If you landed here today hoping to see some spacemen beat off some aliens, then congratulations, --you came to the right place! This is a wild one from the October 1953 issue of Weird Mysteries #7, and if to some of you this all seems a bit familiar, it's because I posted it back in 2012 in B/W-- HERE!
The transformation from woman to spider was impressive. The artist drew a rather accurate looking spider, though a Black widow would have a red hourglass image on its back section, though things might be different for a space spider/woman.
ReplyDeleteAnother great out of this world find, Karswell.
When I saw the winged monster attack, I halfway expected the same ending as a story in Creepy # 64 called "Mates." In that one, the "monsters" were actually men who'd also landed on the planet, and were only trying to warn the latest one about what would happen to him if he stayed.
ReplyDeleteIt drives people crazy when someone calls spiders "insects," but at the other extreme, the writer bothers to use the Black Widow's scientific name.
(At least, I guess that's the correct one; I'm very bad with remembering those).
So I had to look at my previous comment:
ReplyDelete"I never got why Wertham got worked up by this; these sci-fi "woman turns out to be a monster that will eat you" are standard fair and designed to raise as much fear and panic of woman as possible in the young male reader.
Wertham should have been all for that -- fear was his stock in trade!"
Still works! It's always hilarious in these stories; if a woman is lusty and you fall for her charms, she's going to eventually tear off her skin and be Frankenstein underneath. Don't do it, young boys! Keep your mind of collecting baseball cards!
Nice tarantula. Yeah, wrong spider, but I always appreciate a well drawn spider, you get so few of those in these comics!
I really love how this super nutty tale looks in color. Even though it has obviously grown more yellow over the years, it's still really effective. Especially on that last two pages (I love the flight through space panel in the middle of page five).
ReplyDeletePages one and three are also very exciting. I dig this mode of horror sci-fi so much, shared by Elias and Wood and Wolverton and others. I feel like there was a real wave of weird futurism going on everywhere at the time, and it's immaterial to try and trace who were influencers and who were influenced. It's all solid gold. Or at least yellow.