It's Lurid Lit 101 time again, and after our last post which weaved a rather wicked spin on a Shakespeare classic HERE, let's fulfill a recent request for not only mo' Edgar Allan Poe, but also for some Frank Brunner art! Now this is how you really weave together some legends-- and a fine addition to our recent look at illustrators who know their way around a scary skeleton drawing too! This is based on the John Jakes sequel to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", and originally appeared in the May 1973 issue of Chamber of Chills #4.
6 comments:
Ah, I remember Frank Brunner’s lush very 70s style… He also illustrated the first issues of Howard the Duck. John Jakes gives us a tight focused retelling of his short story… makes one wish living authors had an opportunity to do the same type of adaptation for their stories in comic anthologies.
Agree!
The art on this is great, I assume Brunner is inking himself? It's light where it needs to be (backgrounds), it is heavy where it needs to be (people.) Contains multiple spit dripping mouths, and incredible skeleton on page 8.
Let's talk about that panel -- there's a clear sight line from the face, to the hole, to the skeleton, which lies on the line and the lighting is a little faked in spots (this is intentional, to light the skeleton a bit more) but still works perfectly within the panel.
Then we you think we've gotten the killer panel, one page later we have that awesome ghost. I'd still vote for the skeleton, but both are great panels.
Also, like last time, no skimping on the backgrounds. This is one gorgeous comic.
This is another horror story with a "sins of the father" ending.
Great funky Brunner! I got spooked by the original Jakes story in The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology (1965) as a nipper.
I like the sort of inferred idea that the knee-deep piles of other people's remains there in the depths of the medieval wine cellar are previous Montesors driven to site by one dead drunk's apparently limitless powers of revenge. And yet... I'd have liked the story to make something of why nobody else had managed to open that wall before this narrative. Or had they? I kind of wish the specter had popped out, made his speech while our protagonist choked by ghostlight in the deadly miasma, and then promptly walled the costumed bones of Fortunato back up for the next victim to find.
I always have mixed feelings about "sins of the fathers" stories for the obvious reason - how is this fair?
But this is definitely one of the better ones.
I'm glad it includes the carnival of the original story.
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