Following up our previous werewolf story with a terrifyin' tale about a trio of ancient vampire bros unleashed upon a small village --because three Nosferatus are always better than one! The title probably should've read, "The THINGS in the Vault", but no matter, this is one of the earlier, lengthier Marvel anthology entries, and at a whoppin' 11 pages, we get a more fleshed out story than the usual Atlas 4 or 5 pager. And though the climax feels a wee bit rushed, it's still a rollickin' ride through the 'ol creep infested countryside. From the July 1949 issue of Amazing Mysteries #33. Cover / story art by--???
4 comments:
This really has a Universal movie vibe to it, except the ending where the heroes would have triumphed. In this one, they pay for their hubris but it's off camera which works well.
All the vampire attacks are well staged art is great; I love the bat door and the cross, the funny trees at the beginning, the sparkly vampire attack, the reflection in the water, the artist went all out with a lot of neat panels.
My only nitpick is killing 2 of the brothers was ... kind of easy! I'm surprised nobody just did that before, open the crypt in the morning and stake them all!
The "running down the hill" was a pretty cool little note.
I love panel 1, page 10. It's a neat way to keep the panels interesting.
Nice creepy ending! Similar to Fearless Vampire Killers where two idiots unleash a vampire plague on the world…..
Also, it's funny how the story makes them such "Ugly Americans" without really overdoing it (especially with the nervous one of the two, but both of them).
And even though Dr. Molnar is a kind of stock character - the person warning the archaeologists to stay away - the story makes him pretty complicated -
"The more I speak to you, the greater is my contempt for your cynical little minds!"
I have an ambivalent relationship with fictional stories in fantasy environments where people act rationally for our reality but irrationally for their own. I appreciate the fact that a scientist would spin his wheels to create plausible theories to explain strange facts, but it's hard to read a story in which the characters--most of them--casually dismiss whatever evidence doesn't fit their worldview. How many of these dialog balloons include some variation of "nonsense, that's completely impossible?" Perhaps I'm especially sensitive to this right now. So I really appreciated Dr. Molnar having none of it.
The second to the last panel on page ten cracked me up. "They're destroying the unique castle we've spent this whole expedition trying to document, but that's okay because we've got this tomb raided plunder we didn't know existed before yesterday." Some scientists.
But I josh. This was a moody and effective story and I really dug it. I especially loved the Joseph Mugnaini qualities of those fleeting vampires, the triplicated reproduction of their identical forms making them seem all the more like some nightmare catastrophe. Unnatural disaster. And I love the time lapse between pages ten and eleven. That's a great and forlorn shocker in an unexpected place. Very effective.
This story is also interesting because it's got great examples of key halftone dots (black ones, that would have been in the art, as opposed to colored ones that make up the process screens). The very first frame of the story proper, right after the title, is an example of a look I dislike. Let's call that the lazy use of halftone gray to fill space that might have been filled with art. But later we get the last panel of page ten, in which we see the much preferred artistic use of halftone dots to create a contrasting sky. There are more examples of the former, poorer use of the technique in this story, but it's nice to see this artist growing from beginning to end.
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