Last month we featured a few frightening tales set in a funeral home, and now today we descend down into yet another eerie embalming chamber for a sickening sneak peak at the lonesome, psychotic life of the absolute most deplorable mortician of all time. Yep, he's definitely got a few problems with a few people, not to mention a few rather macabre momentos hanging in his f-f-f-freezer. If you've ever wondered exactly how hard one person can literally F up everything they touch, well... here ya go! Marty Elkin goes full blast on the gory deets, and Dick Beck delivers one of the most iconic precode horror covers of the 50's, ever! From the April 1953 issue of Mysterious Adventures #13...
8 comments:
I like this one a lot. I am reminded of Hebert West - Reanimator, by HPL. I wonder if there was a little cribbing there.
Eben should have known that their might be a reckoning for his actions, if not in this world then the next. Had Eben used his head, he would have cremated the body parts and dumped the ashes in a convenient patch of quicksand, (there is always a convenient patch of quicksand in these tales.)
Eban's second mistake was his pursuit of Ann, guess he never heard the old expression 'There's plenty of fish in the sea'. If Ann isn't interested, there are other women out there in the world.
Suppose Eban met and fell in love with a vampiress, it would be a match made in ghoul heaven, she goes out every night to grab a bite to eat and Eban gets a steady flow of customers. I wonder if there was a horror comic story out there with that plot.
I do feel bad for Eban, if he hadn't been mocked and bullied by the townsfolk he might not have turned evil.
"I don't play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge." Vincent Price.
I wonder if this comic is inspired by/borrowing from Ray Bradbury's "The Handler"? EC did at least one before getting permission to adapt the actual story.
The same with me, but not till the last panel.
I barely know "The Handler," but I noticed that.
In a loose way, there's also "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," since Eben's frail look makes his rival the obvious choice, almost as much as Eben's job.
It might not have helped, but he could've said one obviously thing to Jake and the others - "Do any of YOU want this job? Because SOMEONE'S gotta do it!"
These stories in which folks seek revenge for suffering the vengeance of someone they've wronged are always really interesting to me. They, perhaps accidentally, demonstrate the pitfalls of retaliatory justice, yeah. But they also pick and choose sides based on which part of the story they choose to frame. This one might have been about townspeople ridiculing a long-suffering mortician--and so then his cadaver desecrations might have been seen as the catharsis. But instead it's about an evil mortician who's actions vindicate the community's suspicions, so their own posthumous retribution is what clears the slate. But it's easy for me to imagine the cycle both pre- and post-dating the events here, the tit-for-tat spiraling away in perpetuity.
It's an arms race to the bottom: An unpopular vocation provokes bullying creating grievance begetting transgression, a victim becomes a murderer and a population turns into a deeply disturbing lynch monster. And now I guess the dead have to bury themselves in that town, because who would ever be willing to undertake mortuary duties after this?
The idea that a person's job curdles and weirdens them is something else that fascinates me. If these folks demonize the undertaker, what do they think about doctors? Garbage men? The dog catcher? Is every vocation some kind of funhouse mirror demonstrating the ulterior warp of the practitioner? These townies certainly seem to think so. The comics creators certainly seem to think so too.
Elkin's art is as swell as it usually is. A deeply precode fermentation of the horror and the cartoony, making for a cozy grotesqueness. I always thought he and Ditko may have inspired one anther. This work could just as likely have been one of Wrightson's wellsprings as Ingles' stuff.
As always, thanks for all the great comments! Wait, which one of you won that dead body?
Late to the party on this one and most of it's been covered so ... the cover!
That is an incredibly striking image. Even though it's a little off (the skull is to the left) to give space for the woman (who is pulling from the side ... this doesn't make physical sense but makes perfect layout sense.)
Painting the guy in the same red/orange/yellow print of the flames (and flicking in the eye corners) ties the whole thing together. That has to jump off the shelf at the local newsstand back in the day!
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