If you didn't giggle hard enough at our last post, --and if the smell of burnt hot dog made you completely lose your appetite from the same entry, --let's quickly turn now to the May - June 1954 issue of Bughouse #2 for something a bit more silly and madcap, and maybe even a little macabre in the most moronic manner possible. And Happy Werewolf Wednesday as well!
I like the menu--especially how cheep a slice of writer is without toast compared to it on toast.
ReplyDeleteI love the complete mix up of vampire/werewolf here. It's as is the clever idea of "wolf" (as in the Tex Avery type) got shoe-horned into a vampire comedy!
ReplyDeletePage 5 is great, the battle is really cartoonish but features pretty strong action! I love page 3, panel 6, with the over-exaggerated dancing characters. There's a lot of fun art here.
I did a quick google search and can't find a good definition for "slip joint."
It's like Count Chocula as a randy young bigamist. Am I the only one who reads these things in old vaudeville accents? I, too, dig that Rock 'Em Sock 'Em throwdown on the last page. Rollickin'!
ReplyDeleteIt's always fascinating to run across problematic, racially-coded caricatures that are also skeletons. In a way it's almost subversive to simultaneously show us that people are the same under their skin in the art while denying the same in the writing. Like a race vs. ethnicity / nature vs. nurture argument that could go somewhere interesting if this was a different kind of story.
Yeah that final battle is really something, haha.
ReplyDeleteSo no kidding', some publications really seemed to get that vampire / werewolf thingy confused, it used to bug me as a kid but now I find it kind of charming tbh...
I have a few more chuckle worthy precode tales like this lined up for later this summer, so stay tombed!
Up next: we're heading to the disco!
Eh, the most meaningful difference between a werewolf and a vampire is that the werewolf is alive while the vampire is dead. Lots of old stories have both "catching" the condition in some fanciful or heretical way, eating blood and life, turning into animals, shying away from water or religion, and then eventually getting knocked-off by some or other arcane procedure or fancy metal. The categories are so intermixed that, as I understand it, sometimes its hard to know which old Slavonic and Greek words are supposed to mean one thing or the other. Just like in this story!
ReplyDeleteThe slip joint must be a variation on clip joint. Some kind of pun?
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