Time to wrap up Fearsome February with a devilishly hot tale, direct from the burning gates of The Thing #1 (see our previous post as Hell, errr, --as well, too!) It's another smokin' pairing of Forgione / Tyler, teaming up and screaming up our final post of the month! And along with this macabre mystery lies yet another-- a wild picture to share (courtesy of the cool ass Carny Feet facebook group), featuring the Devil's Cave, a 1960's spook house or carnival dark ride from Ohio. And good 'ol Mr. Karswell himself figured out that some of the artwork on that fabulous attraction facade appears to be lifted from a couple of precode comic book covers, no less! Take a look at the end of this post, and if you recognize that hooded / bearded gentleman also painted on there (on the left), let us know where it comes from! Thank you in advance, and we'll see you in March for lots rots more!
10 comments:
This one is pretty damn grisly!
Not only are people randomly (to them) suddenly going up in flames, but the comic spends a panel (or two) at times with their last thoughts.
Guy thinks about his kids! Other guy tries to stamp out the flames on his brand new fiancé! Some people just give up! All in horrible, graphic detail.
Then there's sudden good girl art on the last page, followed by another horrible burning (!!!) and then a Ellery Queen who-done-it clue ending.
And we get an underpants devil, with boots! And the collar of a cloak without the cloak! If it can cook you alive at random, though, nobody is going to question his fashion sense!
All that adds up to A+ horror story in my book!
Maybe it sounds cynical, but when I read about that first victim "sending the wife and kids to the seashore," I expected him to plan to have a big time while they're away. Which would make whatever happened to him some kind of retribution.
Not that I think it would've been FAIR, but stories like this often punish people who do SMALLER things than that.
I wonder if the inspector from Nightmare is Detective Trails after his promotion/capture of Hellfire.
That infra red gizmo would be worth a fortune to the likes of MI Five (MIV British intelligence) or the CIA.
I wonder if the idea for this story came from the case of spontaneous human combustion.
That bearded hooded character seems so familiar, but I can't recall where I had seen it before.
What a heck of a way to say goodbye to this month of devilish snowstorms.
Louis has a moustache.
Yeah, I made him as the killer the moment he appeared.
There is something wicked strange about this one. The way the victims discourse over their surprise combustion is very disturbing. They don't scream in pain or and , they just sort of muse their final seconds away. It's like they are all robots. I expected to see them melt. In my head, the whole story began to sound a lot like those Al narrated YouTube how-to videos.
Man I really love the splash on this one. The Devil as some kind of apocalyptic parade float. The art is really solid all the way through, rigid and brute enough to match nicely with all the flattened affect of the dialog. I love that last green and orange portrait of the killer almost as much as the first panel. Sheesh, that guy is eeevil.
This feels like this story was based off of spontaneous human combustion. Of course, in this case, there actually was a reason for people literally going up in flames. I'm still not entirely sure what a portable infra-ray set is, but I'm pretty sure its actual usage is NOT to set people on fire. The first part is pretty gruesome, a man is happily thinking of how he'll be able to treat his wife and kids to a trip to the seashore from his commission check while a man has picked out an engagement ring for his lover. Nope. Nobody will be enjoying anything. They've all just gone up in flames! There's some unintentionally funny stuff in here too though, such as the one man wondering if it was caused by aliens with his wife telling him to stop thinking like that and the sudden twist of a famous (not infamous, FAMOUS) insane scientist who escaped from his "rest home" only to discovered dead due to being run over by a car. (not burned to death, surprisingly) The one thing that surprises me here, is that the Hellfire of Doom is just an ordinary man with some sort of infra-ray device. No pyromanic powers, and certainly not the awesome looking devil on the splash page.
I still haven't found the bearded hermit like character, but the skull with wings might have been inspired by the next to last image in "Return of the Ghoul" by Jay Disbrow.
After searching high and low I have not yet found an exact match to the hooded, bearded figure.
Here are my best guesses so far-
The space being from 'The Thing That devoured a Planet' posted here on Nov 9, 2014.
A Bill Everett creation, it just seems to have the look of an Everett drawing.
A version of Bela Lugosi as Ygor in Son of Frankenstein.
A real longshot is from a newspaper ad from the thirties or forties for the radio show 'The Hermit's Cave', the image of the hermit and the bearded image are similar.
Appreciate the help in this ride image, you guys! :) thank you!
This story reads like it was an old tale from The Spider pulp magazine. It's exactly the kind of insane stuff The Spider faced monthly, if a little toned down in scale.
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