Found a spider in my attic last night which reminded me of the fantastic fright film classic, The Fly (1958), but it also reminded me of this downright shiver inducin' creepy crawly chiller from the May 1975 issue of Witching Hour #54. The art is by Jess Jodloman which isn't a name that rings many bells around this blog, --I'll absolutely have to rectify that immediately as this is some of the spookiest post code horror I've seen around my own sector of the web in quite awhile...
7 comments:
Jodloman was a Filipino artist whose style was similar to Alfredo Alcala's.
Lately, you've featured several talented artists that were new to me. Thanks!
Had a couple issues of the DC pre-code stuff, and some collections, so I seen his work before, though a lot of the new artist DC found around the world at that time, some of them had a similar look so I might be mistaken!
Regardless, this is more great work. Art was something you could always depend on at the DC mystery/horror lines. The story is kind of just there, but the art sells it. It works because Pietro really looks like a nervous wreck, and his slow descent to murder really works.
Page 6, panel 1 isn't doing anything special but it's just a great layout, the camera angle, the rows of bottles, even the ceiling and the scratch like shading. It's really incredible work.
Well I'm with everyone else on the art: That splash is incredible. It uses its complexity very strategically--different details reveal themselves from different distances. I'd love to see the original art board. Other instances of the central horror imagery throughout this story are equally awesome, only smaller.
This Jodloman (I'd have guessed Filipino or Argentinian) seems to be an early practitioner of a style that I think of as being all the rage by the mid-sixties--that technical pen look, with organically feathered uniform lines creating abstract textures and shallow shadows all over the art. The fact that he used this look in combination with a brush and occasional big, deep darks makes his forms particularly meaty and effective, and to my eye look almost like underground comix at times. Pretty cool.
I'm looking forward to seeing more.
In a way it has an "Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" kind of ending.
Except that the character isn't human and he's even imagining THAT part of it.
At first glance I thought the art was by Nestor Redondo, who I think had a similar style. Another swell posting of another great one I've never read before! Always thought that DC could've cherry picked the most uncompromisingly horrific stories from their early 70s heyday and published a very cool black-and-white anthology magazine that might've been competition for Marvel's B&W horror mags...
Believe it or not, the entire "the reoccurring dream was actually reality" plot is a fairly common trope in these post-code horror comics. The oddest involved a man dreaming of two sharks being hunted down--in reality, he and his hot girlfriend are the sharks in question. I don't know how or why a fly would resort to dreaming he was part of some sort of Italian soap opera but I love it all the same. Especially near the end when Celia starts to slowly transform into the taratula.
And fyi: we actually have seen some of Jess's art around my blogs, most recently (in case anyone missed it) when we visited the Vampire of the Apes over at AEET back in October HERE:
https://andeverythingelsetoo.blogspot.com/2021/10/vampire-of-apes.html
Thanks for the comments!
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