If you enjoyed our little hunting tale in the last post, we've got another! And sinister Sid Check leads the party into the wild 'n wooly depths of Werewolf Wednesday doom this time around, --it's a savage story with more bites than you could ever possible chew! From the June 1954 issue of Mystic #31.
6 comments:
Ah the old werewolf-vampire switcheroo!
I like that the vampires were prepared! I really like the designs here, the more beast-like werewolf (wolf-man/werewolf, argue in the comments!) and the winged vampires, but you have to wonder how many clothes these guys waste turning back into their vampire forms.
This is a great piece of work, but that sad, a complaint: Don't like the coloring. The art is super dense and the cave and the people in it kind of blend together, something better coloring could have fixed. Different colored shirts would have gone a better way to making the people stand out against the cave. The art is incredible, it's let down a bit with the coloring.
I like how the vampires still have their hats on after they transformed. I guess in this story, silver bullets only work on werewolves so it's okay for vampires to be equipped with them.
I really wasn't suspecting that familiar ending, which is both a complaint and a good thing.
Speaking of the art, it's odd that in the first panel those starved prisoners are built almost like men out of a sword and sorcery comic! From then on, of course, they look more like bad-off prisoners.
I don't know why that werewolf is so dang mad. Franz did just what he was supposed to do: Go out and lure food people back up to the cave. Sure, he had the misfortune to run into a bunch of baseball cap-wearing day-vampires, but anybody could make that mistake. I'm not sure the wolf man ever even found out about that part, though.
Crazy craggy and mutated looking art in this one, definitely stranger than the Check I remember seeing in the past. In many frames, bodies are crammed together or optically stacked in such a way that they grow into one another, their weird lines and deformed shapes melting together into some kinda Screaming Mad George-type fleshly mass. It's like a vision of hell.
I agree with Brian that the colorist could have done more to parse these images (shirts? What the colorist actually gave us was color-coded pants! Ha! You can only easily tell in the splash because most panels have the legs gangling out of frame). I must confess that saving this art from its on freakish nature would have made it less appealing to me, though.
Maybe it's doing the obvious thing, but I like the way the werewolf's lines to Franz change a little when he starts trusting him a little. He even tells him to be careful out there.
So Herschel was wrong, vampires beat werewolves. No wonder he lost. Great work from Check, I've only been aware of him as an inker. Thanks for this!
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