A few of you seemed on the fence about the hot pink horrors of our previous post, so I thought maybe we'd take another stab at it with a fun, old-time oddity from the March 1939 issue of Amazing Mystery Funnies V2 #3. Of the 7 pages, 3 of them are overlayed with a variety of perplexing pink hues, while the other 4 pages are in black and white. Not sure why they did it like this exactly, but I think it adds a screaming surrealness to the sinister setting, as well as to the masked murderer and their spooky dungeon of brain swappin', scientific madcappery. GCD notes that artist/writer, E.F. Webster was actually Ethel Felder Webster, and she was rockin' the Richard Sala-esque murder mystery style tale a few decades before he was even born. Man I miss that guy...
6 comments:
CGA graphic a bit before its time.
My suspicions about the magenta in the last post don't apply to this one. I think this one was pink from the get-go. Usually when they do weird color like this--fewer than four passes, mixed black-n-white and color, etc.--it's just to save resources. A page that is color on one side and black and white on the other can go through the printing press fewer times (and usually at faster speeds). A standard full-color comic page goes under wet print rollers eight times. This one went under three. That saves money, ink, and time. A lot of that sort of thing happened during the war, but this would have predated that. There are always reasons to save resources, though. For example, many small presses rented time at the local newspaper's press, so how quickly they could fit a print run between other projects was a real factor.
I really enjoyed the last two Webster stories you posted, and this one's no different. Sure, she draws an awful lot the way I did in elementary school--I'll bet her dungeon monsters are dead ringers for mine!--but I really like the carefree brio, and I think she's an excellent letterer (assuming she did her own titles and things, and I do assume that).
The weird ones are always welcome!
Ahhh, that Missing Mummy story by her completely slipped my mind! Glad you mentioned it…
An interesting choice of colors, and as Mr. Cavin mentioned, it was most likely a choice of economics.
The use of pink and red reminded me of the hand painted coloring done to many black and white films from the 1890's.
Quando reminded me of the film "The Mad Monster", where the professor was experimenting on his simple minded assistant, only in this story, the assistant was already a monster.
This was an interesting old dark house/hospital tale. It would have made a decent horror film in the thirties or forties.
Honestly, I like this art!
Yeah, it's amateur and looks like all the art we all drew in grade school (for me probably how well I drew in high school!) but it has something very important -- it properly tells a story. From panel to panel, the action reads right.
A lot of amateur jobs don't understand the flow of comics from panel to panel to page. This does. You can easily get lost and this works well as a comic.
And there's some tries for neat ideas, like panel 5 (thanks for the numbering!) on page 6. The graveyard framed by tree shadows might not quite be right, but is a cool try, never-the-less.
Quando also has a sort of Alley Oop look.
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