Everyone seemed to enjoy the Jess Jodloman artwork featured in our last post, so I dug around a bit and found another tale by him for you, a terrifically satanic passage from the May 1986 issue of Elvira's House of Mystery #3 via DC, with some ferociously hellacious Halloween devils heatin' up the last five flaming pages! And while most of you know that I'm not the biggest fan of Elvira (I am forever dedicated to Team Vampira), I was actually quite a fan of this short-lived series back in my teenage high school days. And just to make things even more eerie, how about a 3-page mummy quickie from Elvira's House of Mystery #8 as well, with equally astounding art by killer Kerry Gammill too!
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:
ReplyDeletehttps://andeverythingelsetoo.blogspot.com/2021/10/vampire-of-apes.html
That's kind of an interesting horror story. There's no punch ending, there's no even really any vengeance or ancient curses, it's basically a listicle! I'm not really sure about why the movie star got out of this, but on the last page Jodloman spend some extra time on the breasts!
ReplyDeleteArt is obviously great in this, I especially like all the nudity concealing shadows. I really like the landlord one, that's actually staged really well, and then the lake currents, it's pretty entertaining!
I like the buff super-villain-ish devils.
Let's give the second artist some love, he goes all out on the interior of the tomb. That's really fine work!
I get what Brian's saying about listicles, but I was thinking of the vibe here more in the precode vernacular: What we got in this story was a completely self-contained, full-blown anthology horror mag. Only this time the interstitial material--the wraparound segment--has been promoted to the foreground and all the individual horror stories have been boiled down to about one panel each. And yeah, that's just a long way of saying it's a narrative list. Otherwise it'd basically be Tales from the Crypt--especially similar to the 1972 movie.
ReplyDeleteOf course, what it really reminded me of was historical folk art displays of the morality kind: All those red devil dioramas whittled by Appalachians, or Tiger Balm Gardens, or even seasonal evangelical Hell Houses. I liked it! Jodloman gives us excellent devils, that's for sure. I also really like the second page here: It's very effective the way the page goes from crowded at the top to rather lonelier at the bottom. I love that lonely elevator panel right in the middle. It's an effective and premeditated graphic use of the word balloons themselves, all the more effective because we are sort of trained to edit them from our appreciation of the page.
I worked in a video store in the eighties, and we got all the Elvira promotional items--mostly for beer and Halloween and Mistress of the Dark. I'm pretty sure I used to actually own that cardboard standee on page one. Maybe still have it!
"True Justice--retribution--even forgiveness--is the province of Higher powers!"
ReplyDeleteOl' Scratch, what's come over you? You're supposed to be the foe of mankind and arch enemy of Heaven, not a moralizing preacher-
-or perhaps, just perhaps, this is one of the fallen angels who works for both sides, a double-crossing double agent who hopes to get in good with the powers above. You never can tell.
>Let's give the second artist some love, he goes all out on the interior of the tomb. That's really fine work!
ReplyDeleteI agree... I hope everyone reads it, I know sometimes the second story of a double feature here gets overlooked, but this one is really great. So let's hear what everyone thought of Mummy Dearest too!
>basically be Tales from the Crypt--especially similar to the 1972 movie
It's actually also very much like Amicus Studio's Vault of Horror movie, as that group of characters were also trapped on an elevator ride down into Hell.
>Ol' Scratch, what's come over you?
Haha, true... but sometimes it seems Scratch and God switch roles and the one above who is all powerful and overseeing seems to be on vacation-- I mean, have you seen the news lately?
Okay, more Jess Jodloman up next, I kind of decided to just give him a little more of the THOIA spotlight since he is definitely one of the more underrated artists I've featured around here in awhile. Stay tombed...