I promised you more Bernie Krigstein, and here he comes like a terrifyin' tidal wave of weirdness, via the August 1952 issue of Journey into Unknown Worlds #12. Okay, the coloring here might be a bit off and washed out (I did my best to clean it up), but it's really such a wild and wonderfully written tale with a super clever and very funny double twist ending-- I believe it to be one of the very best Atlas crime horror posts on this blog now! So sit back and relax, kick up your heels and pour yourself a lil drinky for 'ol Kriggy, as All Atlas Month continues to pull you in, and drag you under...
6 comments:
This story reminds me a little of Cat's Cradle and Ice-9, i.e., how far does the water pill go? Does the water of his body now turn the floor into water, and on and on until everything is water? This story has a pretty horrific ending if you consider that Chic has started a chain reaction that's going to kill us all (yes, I know the glasses earlier but it is still fun to consider.)
As before, Krigstein's ability to do emotions and create characters that are instantly recognizable is pretty uncanny; just like the characters in the last one, here Chic and Russ read gangster; our poor shopkeeper reads beat-down merchant.
And he gets to do his version of the old Atlas 4-panel!
I will say Chic's plan seems overly elaborate!
Honestly, that was a waste of a good soup if you ask me! The last panels of the first and second pages of Kovacs illuminated in yellow light looking absolutely frightened and later desperate are fabulous.The fifth panel of page three as Logan and Kovacs watch the soup turn into water is also great. I will admit it took me a few seconds to figure out why Logan was poisoning both glasses. Then I realized that he figured the water pill would counteract with the poison, having no affect on him. Those last four panels at the end are so damn good, especially the second one where Logan realizes that EVERYTHING changes into water thanks to those pills as he melts into a puddle on the floor. And I though the Wicked Witch of the West melting away was a disturbing way to go!
For those of us taking a water pill, we can relate.
Had Chic used his head, he would have tested the pill on a stray dog to see what would happen. Those pills would have made Chic the ultimate hit man- no body, no crime, just a mop and bucket to get rid of any evidence.
Enjoyed this one tremendously. The huge face/panel on the first page pleasantly surprised me. The ending too. I didn't know that was the last page and did not anticipate the obvious ending. Thank you Karswell!
Thanks for the reminder of Vonnegut's story. Had forgotten reading it.
So yeah, I guess the pill doesn't "turn things into water". It turns them into liquid pill. I'm with Barnes all the way. I too thought of the self-replicating nature of Ice-nine and the global ramifications of using this stuff. It's easy to imagine that, dehydrated into a powder and compacted into a pill, this stuff is totally inert. But when melted into a solution by combining with a liquid, it then becomes containable only by glass or some other barrier made of crystallized sand (Kovacs said the pills came from "the Orient," but that includes the near east, the Lavant, and other desert lands, no?). And now that it has been released onto the floor in a Logan-shaped puddle, we are rapidly on our way to a new waterworld littered with floating martini glasses and spectacles and syringes and false eyeballs--and whatever else is made out of glassware.
I guess this has a lot in common with the Blob, too.
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