August arrives with eye fangs planted firmly in cheeks, as Howard Nostrand goes straight for the jugular in this amazingly illustrated, but seriously silly blood sucker satire via the July 1954 issue of Chamber of Chills #24. (Some of you might remember this one from our Howard Nostrand Nightmares collection from 2016.) Plus! More Howie hits with a couple of great CCM sing-a-long song parody one-pagers to round out your chills with even more kookball chuckles.
There's a lot to love in this little story. Nostrand doing his best Davis and the script doing a very good midpoint between MAD and horror comics. There's so much to love in the art; I love the bloated version of the vampire, the giant tanks (with some Wally Wood type mechanisms!) and the crazy unnecessary pipes. I love the new faucet vampire on the last page. The whole thing is just great to look at.
ReplyDeleteBeing able to successfully cut the line between MAD and horror comics is not easy and this treads the line gracefully. It's a really, really good piece of work.
Can I say that some artist had a lot of fun in panel 8 of the first song page. Paging Dr. Wertham!
Ha ha, the Mairzy Doats parody was pretty great.
ReplyDeleteYou know, Nostrand's on-again/off-again use of Jack Davis-like rendering to finish up entirely Nostrand-like figure drawing never seems particularly larcenous. And it looks super great here. Along with Frazetta, this is the sort of thing that most feels like a precursor to Wrightson to me. I love the simple expedient of darkening the horizon to a tombstone-studded silhouette in the panels where the vampire is talking to us directly. Made coloring those frames super easy, too.
I have no idea how they'll keep that vat from clotting. So vampire rock candy!
The description of hiring 'your kind' reminded me of the film The Monster Club, and how monsters viewed their outsiders, the 'heums' of the world.
ReplyDeleteThe second song from the spook box features a pre-Harley Quinn character.
I don't know which is more dangerous, her blade or her blinding headlights.
What a great way to kick off August.
It's hard for something else to upstage a heart removed by a maniac, but look of the maniac and her top really manage it.
ReplyDelete