There's a lot to beware this November here at THOIA, as I've suddenly decided to keep the blasphemous Beware! Terror Tales train a'rollin' for a few more posts, anyway. And this is an eerily illustrated Andru / Esposito classic with a gnarly mix of satanic supernatural, time travel, and brutal execution-- seriously, don't read this if you have a splitting headache! From the July 1952 issue of Beware! Terror Tales #2. CLANG!
I really like the writing in this one! It gives us the mobius (or morbius, for us horror fans!) strip story, and then it hands us the twist where it could have been a dying man's dream, all along, and I really appreciate the setup with the stove, it's really well played and gets center stage but doesn't trigger anything (at least for me.) That's a good use of a twist.
ReplyDeleteThe only small nit is that, it is, again, a horror comic and it's pretty obvious the time bit really happened because of how it's played, but still, it's neat.
Art is really good -- but not a big fan of the bright coloring in places, but that's comics. Coloring is a lot harder than people think it is, especially when the art on the pages is complex.
This one is a real winner!
Pretty hard lines on Sprague II. He should ask for a do over. In most of these stories that extend a curse over the descendants of the cursee, the modern day descendant is as evil as the original cursed person, but not in this case. There's absolutely no proof that Sorague II was anything but a totally normal and nice person.
ReplyDelete-"Nobody goes there!"
ReplyDelete"Well I'M going there!"-
Why oh why is it whenever someone states that a place is haunted, cursed, or no one ever returns from that demon possessed realm, etc. the hapless victim, er, would be hero, tempts fate and suffers for it. Do they study the manual of 'How To Doom Yourself' a tome well read by so many of Lovecraft's protagonists?
This is why I have little interest in learning about my family history, I prefer to let the skeletons rest. Said skeletons are not bothering me so why should I bother them? Let them sleep, I don't like being awakened form a sound sleep, no doubt skeletons feel the same way.
Footnote-the gas station attendant made me think of Horror Hotel/City of the Dead, the gas station attendant in that movie tried to warn travelers away from an evil place too.
I don’t think Sprague II was really all that innocent…. He was fired from his previous position because of spreading “bad ideas”…
ReplyDeleteI don't usually use that expression about entertainment that "didn't age well," but in one completely COMICAL way, this story didn't. A lot of people came to associate the name "Sprague" with a milquetoast character in the later ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW episodes - "Howard Sprague" - not a scary warlock!
ReplyDeleteOf course, so many fans of the show seem to hate that character, so maybe it did "date well" after all.
It's always slightly disturbing for a story to only mention GUILTY witches in New England, which this one does at the bottom of Page 10, as opposed to all those wrongly accused people. But, it's just a story.
I meant to say Page 8.
ReplyDeleteNerodart says...
ReplyDeletereally, the moment he saw the place seemed waiting for him he should have high tiled it out of there!
Local sheriff can't bury this guy fast enough. Like, he's not waiting around for funeral clothes or to contact next of kin or even to pry the spellbook from the corpse's cold dead hands. No time! At least he got the man's wallet, though. Pretty slick.
ReplyDeleteAdding injury to insult dept.: I like how this curse, which condemns any tainted family member who ventures back into town to suffer the same fate as great great grand-Sprague, also seems to spam them with fake job opportunities, suckering them back into its fatalist clutches. Karmic entrapment is just mean.
I love the art but the cheap printing is smudgy. I'd love to see the original art boards for this one. I think we all know where I stand regarding the coloring, too: Pages three and four are amazing top to bottom; page seven is glorious!