Summertime blues got ya down? How about a frigid lil Werewolf Wednesday fright fest to cheer ya's all up then? Manny Stallman turns on the weird winter transformational terrors with a truly hairy scary entry from the August 1952 issue of Suspense #21. And fyi, I have some more fanged-freak action up next as well, so do stay tombed, please...
Another tale where the man looks for the greener grass and pays for it. I'm sensing a pattern!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there was a script change somewhere? The polaroid makes it look like they were BOTH werewolves. It could be the art, but what reason would there be for ears and fur? BTW, that's a great panel, with both of them ringed by the moon.
The final yellow/green panel is such a Atlas panel. My cat is big and a giant baby and is always climbing on me so I know the feeling!
The art is excellent here, the splash with the two circles, the ringing trees on page 2, the wisps and snowing window on page 3, and the cinematic panels on the bottom of page 4.
Peter, BTW, was a big jerk and absolutely deserved his fate. Poor Eva, dragged along, did not, but hey, she got to fight a werewolf, so there's that!
Look, Eva does come off as a bit rude (calling Gus ugly was uncalled for) but maybe it was a different time of the month for her causing a change--and not the werewolf kind. Man, Peter is dumb, just immediately falls for this woman he knows absolutely nothing about except that she's the daughter of his hired man, and immediately agrees that his own wife, who he's only known for so long as well, has to be the werewolf. Yeah, men, just see a shapely women who wants to hang out with him in the cold and loses it.
ReplyDeletePeter really was the doomed dimwit in this one. Before marrying, he should have found out his future wife's likes and dislikes. Not everyone likes winter sports or a cold climate, some prefer the seashore, summer activities, Palm Springs and the like.
ReplyDeleteWerewolf lore was ignored in this one, no mention of a silver bullet in this tale, nor the fact a werewolf would have made short work of Eva, being supernaturally stronger and all.
There is something about remote places or winter settings that add an extra level of menace to horror stories. Isolation, the difficulty in help arriving, just the protagonist against the unknown terror waiting to strike, the fear factor goes up when remoteness and winter are combined. 'The Shining' and 'The Thing From Another World' both come to mind.
This was a chilling tale, and not just due to its frosty locale.
He doesn't wait the few minutes for the photo to develop and (supposedly) clinch things about Eva. And they talk about people being impatient with technology "nowadays"!
ReplyDeleteAnything slightly funny thing is her name. If Eva were blonde, it would sound like a Gabor Sisters joke.
I think Eva seems like the perfect spouse: Easy to entertain, reasonably willing to put up with her husband's interests--at least to a point--and willing to set aside any pettishness over whatever minor annoyances she's enduring, at a mere moment's notice, in the middle of the night--aye, even at the cost of her own comfort--to roll up her sleeves and do battle with a werewolf.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe this place had an outhouse, and they just didn't mention it?
I love the almost animation cel look of the environment in this one. The snowy landscape and streams of chilling wind are very fetchingly crystallized in panels at the bottom of page one and the tops halves of pages two and three. I do think the story could have been a page longer. Not to add any more story so much as to breathe a little room into the last page. Seems a shame to have to resort to a nine-up panel composition just when we are getting to the images I want to see the most.