Okay. Mr. Karswell played nice in our previous post, and yeah, you all loooved the happy ending and cutsie wootsie cuddly kooties, --but! It's a new month now, and it's time to get back to the good 'ol depressing stuff that makes me, errr, I mean him (Mr. Karswell) so happy! Like this gruesome entry from the supernaturally great "Ghost Squadron" back-up filler stories, (this one found in the October 1947 issue of Wings Comics #86, published by Fiction House), and features a cold-blooded psychopathic doofus who has no problem killing a man that just wants to see his wife and new baby-- hurrah! There's also a ghost possessed wax doll, a few more shockingly cruel murders, and finally, one of the all-time goriest, and most brutal pre-code climax panels ever printed. Seriously, I hope you saved your breakfast for afterwards! And if you did save your breakfast for afterwards, don't eat it quite yet! *record scratch sound! Because over at AEET today, I've spun yet ANOTHER propular way to get yourself something disgustingly scrambled in the morn! Yeah, it's a whack way to spend your mourning, --but then again, that's why ya'll love me, right?
4 comments:
Pretty sure Bob was crazy mad loooooong before that glorious last panel. I mean, just look at Panel 2....man, he looks rough. As well as at least 80.
I unironically loved this story, since from the start there was zero reason to believe that there's anything supernatural in all this, just Bob's innate criminal instincts being sublimated into the doll. If she was really alive and evil, why would the vet much not evil Frenchman have her on his mantlepiece at all?
Oh this one is absolutely bizarre. At first I thought Bill's backstory of when he first met Isabella would revolve around the actual person the doll was created to look like. (After all, Isabella had to have been an actual person at some point if her ghost is haunting her own doll.) Yet no, that's not the case at all. He's never met the actual Isabella, just her ghost who's haunting her doll (I'd love to know the backstory behind that, seriously!) Even stranger, the French man clearly was a kind soul so why on Earth would he have such an evil knickknack to begin with? The odd part is while Isabella is the one who persuades him to kill the French benefactor, shoot down the German planes and rob the payroll, she never actually told him to kill the payroll master or to sabotage Bob's parachute on his wedding day. This man was clearly a sick puppy even prior to her influence. There is one unintentional thing in this comic that had me immaturely chuckling. It's when Bill mentions "When that Heinie slipped down out of the sun and nailed me." Okay, I figured out rather quickly that it's a derogatory and outdated term for a German soldier, but still, knowing it mainly to mean the buttocks these days, doesn't exactly help. (much like the term "boner" or "gay" which appeared in comics around this time, but meant totally different things too.)Also, Bill looks like he's picking his nose in the third panel of page five. That pre-code death was goryious! (pun intended!)
It's interesting to see shooting down a German plane played as another of the doll's evil suggestions, sandwiched right there between opportunistic murders for money. Sure, I guess Isabella's grand design was to hook Bob up with Bill and his gal, opening a doorway to rather more complicated evils to follow. But still. It almost seems like the story is trying to tell me that killing is killing, whether it's a Frenchman, a German, or a US Soldier in the crosshairs.
But actually I agree with the Butcher up there: This sneaky doll is just the voice of Bob's own id. I figure that's pretty much the way the judge would have looked at it, too.
I like the way the ghostly projection of Isabella is rendered in dotted lines--just as the specter of the past is also drawn in the dotted flashback panels. I'm really enchanted by this literal presentation of flashback as dead histories haunting the present. I'd like to throw nostalgia and déjà vu into the mix, too; just more nomenclature for ghosts in the house.
My mistake, the main guy’s name was Bob. Bill was the guy he murdered.
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