I'm working feverishly on a larger post that will be coming midwee-eeek, --in the meantime, here's a two page, factually creepy, moving coffin mystery for ya, from the March 1942 issue of Bang-Up Comics #2. Uh, does anybody actually ever read these text tales? I know as a kid, if one had a wild header spot illustration it would make me break down and read one, absolutely. And this one benefits from a cool little, leering ghost host character at the very start of the first paragraph too! *Gasp! Man, that guy needs his own comic book series!
6 comments:
In my younger days when I was buying Bronze age horror comics I would sometimes read the text stories, although they tended to only be one pagers.
I had read this story before in the book 'Ghosts' by Seymour Simon printed in 1976. It featured the unforgettable artwork of Stephen Gammell, long before he became famous for his work in The Scary Stories books.
I’m pretty sure I read this as a kid somewhere else before too, but not sure where it was exactly. It might’ve been in some ghost book or Ripley‘s believe it or not type thing.
These text stories existed for postal rules but some of them were pretty good or lifted from other magazine by the same publishers.
This is a nice one, though the moving coffin story might just be completely made up (there really isn't any eye witness testimony, just a story that has been repeated, there's no documentation or news stories, etc.)
I like paragraph 3 a lot!
This one is really neat.
As a comics reader, I haven't really run into many text stories. As a kid in the late silver and bronze ages, comics had house ads and letters pages, announcements and the like, instead of text stories. I didn't start reading the stuff from earlier formats until it was being collected in modern anthologies (or put up online, even). So mostly my experience with text stories in comics has been in the rare old mag that's turned up unexpectedly, the occasional "facsimile edition" that is becoming all the rage, or here on the web. Generally I think they are a snooze, obviously desultory content shoehorned into the page count to meet media mail requirements. But every so often a title pops up with a much better stuff, like here, and I make note of it. If an editor is finding (or writing) good copy for this issue of this title, it's likely going to be pretty good in the next issue, too--and maybe in the publisher's other titles as well.
Thanks for posting this one!
I’ve come across two comic book treatments of a moving coffins mystery: “Barbados Burial Vault!” Black Magic, vol. 3, no. 4 (22), March 1953; and “Grave Results!” House of Mystery #182, Sep.-Oct. 1969 & #229, Feb.-March 1975.
It's famous in ghost books and paranormal books in general.
A paranormal writer named Daniel Cohen - who was largely a debunker - seemed to find it hard to debunk.
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