As long as the sinister statues are rampaging this week (HERE), might we allow a fine female form of art to get in on the bone crushing action as well? This is a nicely told tale from the July - August 1951 issue of Weird Adventures #2, and is based on the classic short story by Prosper Merimee (read it HERE!) Art on this one is by the ever underrated, Bob Jenney, who started out his illustrative career way back in the late 30's working on pulps and young adult books. After the war, he continued steadily producing quality visuals for nearly every big name publisher in the biz, rounding out his career in the late 60's with Creepy and Eerie classics for Warren Publications. Longtime THOIA followers might remember his tremendous Dell adaptation of The Creature from the Black Lagoon that we featured HERE in 2010...
7 comments:
NOTE: Be sure to wear sunscreen during the day at tennis matches, --you don't want to be sunburned for the fiesta later that night!
This was a good adaption of the original. The minor changes here and there didn't negatively effect the story, if anything, it made the story flow a little bit better.
It's strange that mismatched wedding rings are a part of so many light comedies, considering what happens with one here.
Thanks for the link to the story. Glad I read it first: I always prefer the written word to the drawn comic as a first read, instead of the other way around. It was a good adaptation, though.
Another version of a discovered Venus statue was written by Clark Ashton Smith, titled "The Disinterment of Venus" published in Weird Tales July 1934.
In Smith's story, the statue is discovered on the grounds of a monastery, with a few monks succumbing to the spell of Venus.
This story has a lot of characters in it, but that's probably a bit more the fault of being a translation of a written work (which I need to read) -- normally in text you have some extra time to live with and remember the characters but here many of them sort of blend together in parts.
That said, it's a great little story of a killer statue. I love how mysterious the statue is; we aren't given any explanation like "sculpted by a mad scientist" or anything -- it's just there. It's evil. Don't mess with it.
And the evil lives on outside of it being a statue. Why you'd turn an evil statue into anything that could ring out and get the whole town's crops I don't know, but they did!
It's good art, and the artist has to deal with a pretty talking head heavy story, but the killer statue is good, the kill looks brutal, all around, a fine job.
Man, what a great story. Thank you so much for linking it. I just finished scrolling through it at the BYU site you provided and went off to find more stories by the same author--and it's the guy who wrote Carmen, of course! I've really got to start paying attention to people's names. So it turns out I've already got all of Mérimée's short stories in the Oxford Classics version I bought years ago. But, derp, I only ever read the famous one! So thank you for reminding me that I've got some catching up to do.
As for this comics version, I think Bob Jenney (and maybe a writer?) turned in a fine adaptation in the space they had to fill. I wish it was as roomy and amusing as the original story, but you can't win em all. I especially like the bit on page eight in which the narrator measures the statue's foot. That's a neat but of storytelling in which the illustration rather than the caption carries the narrative water.
I do want to read a sequel about the cursed church, though. From now on out, I'm imagining a melted down evil statue as the backstory of every cursed artifact. Or maybe I should go back further? What wicked blood ducats or tyrannical implements of heretical torture were boiled to make this statue in the first place? Nothing removes incriminating evidence quite like liquefying it to make art, after all.
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