Monday, February 25, 2019
Death's Bridal Gown
You're not getting off that easy with just one weird wedding dress post this month! And this one from the February 1953 issue of Adventures into Darkness #8 just might actually out-weird the previous one-- see what you think! Also, you chemical experts are encouraged to weigh in on the plausibility of one climactic detail. PLUS! A fun crossword puzzle from the same issue rounds out the post!
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8 comments:
It's an old urban legend, from the 40s:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dressed-to-kill/
Certainly coming into contact with the stuff isn't good, but we are talking corpse -> dress -> time -> Olga. It's very unlikely. This story is pretty much taken directly from the first version of the urban legend.
Good coloring in this one! The splash shows you that, even when dead, men are still all grabby :) There's no way the artist didn't specifically put that hand there!
I swear there's a photo reference for Olga, especially page 2, panel 6. I love the shop keeper, the ghost, our pin-up of the poor doomed Olga. Very nice stuff.
I love these urban legend stories -- that's a theme but it'd probably be hard to find them from memory in your giant collection.
I'm gonna say that if you're rich, and invite a nice blue-collar lass out for the evening, it's maybe a leetle bit of a red flag if she shows up wearing a wedding dress. You know?
I agree with Mr. Barnes about the coloring. The color distribution on page four is especially elegant. I am also a big fan of these stories sourced from urban legends. I'm an inveterate armchair modern folklorist and a Snopes community member from way back (from well before they became primarily a political fact-checking site), so it's great to see these things popping-up in fifties comics.
Brian Barnes beat me to using Snopes.com as a source behind this classic urban legend. I first heard it told years ago on a girl scout camping trip from one of those "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" collections.
Oddly enough,back in September, a variation of this tale actually showed up on the "Not Always Right" website--which is a place for sending actual stories of bad, awful, or funny customers which then get posted if the moderators find them interesting enough.
Nobody dies in this one--but a returned dress does get re-returned due to it causing a rash.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=983171239671909762&postID=6793275876189161313&isPopup=true
Of course, many commentators immediately debunked this one's authenticity.
As for the story itself--it seems almost like a morbid version of Cinderella gone horribly horribly wrong. If it weren't for the supernatural ending in which the ghostly original owner of the dress takes it back to her grave, I'd say she was just a hallucination that Olga had experienced due to breathing in the embalming fluid.
One of the best versions of this tale told by the man, the legend, the one and only Boris Karloff- Boris Karloff Tales of the Frightened: The Deadly Dress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1S6G9dii6k
The GCD list JVJr identified the artist as Sam Citron. The last panel reminds me of simultaneity in Cubism, e.g. Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
Speaking of Alfred Hitchcock's show and similar ones, it's kind of easy to imagine Percy Helton playing the shopkeeper (though I don't know how many villainous roles he played).
We're reaching the final day of the honeymoon here at THOIA, fiends! One more tale of bloodthirsty bridal beastliness to go-- stay tombed! And as always, thanks for the comments!
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