Boy, some Bill Everett fan I've turned out to be! Nearly 17 years into this #%@ blog, and I've never posted one of his most brutally bonkers tales of all time! There is of course another tale with the same title in the THOIA Archive (HERE!), but this one definitely deserves its own rightful time to shine! From the March 1953 issue of Suspense #28, and written by good 'ol Stan the (fisher)Man of course too! 'Nuff said...
A lot of comic people talk about Stan during the silver age and how much belonged to what creator and some really pillory him but here's the counter argument to that.
ReplyDeleteIn pre-code he was doing a lot of stories every month and he could go from snark to comedy to outright vengefully brutal stuff like this. He saved the best for the "commies" though!
You can pretty much see where this one is going; the setup -- and it's pretty horrific -- is where the gold is.
Oh course Everett just pencils a beauty here. The fish are realistic; the guy is cartoony in the most evil way, the deep blacks of the splash are crazy good for pre-code, and the aliens, well, you have to love them. BTW: I love all the sfx here -- lighting bolts, smoke, ray guns. Bravo to the colorist, too.
Thanks to the game warden's murder and the motive for it, I keep hearing the song "Amos Moses."
ReplyDeleteWell it had either be this or the game warden's corpse holding him under swamp water while he tried desperately to breathe. Since unexpected aliens stole Riggs' ghostly vengeance, I wonder what that corpse will do to while away his waterlogged afterlife? Think he'll just revenge himself on poacher after poacher till they give up and do something else for a living?
ReplyDeleteI like to see Everett in his "Atlas mode," synced nicely up with the looks of Maneely and Heath and Sinnott here. It's not worlds away from his "heroic mode," but it's fun to see how the bullpen just naturally gravitate toward genre-related house styles.
Nice cover on this ish, too.
Was this tale swiped from EC? It has all the hallmarks of EC madness.
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