After last Friday's feast of flesh appetizer, I'm guessing some of you might still need a little liquid refreshment to wash it all down! So today thy cups be runnethin' over a'plenty with a brutal vampire saga from the April 1973 issue of Nightmare #12. Chic Stone unleashes all kinds of head loppin', stake stabbin', sinister blood slurpin' sexiness, --where even the vampire hunter himself realizes too late that even he's bitten off just a bit more than he can chew! This is definitely one of the best ever Skywald entries in my opinion, and it contains quite a few panels I've seen taken out of context / tumblr'd endlessly over the last decade or so. And stay tombed-- the actual main encore corpse chow-down is up next!
5 comments:
Oh, this one is fun. I love how clueless Thatcher’s horny companion, Philip is and the panel where he gets excited about Marisa’s outfit is hilarious. “You may have lost your crucifix, Father, but I still have mine!” Is a badass line. I also love the dark sense of humor where the priest prays for salvation and the giant cross collapses on him. I also love the dark humor of the vampire hunter being staked by the vampiress. Now that’s something you don’t see every day! The ending is hilarious though. A freaking bear trap did her in!
I love the art and I love even more the fact that the letterer never heard of the concepts of "spelling" and a "dictionary".
This is a great one. I can run hot and cold with Skywald; a lot of times the "horror mood" stuff they promised felt like a straight jacket on some of the stories, something Warren (who hated Skywald as one of his writers started it) and Marvel (who Skywald blamed for their failure) weren't constrained by, and both of them had a better crop of artist.
That said, right here, everything comes together. Stone delivers gross vampires, hot vampire ladies, heads flying everywhere, melting vampires, etc. Everything you'd want from a 70s black and white mag.
The story is solid; it works as a young mans adventure story (even though our young man gets it) and at the same time operates totally fairly (he notes setting up the traps before they are revealed.) ... and it being a bear trap. I assume some kind of holy and/or cursed trap to hold her. That's a new one!
I love how absolutely a grade A jerk the vampiress is. She's bossy, she laughs that she gets the big cup, she's all about how nobody can destroy her, etc. It makes her end all the more satisfying.
Looking forward to whenever you pull from the 70s B&W magazines. There's so much good material there. Of course you know the one Skywald story I've been asking for probably over a decade now!
BTW this issue of Nightmare has a really strange cover, IMHO, and I love it!
enjoyed this one very much, As a big fan of Savage Sword, I came to appreciate the B&W stories. Reading this one, I thought coloring would just ruin it. Thank you Kars!
I like Chic Stone's work here quite a lot. It may be a little inkier, but it basically looks like really good silver age superhero comics art to me. It's sophisticated and uncluttered, with just the right amount of gothic juice. There's a well articulated panel composition that moves effortlessly across the page--even around all those dialog balloons--and skillfully applied surface detail like wood grain and rough stone don't muddy the place up. I love the literal foreshadowing of evil on the priest's face at the top of page three.
But man. While most of this feels right out of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, the figure drawing for Marisa seems right out of a men's mag gag cartoon. She looks like she's getting swallowed by a fish. I laughed out loud several times. Also, she's got a bit of a drinking problem (in the Airplane sense).
And about those balloons. Holy cow. This story is not overwritten in the usual way. The narrative trips right along. So I don't get why half of the dialog could be removed without a causing any damage whatsoever to the story, character building, etc. Look at page three. Everything that Phillips says is ludicrous. Moreover, every character says two or three things per balloon where only one would have sufficed. I'm not one to balk at wordiness (he said way down here at the bottom of his comment), and I appreciate the flavor and lived-in quality a bit of extra writing can afford a story. But this really feels like someone had trouble picking which dialog to use out of several options, and so just jammed all of it in.
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