Here we go with another eerie Atlas classic, and it's Robert Q. Sale's turn to sell you the rose-tinted glasses. Don't take this the wrong way, friends, but the last thing THOIA would ever attempt to do is keep any of you "safe from the trouble and paaaain..." (from the June 1954 issue of Mystic #41.)
8 comments:
Last panel, page 4: is de Grigny leaning against air? What an odd pose.
I like how sometimes these stories make no bones about how degenerate the bad guy is. "I'll kill literally everybody who's nice to me." I'm glad the inevitable caught up with him.
2nd to last panel, last page. That ... is one of the greats. Slime covered, rolling tongue skeletons. I do not think I've seen that before, but somebody had to have drawn that in the thousands of pre-code stories. Those skeletons are the great grandparents of tar man! I adore that panel!
It's of it's time but I could have done without the yellow peril panels. This is the kind of story that's always fun in the pre-codes; there's absolutely nothing about our hero that makes him redeemable and every panel takes it's sweet time in making him look worse and worse, until his fate almost seems to not be awful enough for him!
I doubt the author thought this deeply, but there's really some good meta commentary here, especially somebody so awful and down in the dirt is enraptured with only seeing beauty. Doing the beauty in the light pastels is also a neat trick.
This is a great one.
One thing's for certain here. Dennis is a menace. The idea of a literal pair of rose colored glasses is pretty clever. The pretty images Dennis sees through his glasses compared to what they actually look like are fun. The splash and the image of Dennis' first reaction to wearing the glasses are great. Although the one small nitpick I have with this story is that the undead asking Dennis if he recognizes him, we never do find out for certain who he (at least I think the corpse is male). I get that he's supposed to be one of Dennis' many victims he killed to obtain his many collectibles but it would have been even better if he was suppose to be the guy who showed him the spectacles in the first place.
In the panel before that, the baby looks like a horror story version of Popeye's friend Swee'Pea.
Either that or some baby in a Basil Woolverton story (a comedy one).
page 4, panel 4 - It's Robert Crumb! In fact, I feel like he could do a version of this story. Loved this.
Brilliant. I'd love to see this fleshed out some, yuck yuck. The last page came a little too soon for me. The idea that a criminal inured to seeing nothing but hardship and hatefulness would become addicted to wearing the glasses--to the point that he's no longer able to detect the horror and danger around him--is an enormously heady notion with a lot more to mine than we can really hope to achieve in such a simple tale. It's a plot pregnant with Oscar Wilde levels of satirical opportunity and I'd love to see a movie version done like The Mask, that starts with noirish, Val Lewton-esque black and white reality segments and ends up in a delirious Derek Jarman-designed rose-colored wonderland. I imagine the final scene: Terrorized by the horror of moldering tongue zombies, De Grigny desperately slips the glasses back on to witness himself devoured by tanned fashion models with Damien Hirst skulls under a glorious technicolor sunset. Only the sounds of clicking bones and screams remain the same.
And thanks for the RHPS nod in the intro. Now I'm gonna have that in my head all day long--which is great because I woke up with Joe Walsh on repeat for some reason.
Maybe it's an obvious thing to do, but it's funny that the attractive things and people that he sees aren't all the really DRAMATIC kind of attractive.
The girl in Panel 2 of Page 5 is has such a believably "cute" look.
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