We're less than a week away from the big day, and if you haven't popped on over to your local Halloween vendor yet, then you still have a little time to get yourself that perfect mask and costume! Perfect that is, unless you go here... from the May - June 1977 issue of The Unexpected #179.
8 comments:
Anyone wearing that "clown face" mask and behaving like that will get the girls all agog, I suppose...all agog to punch him in the unmentionable.
Very nice art, I wasn't familiar with the artist. At first glance I thought it was Gerry Talaoc.
That mask ad (the last scan) isn't from 1977, is it?! Because that "Monkey" mask in the upper corner... hoo boy.
No, it’s an golden age ad
We usually get horror stories where people become their Halloween costumes or use them to commit murders. I don't think I've ever read a story where someone was MISTAKEN for a Halloween costume and sold to a customer. 🤣🤣This story just gets wackier and wackier as it continues and we finally find out just what's up with that "costume". It also does a good job of making us think that the main character to this story would be Frank, the guy who bought the "costume". Nope, the true main character here is Horace. I can't help but laugh that the Gornes never figured out that Horace had a trapdoor in his room to sneak out to at night. Panel 3 of page 7, where Horace asks his parents if they want him to pretend to be a costume again is hilarious to me. Horace doesn't even seem freaked out by the siren either.
This story reminded me of the comic DC 1st Issue Special #10 (1976)
of Outsiders- not superheroes, super mutants (I suppose Marvel threatened to sue for copyright infringement so it faded into comic obscurity.)
In the comic, a man keeps his freakish son hidden in the basement, but the son flees when two robbers break into the store killing the father and setting the place on fire. The Outsiders arrive to rescue the freakish son and have him join their group of outsider heroes-
some bronze age comics were just weird, no doubt about it.
As for the ad for masks, I am a bit surprised the clown face wasn't replaced with the face of Pennywise, that would Really have the girls all agog!
Someone having a trapdoor in their house without knowing it - even without this story's murder sub-plot - is pretty wild all by itself.
Ah, the comic code! What's that on the last panel? Blood? No, drool I guess! When old Horace slammed his entire head into a meat hook he just drooled a lot! Actually it's kind of surprising they got away with that but at 77 people really weren't paying that much attention to the code anymore.
The story is original, unique, but stretches disbelief way too much. The art makes up for it, Rubeny fills the first couple pages with all sorts of cool costumes and various horror nick-nacks, Horace is a great character, and every building, every mansion, every car, everything is just rendered beautifully.
Look at the light / shadows on page 3, panels 2-3. Excellent work.
One thing you could always depend on pre-code DC horror was some of the best international artists out there.
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