It's Wednesday again already, and you know what that means-- werewolves! This is a totally bizarre, and somewhat unique spin on the 'ol hairy scaries, mixing in a ghosts 'n graveyard plot to create something unlike any other lycanthropy tale ever told here. Okay, our hero, Steve, seems to figure things out a little too smoothly at one point, but it's still a wild horror-mash romp through the haunted countryside as only ACG could unearth and unleash 'em. From the December 1951 issue of Adventures into the Unknown #26.
5 comments:
Like the story before this (Horror on Canvas) this is very much what I like to call a hat story -- you've got a hat full of horror ideas and you pull 3 or 4 of them and stich them together into a story.
Honestly, while it makes stories that are at best goofy and at worst hard to follow, it certainly makes them original!
I like the art in this one, the printing is pretty awful but we get a bunch of different werewolves and I like the weird alien like ones, that's not something I've seen before.
In the search for random rules to make the story work, the old "need a human to bury a werewolf in a cemetery to claim the souls of the dead" is a new one!
BTW I can't blame Steve as Lycana (get a clue, buddy!) is a looker, but man is he a jerk. I kind of hate to see him win in the end! Gilda needs to dump him, like right now!
I remember reading this one a while back. It’s still kind of confusing and there’s some really unintentionally funny stuff going on in it too. My favorite being the idea of taking a werewolf in his wolf form to the vet for treatment! That’s hilarious. Also, it’s strange how Lycana is the only one who never changes into werewolf form throughout the entire story and only Coyos gets to wear a fancy suit in the beginning of the story. Everyone else is naked! The rabies theory had me cackling. Almost right, Steve, almost! Also, that sludgy writing at the top of the first panel of page three reads “As Steve stoops to examine a he wound.” Please don’t ask me how I did that!
You don't always see a gung-ho, womanizing, gaslighting veterinarian rise to the tip of the title card in these precode werewolf stories--but I wonder why? It's a pretty good fit. There are plenty of crime comics that focus on those doctors who abet gangland types--digging out their bullets, changing their scarfaces--so I don't see why we don't have a whole subgenre of creature comforters doing the same in the horror mags.
This is my favorite kind of story to read out loud, with billowing circles of expository dialog (and thinking) awkwardly underlining every detail of history, plot, and character motivation. I imagine it would make a wonderfully camp stage play. I love the bit where Steve jumps to the wrong conclusion and leaps into misdirected action. That's comedy gold! It's also clever: In a story where there are, by my count, three separate instances of characters jumping to correct conclusions (hear about a girl? See a bullet? Or a ghost?), this one time kind of covers for the others by being a flamboyant misread. And if it then turns out to be just as helpful in solving the problem, well, as a reader I'm mostly distracted by the novelty.
The art is totally fun (love the weird werewolves, love the penultimate panel) but objectively unskilled; panels of inertly-composed talking figures with weirdly bobble-headed anatomy in unchanging POVs crowd every page. It fits well with the general oddball tone here. Everything really adds up to some deliriously unexpected storytelling, unconcerned with the usual sophistication or whatever.
PS, it's always nice to see the Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires poster again. It's been far too long since I watched the movie, too.
Yeah, even though we never get to see Lycana turn into a bikini werewolf, I was thinking about this movie poster (aka Crypt of the Living Dead) the entire time while putting this post together.
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