Time for another doom-laden dark mystery from the June 1954 issue of Dark Mysteries #18. Jon D'Agostino delivers some shiver-inducin', eerie examples of exactly what made this macabre Master Comics series one of the most notorious in all of pre-code horror history. And if haunted houses and vampires are your game, then CLICK HERE for more after today's post...
4 comments:
A pretty downbeat ending, though Gena could have saved herself from false accusation by wearing a cross or attending the local church.
Still, the townsfolk wanted a scapegoat and found one in Gena. Mass hysteria punishes the innocent once more.
I should be used to downbeat endings in these stories by now, but I was expecting a different one for Gena and Adam.
Just take Gena out in the sun, yeesh, Adam deserved to get murderized!
This story is a bit text heavy, there's a lot of this that could be clipped out, it's a writer that doesn't trust his audience to follow the narrative and/or not exactly versed in comics.
Lots of fun stuff in the art -- the splash is awesome through proportions are a little janky on Gena, the house is cool, the dead father is a grisly image, all the things you need for a good horror comic.
The ending? I like it. It has a good bit to say about mob violence.
I dig the dreamlike storytelling here, it reminds me of a little kid making up a campfire tale as he goes along. There's no energy wasted in trying to convince me of Adam's changing motivations ("For the last two victims she looked too cute to be a vampire, but after this latest victim, well..."), or to explain away just why Gena did appear over all those corpses, anyway? Nah, that's just how it was, man--because the storyteller said so, that's why.
I'm all about those rigid, pointy flames in the splash (and the full beard on the skeleton, natch), and of course I adore the freaky corpse reveal on page four. But my true love has to be that last panel, a kind of aftersplash that tells the whole story from the other direction: "Welp, it's obvious that's the dead caretaker with vampire wings! Obvs didn't see that coming, LOL!"
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