unintentionally hilarious!
Nope, everything the 60's -70's DC horror hosts say is completely intentional! haha... also, I think the big empty spaces in the final panels was just an artistic way of showing how Nikki's life was no longer crowded with crappy evil adults making terrible decisions.
>This Jodloman discovery month continues to deliver excellent character work.
And one more to go-- coming up next! Thanks for the comments!