I feel like a few of you thought the previous post was our last entry of 2025, --well not bloody likely! And yes, behind that grisly Sol Brodsky graveyard of terror cover, via the April 1952 issue of Suspense #17, there's a few more scary stories we still plan to finish out the year with! For starters, this weird 'n witchy Dick Ayers / Ernie Bache team-up, written by Hank Chapman. And how great is that Mort Gerberg gag? hahaha!
8 comments:
I like the setup in this one! You usually get some kind of twist -- the wife wasn't a witch, the wife was trying to stop another witch, etc -- but nope. She's outright a witch, she outright curses him (though they don't show it so the closet reveal works) and she's got a closet exactly like mine, with hanging articulated skeletons (a seemingly random amount), bats, and voodoo dolls ... and yup, she *was* trying to kill him.
Poor Alka Murra got strangled for this tale of revenge, I always feel sorry for those types of victims.
That's a pretty fun last panel, I love that it duplicates the original murder (he's run over twice) and doesn't shy away from showing the squished part (amazingly bloodless, though!)
Full of great 4-panels, the splash is excellent (and good use of the garish colors) and lots of good face work. This one is a ton of fun.
Yeah, great gag cartoon, too!
Concerning Carl, you have to admit he could be a cousin of J Jonah Jameson, even the haircut is similar.
The police didn't seem too interested in investigating his wife's death, maybe they believed she was a witch and were glad to be rid of her once and for all. Maybe she was a 1950's version of a Karen, making a nuisance of herself over some petty issue with the townsfolk, calling the local police to harass everyone around her while reserving her magic powers for her main enemies.
On page three, upper right panel, one of the skeletons looks like it has a pleasantly surprised look on its skull, with extra wide eye sockets and an almost happy grin on his bony face. Maybe the skeleton is smiling knowing Carl will join them in the late husbands club.
The last panel was the perfect ending for this tale.
What a wonderful witches tale to end this year.
For the three panel one pager, so That is where witches or goblins hide during the day. Vampires should take note, hiding in plain sight during the day while avoiding the likes of Van Helsing.
Okay, this is one of those stories where Carl actually had every right to murder his wife. She's a gender-reverse Bluebeard. A black widow. She has literal skeletons in her closet and they're all of previous victims. I'd assume previous husbands. Yet what exactly would Flora have benefited from with killing Carl? She's the one with the big lavish looking castle. I feel sorry for that poor medium though. Just trying to warn Carl that he shouldn't have messed with a witch to begin with. I don't condone Carl for killing the medium, that was going a bit too far. I love how the car comes into his locked room at night to fulfill the curse! That's a morbidly funny way to end this one with tire tracks as plain as day so that not even the cops can write it off as not being real. Also, Carl looks like James Jonah Jameson. Should have stuck to wanting photos of Spider-Man. Also, that gag comic is adorable.
I love these horror comic skeletons that stay perfectly articulated instead of separating into their component parts as real skeletons so inconsiderately do.
By the way the skulls are really well drawn.
Even though it's premeditated, Carl is like those COLUMBO characters who commit accidental killings - they usually end up killing someone else DELIBERATELY (like a blackmailer), so you won't feel too sorry for them. And Alka Murra is a little like that.
So, Glowworm is right about Carl stopping a female Bluebeard, and he and Briane Barnes are also right about "poor Alka Murra."
At the end, that second servant is drawn to look as disturbing as any given Jose Bea character in a Warren magazine! Which is funny, since you can tell that he and the other one are meant to be down-to-earth characters.
I think the interesting thing about this story is the way it re-frames itself as it advances. Everybody's talking about it, so I will too. Many simple narratives sort of walk forward through their plots, revealing details while setting up and executing an ending. This one does that too, but also regularly zooms out, giving us a greater understanding of the situation, page-by-page, in a way that often reorganizes how we feel about the characters. The story starts the way so many do: A tiresome husband murdering his pitiful wife. But later we discover she is a serial murderer with a vermin-infested castle, and he's a plucky survivor with track marks all up and down his voodoo doll. But there may be even more to it that that, because his is also an insufferable jerk deep in the throes of some hallucinatory madness, who murders a hapless gypsy cliche for no reason. He's certainly no hero by the end of page six--and quite possibly he's imagined everything he's blaming his ex for, too.
It's a neat way to organize a story.
But, like Glowworm, I'm enticed by the riddle of the witch's POV, here. What could her motivations have been? Why was she collecting skeletons? (And what did Carl do with them when he sold the castle?) When we see her, she's pleading piteously, but later Carl says she was cursing him. Well, good for her, but why did she wait so long to run him over? He destroys the car, fumigates the bats, sells the house, books an Atlantic cruise, sets up house, gets haunted by a car, amuses a cop, locks himself in, and waits... a week, a month... playing trick pool. Then, as the clock strikes one out of many, many midnights since the murder, he is struck down by some ghostly late model import! How does this timing make any sense? Why didn't she just off him in front of the cop?
And I have to admit to a little disappointment, ultimately. For a page there I thought he was really being stalked by the murder weapon. Wow! Not some manifestation, but the real actual car he'd used to kill his wife. That's a really great idea, I'd love to see fleshed out. I want to know how it crossed the ocean, where it hid when he was sleeping, how it managed to gas and lube itself. Etc. That would make a great story, huh?
"That would make a great story, huh?" Sounds like a cross between The Car (1977) and The Twilight Zone episode "You Drive" 1964. A story like that and this one, including a prequel where the car in question was used by the resistance during World War Two would make an interesting trilogy. Sadly, such a tale is above my pay grade/my artistic talent level to attempt.
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