It's kind of fun to find horror stories that clearly attempted a spooky spin and capitalize on popular fads of the time, like Monster Model Kits and Silly String, for example. And here are two interesting tales to prove my point: Frank Thorne's "The Monster Kits" from the March 1965 issue of Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #9, and "A Game of Squirt" illustrated by Giorgio Cambiotti, from the February 1972 issue of Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #39. And the cool thing about some fads is that they're actually still alive and lurking around too!
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7 comments:
The Monster Kits is great, it reminds me very much of a post code Atlas giant monster tale; there's some interesting but irrelevant detail (the hypno disc and having to put them together) that makes it feel more "real", it's the little details that make a good sci-fi story.
The shuttered robot design is really nice.
The constant thatched background is evidently meant to be fog but I didn't read it as that until the ending, still, art is good and it's a fun tale!
Second one has some nice art, I feel sorry for the poor artists who had to draw all that goop, just like the poor family that had to clean it up in that ad. I haven't played with silly string for decades but I don't remember it cleaning up that easily!
The "unstoppable evil robot army is rusted to death by rain/mist/dunking in water" seems to be stuck as a constant in these tales. Just for Ince I wish they'd think of some other way out.
By not showing her whole face, the bottom of Page 4 makes that woman's "EEEEEEEEEE!!" a little comical. Almost like bad dubbing.
Either way, that face makes you wish this were a horror story with a little "cheesecake" in it.
Nerodart says...
Hes a Haro, but no one will believe it
and a if only til together Karloff had some cute tales!
The bit on the boat at the end of the first story has a great spooky feel to it. Like the hushed rustle of blinded dead searching the briny timbers of Amando de Ossorio's Ghost Galleon. The muted brown colors really help the mood. So how many alien invasions have been thwarted by Earth water again? Well, and Tin Woodsmen, too?
Love that Elisha Cook Jr.cameo in the second tale (page five panel one). I think Silly String might just be my new favorite cautionary mechanism. Canned blob! I guess by seventy-two, televisions and ventriloquist dummies were all played out, but arcade games and heavy metal music were still waiting around the corner. What were those darn kids getting up to that we could clutch our pearls about? Silly string scientists never even stopped to consider whether, just because they could monkey around with the divine forces of nature, they really should.
These stories and the one in the last post have a similarity to stuff DC was putting out in the early post-code era though none of their monster stories would have turned out badly and the ouija board story would have turned out to be fakery. But these two stories here also make me think of the early Hammer Horror-esque years of the Tom Baker Doctor Who. Just me, I'm sure.
Anyways, Frank Thorne did a great job on that first story. There is plenty of excellent art throughout the Gold Key mystery titles... which reminds me the DC nomenclature for their sixities/seventies 'mystery' books really confused my understanding of what the mystery genre was as a kid. The Charlton so-called 'ghost' titles were also mostly misnamed but not as awkwardly.
I'm surprised that Boy's Life ran an ad for Aurora monster models. Didn't Jim Warren say that they threw him out for wanting to buy ad space to promote what they called his "sick" Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine? FYI- Best way to clean up Silly String is to set it on fire (don't try this at home!!)...
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