Wednesday, November 16, 2016

When His Number's Up...

Tempting fate was never so eerie, --well, maybe it has been-- in this surprisingly reckless entry from the December 1954 issue of Hand of Fate #25, art by the ever reliable Louis Zansky.













4 comments:

Brian Barnes said...

That's such a bizarre story, but a lot of the Hand of Fate stories seemed to be structured that way. It all seemed so arbitrary; the point was to have Guyle get "killed" (accidentally!) by the brother of the boy he killed; but don't forget Guyle killed somebody else in the middle! If you don't get to cry out a curse it doesn't count?

The marriage/girlfriend element could be removed without changing the story.

I like the art; I wish they would have cut back the dialog. Still, Zansky had some neat stuff, the inverse reaper, the car accident, but then was constrained by a million panels later on.

Glowworm said...

Yeah, Hand of Fate stories involving the Fate character generally either revolve around Fate merely narrating the story or popping into the story to tell the main character "This is a bad idea, don't do it, or you're doomed" only for the character to scoff at him and then get punished for it later, generally by Fate himself.

This tale is pretty weird, a man commits a murder, but unlike a lot of tales where karma strikes back almost instantaneously, here fate literally takes his sweet time in delivering the payment. The last part though in which our main character feels that he has to go outside in the middle of the avalanche is so downright bizarre, fate or no fate.

Guy Callaway said...

MY instincts tell me the edge of a high cliff is a poor spot for a campsite.

Grant said...

Maybe it's necessary to make way for a lodge, but the sight of trees getting hacked down for BOY SCOUTS is a little bizarre.
Where I live, almost the opposite thing happened. A scouting camp was demolished to make way for some ugly construction site.