Mr. Karswell got himself a new cat recently, so to celebrate let's take a look at another fiendish feline encounter from the eerie November - December 1972 issue of Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion #8. Ernie Chua delivers some spooky atmosphere and a couple of really interesting transformation panels towards the end of this fine supernatural DC classic!
6 comments:
About a year before he kills Gwen Stacy and gets thrown under the bus by Stan (that's a great story) Conway is pounding out post code horror stories for DC!
The ending is pretty predictable but there's a lot to love about the art. The splash is great but I might have highlighted the cat face a bit less and make it less obvious but that's a coloring problem and a minor quibble.
Chua does a great job with the cats! I like how he hides the villages eyes which is a fun touch, and of course the transformation page is top notch.
I adore cats and if I ran into a house full of a hundred of them I'd try to scratch them all. Not sure how this village would react to me!
Nice work by Ernie Chua. I usually find that DC horror mags employ a color design that doesn't totally lend itself to the horror mood--it's often too bright and mod, and maybe a little on-the-nose for me. But these pages here, with all the identical village of the damned-style kids and tabby cats, made for a really effective use of bright yellow, highlighting the whole thing. Pretty groovy!
It's hard for me to imagine hating a type of animal for no particular reason. Yeah yeah, I might have to forgo an invitation into a house crawling with spiders, sure. I have a borderline irrational response to spiders. It's certainly not hatred, though--and I worry about harming them without meaning to. It'd be just my luck to be this artist, then. I'd behave exactly right, paint the picture and get the payoff. And the reward for that behavior? I'd leave without ever getting to be a cat, damn it.
Cue theremin.
If I wound up in a creepy old house filled with cats, I'd be trying to befriend them all! While I do not like animal abuse, that panel of that "flying" cat in the second panel of the third page as well as another one in a similar pose in panel 4 of page 5 are epic! I love their poses and facial expressions. Also, I love that the transformation sequence is actually a fake out before an actual one occurs near the very end of this story. So were all the cats previously cat haters? Weird way to get a new pet!
Now this is a worthy adaptation of "Curse of the Cat People."
I really don't understand this. The villagers are cats, the witches are...cat makers?
It really throws me too. As much as I like it.
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