Let's quickly detour back to the House of Mystery for a macabre Mummy Monday rampagin' murderama, via the November 1980 issue of HoM #286. It's 5 packed pages of creepy crumblin' chaos, plus a joltin' Cain quickie-- not to mention a really great cover from 'ol King Kubert too!
8 comments:
I like the horror stories were you get the feels for the monster. Ignoring that tomb curses and guardian mummies never really existed -- heck most tombs were robbed probably within the same period of when the person died in Egypt -- what we have here is a poor smuck forced into a manual labor job for all eternity by a rich powerful guy ... I think a lot of people can relate!
Caryle is depending on the mummy to completely fall apart before it gets him knowing full well this is a *magical* curse. That is not something you should be depending on, and it's a very clever ending, though -- and I don't know how to fix it -- I'm not a fan of the last page. It's doesn't quite have the good punch a clever ending like that should have. Stagging? Not sure.
I love the mummy just breaking through stuff with all the flowing bandages. Great, dense post-code DC horror art.
Panel 2 on the vampire quicky is great!
Weird, I love that last panel. It’s like the mummy is a giant spider and the bad guy is all tangled up in the web.
That's the bit -- the mummy choked the other people to death. At the end, he hangs Carysle by the neck, i.e., a form of choking. But it instead looks like Carysle is caught in the mummies wrapping, like a spider. A panel of the bandage getting wrapped around his neck before the final panel might have made it more evidence.
Again, this is super nit-picky on my part, but I might have altered that ending a bit. IMHO, as it is.
I think what Ernie did here was much more clever, with no need for an extra panel to tell us something we already know.
This was a neat twist on the mummy's revenge, with the Pharaoh's servant doing the killing rather than the royal mummy doing the dirty work. I guess this can be considered the mummy version of keeping one's hands clean, letting the undead servant act as the assassin while the kingly dead sleeps through eternity.
Cain's game room was a fun one pager, but it does raise several questions-
If a vampire bites a werewolf does the victim of lycanthropy become a vampire werewolf hybrid?
If a werewolf bites a vampire, does the undead one become a werewolf vampire hybrid?
Lastly, if a vampire did bite Frankenstein's creation, would it become a vampire too?
A mystery for THOIA fans to ponder...
Along with the theft, the story sets up "disgruntled employee" Carlysle to murder his boss, but he doesn't. But it's a little more original that way.
After all, he gets to think of Leiber and Jameson as keeping the mummy busy till he disintegrates, which makes him look bad enough.
I really like the mummy panels of this one. The loose, scribbly energy of Patricio's work lends itself well to bandaged monsters and plays nicely into the ending.
I guess I sort of fall between the two of you, Karswell and Barnes, regarding the last page. I feel like a little more show-don't-tell would have been nice. Maybe that silhouetted pier panel could have articulated better the idea that Carlysle was getting tangled up... then onto the panel of his tripping... then finally hanging. Then we would not have needed Cain to explain it to us--if we did. But I do like that final image quite a lot. It seems gutsy to position the man and mummy in similar ways, like they are still fighting it out. If I'd drawn it, I might have done away with the mummy's shape totally; completely unraveled him away, leaving just desert rags and bandages and dust. But that would have been more cliche, I think. Who knows? It's fun to imagine alternatives.
My favorite panel is definitely CRUNCH, though.
Oh I definitely had this issue. More of these "newer" stories.
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