Time to put a wrap on our killer King Ward Fest this week with a couple more ACG AdvUnk fillers. And first up, a whoppin' weird 4-page historical account of Hugo Ormsbeck, 13th century oddball alchemist, and magician, who apparently discovered the power of the living dead, --and thusly became a "true" zombie himself! Ward delivers some great panels here, I just wish the coloring was a little more inspired. From the March 1953 issue of Adventures into the Unknown #41, followed by a one page voodoo quickie from the Fall 1948 debut issue of Adventures into the Unknown #1. GCD attributes the art here by Ward as well, but it honestly doesn't look like his work to me... I'm sure you will all let me know your opinions on this matter as well.
3 comments:
I think Hugo gave the townsfolk more than enough warnings! He babbled on about life after death and they didn't think to spike him down in the first place, they kind of deserved the throttling.
I like the art. The printing isn't great, it's a bit dismally muddy in places, and as mentioned, the coloring is kind of ... boring. That said, in some places it works really well -- page 1, panel 4, where the victim is in green, Hugo in ... dark bluish green (?) ... and the background in stark black and yellow really makes a good image, but then in the next panel, not so much.
I love giving Hugo the hunchback of Notre Dame look.
The voodoo 1 pager is full of great images! Panels 4 and 5, with their dark greens and white eyes is super spooky. That's some fine work!
On the splash page I thought the hunchback was the narrator. He has the look of an eerie tale teller.
The one pager is great art wise and gets the job done in seven panels.
These were great treats for November.
Colorists may forget that comic stories with lots of text end up mostly white. All those speech balloons and thought bubbles, all the yards of scrolling captions, all of that is colored very lightly, if at all. We tend to overlook it because we're concentrating on the words, but the color balance of the page itself ends up mirroring the halftone screens used to color it: The same cyan that looks dark when evenly applied looks lighter as a series of dots--because of the white space in between. And so it goes the whole page, too. It looks lighter dotted with white text blocks. It's another one of the reasons extreme, tutti-frutti-style colors caught on to begin with, I suspect. The more garish the colors, the more they stands out in the interstices between balloons.
So this story does feel a little watered down, especially on pages one and two (though I'm gonna throw my vote in with those groovy radiating green bands on panel five of the latter). It looks a lot better on the last two pages--especially the first two panels of three and the last two of four. All that work is really neat if you examine it out of context. In context, the effect is washed away a bit by all the white.
The art in this one feels a little cleaner and somewhat less surreal than what we got from King in the last two. Here, there's almost a Dick Briefer-esqe reliance on groovy, sinewy lines and big shapes; whereas before we were getting a bit more texture tossed into the mix, the shapes more delicate and ephemeral. Both styles look great to me. The last panel of this story is totally breathtaking.
I like the work on the one-pager, too; and I agree it doesn't look all that much like Ward. But who knows? I like the effect of the white eyes staring out of all that fatal green. So spooky.
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