If you thought our previous post lacked a certain amount of heart, wait'll you get a load of this one! From the January 1954 issue of Weird Mysteries #8, and like most of the stories from this infamous issue --which includes the SOTI classic, "I Killed Mary" --it saw over a half dozen different issue reprints, most notably in the later era Eerie Pubs Shiver Age!
This is one of those horror stories that works on somebody not mentioning important facts, like I'm going to put a machine heart in you!
ReplyDeleteThis feels a lot more like a post code story -- and it's close being 1954. I love how the host is copy-pasted into the story, and the person doing it actually putting it in the doctor's office window is a hoot. Nice job, probably overworked editor!
I love the last image with the popped spring!
The character work on Doctor--I mean Mister--Graham is solid gold. So Boris Cushing! But all the faces here are great. Alan Lane looks almost like a Dave Berg guy. The lighter side of advanced prosthetic organ replacement!
ReplyDeleteI like the rest of the art just fine too, but Charles Stern (?) was certainly at sea trying to figure how to illustrate Lane speeding up. Looks more like Parkinson's to me.
It's the story that interests me the most here. A tale of a man with some risky heart disease who fails to observe his healthcare regimen and dies. It's fun to imagine that all the clockwork quackery was just a desperate fantasy he'd concocted to facilitate his achievement in clinical denial.
But having recently seen yet another Alien movie I just can't bring myself to believe that. Biomechanoid indeed.
This is pretty much a prediction too. I don't know much about it, but I know the mechanical heart was first used in the early ' 80s.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is more of a literal mechanical one, as in a machine full of springs and wires, but it's the same idea.
The artwork is the real star in this one, especially the images of Graham. Whoever drew him gave Graham the look of an older man hiding a dark secret.
ReplyDeleteIs Graham a sorcerer, an Egyptian Priest or mad scientist, or all of the above? We still never find out how he came up with his clockwork heart or how it was powered, self winding perhaps?
It is great to see the original of this story, thanks Karswell.