We're heading into the weekend now with a fun Friday Frights tribute post to Rudy Palais, (because why not?), featuring an assortment of 60's Silver Age filler quickies that he produced for a variety of creepy Charlton comic book titles, in this case the May 1967 debut issue of The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves #1, as well as the January 1967 issue of Ghostly Tales #59. As everyone can see, Rudy stayed just as uniquely weird (and sweaty!) as ever in relation to his ghastly Golden Age era works, and I'll never stop being aggravated that we never got around to publishing that Palais hardcover artist's edition for IDW, --arghhh! Also included today: a handful of appropriately spooky ads to really make you feel like a kooky lil kid again. I also think we'll just stick with a Charlton mix for the rest of the month, and if anyone has any complaints about that you can take it up with dear 'ol Doctor Graves!
These are all super interesting. Story wise, we have another Resurrection Mary type ghost story, a pretty funny mirror story, a cute space kid story, and "The Ghosts Next Door" which could have taken an editor (I get where they were going but it was like a couple panels were missing near the end.)
ReplyDeleteThe art is the real wonder here. Palais' style is completely evident and it's wonderful with veined hands and mishappen animals (those cats and rats are weird and excellent), not a lot of goo but a lot of tears and mists.
Yet each story looks a bit different. Could be the time they were made, or how fast he worked. "Wanted Playmate" looks rushed (it's still great) but the inks (supposedly also Palais) look heavy, but the first two stories look much more detailed than the last two.
All of this art is awesome, it's just interesting to see the same artist have slightly different overall craft depending on who knows why.
BTW, we probably all remember the Colonial Viper disaster, I don't think Atomic Age Rifle should underline "Completely safe and harmless!"
Even during the late silver age or early bronze age of comics, Rudy Palais still turned out quality work.
ReplyDeleteI liked all of these tales, but the first one just hit a bit differently. Had I read the first tale as a kid, it would just have been another story of a ghostly officer doing their duty and beyond from the beyond. Nice story, nice fiction, nice ghost story, nothing else. Now however, it makes me wonder...
I had seen and heard the story on youtube concerning a border patrol officer who lost his life in the line of duty, and how migrants surrendered to border patrol agents because they were stopped by "El Fantasma", a sole border patrol agent who appeared before them, ordered them to stop, and then vanished before their eyes.
I won't mention the youtube channel or the episode without Karswell's OK, its his great blog and I don't want to show any disrespect for the greatest blogger of all.
Anyway, even today there are ghostly sights that people experience in real life that 'haunt' them for the rest of their lives.
Myself, I prefer ghosts that exist in between the pages of comic books and not a spectral entity to experience firsthand.
Karswell, maybe you can solve a mystery for me.
ReplyDeleteMany years ago - either 1978 or 79 - I had a ghost story comic book, whose name I no longer recall. Among the stories was one set in the Victorian British Empire in India where a peasant called Bengara Lakhi (this is not an Indian name) was unjustly executed by a Colonel Blimp and came back from the dead for revenge (I won't spoiler the rest of the story though I recall it vividly).
The first story in that comic was about a battered young woman in an air hostess' (stewardess in America, I suppose) uniform turning up at a remote clinic in the American Midwest and asking the doctor to come with her, there's been a plane crash, people are badly hurt, there's no time to wait for emergency services. He follows her across the badlands, until suddenly she apparently falls to her death in a ravine. Just past the ravine is the wrecked aeroplane, with injured people scattered all around. Our doctor - still grieving the air hostess' fall - bandages them up, then enters the wreck to see if there's anyone inside he can help. Guess whose corpse he finds lying on the floor.
Can you tell me the name of this comic issue, and, if you have it, could you post these two stories? Thanks!
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Did anyone buy the Monster from Outer Space? What was it, a blow up doll? A balloon?
If it's the one I'm thinking of (the picture is a little different), the "Monster from Outer Space" was a big poster.
Delete>we probably all remember the Colonial Viper disaster
ReplyDeleteHad absolutely no idea what you were talking about... so I looked it up, and *gag! ohhh yeah...
>without Karswell's OK, its his great blog and I don't want to show any disrespect for the greatest blogger of all
Awww schucks, that's just about the nicest thing I've ever read on here in all these years, thank you! Please feel free to share the youtube video that you mentioned, --sounds interesting! Thanks again :)
With Karswell's OK, here is the place to find the tale-
ReplyDeleteIt is under the youtube channel Bedtime Stories
the story is titled 'Strangeness in the Borderlands'
The original story was from the book "Out On Foot" by Rocky Elmore.
I am bit reluctant to post the exact youtube address since Blogger can, at times, be temperamental, and I don't want to be the one who causes a glitch in the matrix/Blogger.
Man, I sure remember the Red Missile disaster. I don't mean to make this tragedy about me, but I got a Colonial Viper for Christmas that year and it was the coolest spaceship toy I owned. It fired the red missiles. The only even cooler spaceship toy I knew of at the time was the matching Cylon Raider which I did not get for Christmas. Grr. And by the time I'd saved up enough allowance or whatever to get it myself, the product had been recalled. When it finally returned to stores sometime later, it had no springs in the missile launchers. Oh, all my friends had working versions from day one. But not me.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I'm sure glad nobody else was hurt.
Wow, Rudy's a wonder. I don't normally love that kind of collage look in the splash of the first story, but this one is weird enough to really light me up--especially the bottom half, with the webbed eyeball and skull. I like all the art in these--I'm especially intrigued by the cleaner, almost kiddie comic look of the last two--but I keep returning to the utterly gnarled look of story one. I especially love the freaky, claustrophobic panel of that corpse jammed into the car wreckage. Shudder.
I love the last panel on page one of the Ghosts Next Door, too--hey, that s is pretty creepy foreshadowing for a title--Mark's bedroom window must be on some kind of aircraft. Or maybe he watched the house grow out of the ground alongside its tree? Whatever it is, he's a lot closer in the next panel. I like the houses that Rudy has contrived for this story. If you look closely, you can see that the ghost house is actually pretty much the same from panel to panel, although it seems to be rotating. And that's an old dark house trick I haven't seen before.
It's funny that the mother in "The Ghosts Next Door" looks like she's right out of a comedy comic book, the "Archie" or "Katy Keene" kind.
ReplyDelete