How many different ways are there to die? It's an interesting question, and might make for a good experiment. So let's see how it's all progressing with a dead end trip down to the 'ol Iger Shop and the March - April 1954 issue of Haunted Thrills #14. This story is a truly creepy crime / horror classic, with nearly a half dozen Eerie Publications reprints / re-dos to come later on down the road in the 60's and 70's!
4 comments:
So the few times I complain, it is usually because a story has too many horror elements in it, but this is exactly how you do that right.
Every element is important to the next element and the snap ending; the guy obsessed with death, the crooks, the torture chamber, the kidnap, the methods of death, and finally the snap ending where "really an expert" and then the starvation -- which, BTW, he doesn't get to document!
It's really a very, very clever little story and everything puzzles together into a perfect little fit.
I do love panel 2 on the last page; the out of nowhere very comically over-exaggerated expression you see in this Iger Shop art. If you have the Eerie pub redo, that would be fun to post, too!
It's quite sleazy, and yet it's really well composed narratively. I mean in the first panel our gunsel is introduced he says 'I think the famine is over.', but, no, it hasn't really begun. Even the sleaziness is mitigated, though. The scientist isn't gloating or turned on by the situation, he's just coldly and even apologetically running his inhuman experiment. Even the gunsel isn't cruel for cruelty's sake. He's just doing what it takes to rob the guy and can't imagine anything but being arrested as revenge. Not that the scientist is taking revenge, he's just running his experiment.
The art is a twisted, convoluted question as well. That last panel on the first page is pretty crappy, and yet the first tier on the third page is quite arresting with its 3D panel-busting effect. There's some other layering, depth-perception tricks with the gun and trapdoor later as well, with the trapdoor being more artistically successful than the gun. Also, that girl is very Al Feldstein when she's introduced. She's not just window-dressing, though. She may not be much of a reader of newspapers, but she reads the situation well before her boyfriend.
I'm not really a fan of the off-brand fifties horror comics and was only giving this thing a cursory glance at first, but it hooked me and rewarded me actually reading it. Nice
choice.
I accept the story as written, but sitting around all day and night in an adolescent-sized coffin seems like a rather nutty way to catch criminals for one's death survey. And I'm not convinced this guy has properly defined whatever hypothesis he's testing in his lab, either--bird watching is hardly a scientific experiment, it's more of a cataloging hobby. This guy is indulging in something completely aesthetic, and not at all scientific: Directing and scrapbooking little one-act dioramas featuring predetermined conclusions. Of course, he's not the first madman to make the mistake that he's doing science.
Hmm... I guess I'll have the freezing, please.
I too loved the top of page three. Nice catch on the famine foreshadowing, エリック.
Wonderful story! This tales are awesome! It's a long time I have been reading Creep, Eerie, and other horror magazines! Your blog is a must! Thank you for posting these great comics!
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