One final Marvel Tale for you today, and then we'll get back to the usual mix of other publishers (hope everyone enjoyed this brief journey into early Atlas horrorland) --and this is a really good entry about a hypnotically evil mirror portal straight to Hell. Thirty-eight years after this story from the August 1949 issue of Marvel Tales #93 was published, John Carpenter would direct his brilliant film, Prince of Darkness (1987) which also contains the same [SPOILER ALERT] axe shattering mirror thus trapping loved one for all eternity in other world limbo climax. Hope you enjoy another THOIA unhappy ending!
4 comments:
Magic mirror on the wall, who posts the best pre-code horror comics of them all?
Magic mirror- "Karswell does on THOIA, but did you really need to ask me something so obvious?"
At first I thought the antique dealer was working for ol' Scratch, intentionally selling cursed antiques to unsuspecting or greedy fools, but his unwillingness to sell the mirror led the story down a different path.
"If you really love me you will get it for me" he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't, another lose-lose situation for an unlucky guy.
It's impressive that Pietro manages to completely write out (and illustrate?) this little tale... all while bleeding to death. The dedication of the small-potatoes curio collector is rarely so indelibly conveyed. The very human desire to blog knows no bounds!
I'm really into the psychedelic descent into hell here, even though that definitely also takes this story right down the rabbit hole of the "women doom themselves with their cursed vanity" thing I was really hoping it would avoid when I started reading. Ah well, if it's gotta be a sex-based cliche, at least they did it extraordinarily well. Starting at the bottom of page five--that leering devil's head!--this thing goes full-tilt into a surreal avant-garde mode. I'd like to see it animated by somebody like Sally Cruikshank so much. Richard Elfland could play the devil. Page six is utterly stunning from top to bottom, a new favorite--and yet it's somehow topped by Camille's nightmarish run up the endless stairs of hell on the final page. So Max Ernst! Everything is just perfect.
In the first half of the story I was fantasizing about a Jacques Tourneur version (but with the cast of the 7th Victim, of course). I love the panel where they look into the mirror and see warped fun house images of themselves.
So there. Val Lewton on one side of the mirror, then a combo of Forbidden Zone and Face Like a Frog on the other. Probably be my favorite movie (and it's pretty high up my list of precode horror stories, too).
There are two kinds of owners of antique stores in these tales:
1. The sort who are actively on the Side Of Evil and are out to make the protagonists buy things that will ruin their lives (and afterlives).
2. The kind who desperately stop the protagonist from buying things which should never be bought. Well, why the hell did you even keep said things in the shop then?
[In the Commando Comics issue "Cards of Fate" there is at least an attempt at some kind of explanation: the shopkeeper (an antique bookstore owner in this case) genuinely didn't know the cursed item, a book by a sorcerer named Anselm Monk, was still in his inventory; he'd thought it had been thrown out long ago. But that doesn't apply to a *&^%@#£ enormous mirror.]
I always love how these small antique shops have priceless historical items. Just mentioning something Nero owned in passing!
I like the art in this; it's weird in places and the forms are kind of bizarre but it fits the dream like narrative of a haunted mirror. It's also another horror tale (and this happens in comics, movies, books) where there's is about 100 off ramps for our heroes before they meet their grisly fate, and absolutely none of them are taken!
Also: Another underpants Satan! The panel where he's enormous and leering over Camille is great!
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