Wednesday, November 7, 2018

I Live with Corpses

Since everyone dug the Mort Lawrence story in our last post, here's another, and this time it's from the February 1954 issue of Uncanny Tales #17, --a rather gloomy, and very text heavy 5-pager with a time travel twist. Oh, and that incredibly terrifying cover is by big bad Bill Everett of course!











6 comments:

Brian Barnes said...

I'm overjoyed by the thought of a cemetery of just murders where the gravestones are all nicknames. "Killer Joe!" "Strangler Hank!" I'd love to wander that cemetery!

Text heavy is an understatement and the art really suffered from being crammed up like that. The story is clever -- it misdirects you with the money angle (you assume the money won't be worth anything in the future) -- before it catches you with the real ending.

Cutting back on the text would have taken this one from pretty good to really good.

nutsilica.blogspot.com said...

This is a good one except for the excessive text. Easily remedied. I just skipped the narrative texts only reading the dialogue. Do other people do that?
The story worked. Good art!
I do that for a lot of E.C. stories too. Heavy text kills the rhythm of the panels for any story. It fights the artist's efforts often making one of them redundant.
It's like having that feature on the T.V. that describes the show for the blind on by mistake.

Grant said...

Thanks to that TWILIGHT ZONE episode "The Rip Van Winkle Caper," I kind of expected the "Money is worthless in the future" part of the ending, but the rest of it really threw me.

Mr. Cavin said...

I like the part when the future people realize that he's not really a nutter, he's just a time traveler. Ho hum. People were pretty relaxed 2004.

For me the text adds character, gives a unique voice and sets a tone for the story. I did not feel like the caption information was all that redundant here. I certainly do not feel like the excellent art suffered for it. This Mort Lawrence cat is neat. I'm not sure I was aware of him before these posts. I see I liked the only other Lawrence story I can find in the archives; but I didn't pause much over the illustration at the time. But back then I was just some nutter from the past, anyway. That's been rectified now!

Mr. Karswell said...

I don't really mind all of the text either... I mean, the whole thing is only 5 pages long anyway, and at these golden age prices, I like to feel I've got my money's worth --so I'm definitely reading every word! lol

Mestiere said...
This comment has been removed by the author.