Marvel Mystery Comics #92 was the final superhero issue of that series, suddenly turning into Marvel Tales #93 (August 1949), and thus, --a new golden age Atlas anthology horror comic title was born! And today we have the very first story from that issue, a chunky chiller chocked full of great art and snappy storytelling, and especially fitting (and filling) for another wild 'n weird excursion into Werewolf Wednesday! The ever awesome Atlas Tales website says the art is by Gene Colan, with possible inks by Frank Giacoia.
4 comments:
Some fun good girl art from Colan (again, I would have never known it was him!) I love the wolves and the werewolf transformation at the end. The rain and thunder are excellent.
OK I'll get a bit nitpick-y on this one. Could have used some editing. Erase the weird werewolf dude who doesn't factor into the story so you can open up the panel count. The problem is it's text heavy art and it feels really constrained in the 6-7 panel layout. It really doesn't "breathe" well but then that happens a lot in the early days of pre-code horror.
The splash strategy here is like the cover teasers we sometimes see--to give an literal preview from the middle of the story. I wonder if that wolf man misdirect was inserted just to appear on the first page? Not long after, nobody would care if the splash related exactly to the story at all.
I love the narration in this one. It's pretty sly. The first caption is third person, then the next five captions are from the POV of the hotel owner. After that, most of the story is captioned from the perspective of the hotel guest, though I suppose they can be read in the owner's voice, too, since he is reading them from a diary. At any rate, this is a pretty complicated construction for a conic book story, and I'm pretty impressed. I'm sure young Alan Moore took note!
So why do you think the werewolves and wolf-men only seemed to attack the people in that one room? And what have they done for the last two years? And can you really say that a room in which everybody dies overnight isn't haunted? That place is collecting ghosts like crazy.
This one really drew me in too.
I'm not sure why, but I was halfway expecting some "Scooby-Doo" ending where it was a "normal" murder, instead of a "debunker meets the real thing" ending.
Because of the year, I was almost expecting one of those, but with some "renegade Nazi" tie-in (!). Which might've been kind of original in THIS story, but I get so tired of those in countless stories of other kinds set in the ' 40s.
There are bits that definitely look like Colan, but yeah, when someone else inks his stuff it takes on a totally difference style altogether.
I agree about the complicated construction of this story too-- we'll look at more Atlas horror from this era in the coming months. Up next though, it's spookshow time, and Dr. Neff is taking stage shortly... thanks for the comments! :)
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