Tuesday, March 15, 2016

HAUNTED LOVE #2 / Two for the Money

I went to Chicago before I had a chance to update THOIA last week with news about HAUNTED LOVE #2 being released, but I hath returned and here's the skinny-- a little late with apologies! So if you enjoyed the first issue, #2 promises more eerie girls from beyond the grave, monsters, monkeys, Hell, there's even a story about a guy in love with a guillotine! Today's FULL STORY preview though originally appeared in the October 1954 issue of Mysterious Adventures #22, pencils by Bill Savage, and feels a bit like a fast paced and freaky EC leftover. So rush out now and get HAUNTED LOVE #2 before they sell-out-- sounds as if comic shops are under-ordering again, as usual.













7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting that this beats Night of the Living Dead to the "cannibal zombie" idea by almost a decade and a half! (Almost every other comic of this era referred to flesh-eaters as either cannibals or ghouls.)

Darci said...

Fooled me! I thought Carlotta was going to turn to be a werewolf...

Is this where zombies started being represented as cannibals instead of the shambling undead slaves they were originally?
Thanks!

Mr. Cavin said...

I think it's a little suspect that there's a "hairy hands" line in the dialog before the final reveal. It may be just innocent misdirection, but I wonder if it is not possible that this was supposed to originally include a werewife before someone realized, at a late stage, that comics had used that very switcheroo--ha ha, I escaped a vampire and, oh shit, if it isn't a dang a wolfman--coupla times too often already. So they opted to change it up? I mean, without dwelling too much on the provenance of flesh-eating Romero ghouls, whoever heard of anybody changing into a zombie at midnight?

Welcome back from Chicago, Karswell. Did you stop into the Field Museum and say hi to Sue?

Mr. Karswell said...

All good points! I actually brought this up in the intro to my Chilling Archives Zombies collection a few years ago-- when exactly was the first time zombies began consuming human flesh and organs vs simply following orders from their slave masters? I now suppose this story should've been included in that hardcover collection!

Thanks for the comments 😈

Mr. Karswell said...

Didn't make it to the Field a Museum this time, Mr. C, though I did drive by it a few times and thought about it!

Brian Barnes said...

I think they actually just flubbed a line, or somebody substituted "Zombie" for "Ghoul" because it sounded better, and, like Werewolf and Vampire, it's a switeroo story that had been done a number of time.

Evidence:
1. Ghouls and Vampire hating each other is a well worn constant in pre-code
2. The vampire/ghoul duo was used a lot (vampire: flesh is gross; ghoul: blood is gross)
3. Zombies in precode were almost always ghosts or rotting corpses or soon to be rotting corpses, Ghouls hidden as humans was used a lot

What's interesting about this is how both the vampire and the ghoul seem to be able to wait an incredible amount of time and blow a lot of effort on one single meal. What happened to just grabbing people in a dark alley?

Karswell: You should probably tell everybody here to get these books on their pull lists; this is on mine. It helps your local comic shop figure out how many to order, and if a book is doing well enough to order others.

Grant said...

Gigolos getting in trouble due to something they didn't entirely cause makes me think of Alfred Hitchcock episodes, so it's interesting seeing that in a horror comic.
(In fact, it reminds me of a particular Hitchcock episode with the actor Robert Horton, whom we just lost, unfortunately.)