Monday, February 4, 2019
The Dead Lover Returns!
The month of February is a reminder that love is in the scare-- well, "love" as Mr. Karswell defines it-- and as Valentine's Day approaches, so will the loathsome levels of gag inducing, lusty guy / girl story shenanigans that, for example, made my Haunted Love series / book such a chilling thrill (still available HERE --makes the perfect VDAY present too!) So off we go again with a month of gentle, tender, romantic tales of woo and goo and ooooo I think I'm seriously gonna be sick... for scary starters, this one from the May 1952 issue of Worlds of Fear #4, with art by Sheldon Moldoff.
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5 comments:
Aw ... how sweet.
I loved the light blue corpse/face bit, though it didn't always work out (it was either drowned out by the coloring in places or the artist hurried through it.) Still, page 7 panel 2 is awesome.
Though I'm not buying the dog running away. Heck, my dog would run towards a corpse, there's yummy bones in there!
I loved the story, it was predictable but actually surprised me as I expected a more EC ending. I really felt for Ted, and all the characters, though Bud really got the short end of the stick in this one.
Page 4, panel 3 is awesome.
I know Ted doesn't mean any harm, but there's something a bit terrifying about waking up to a rotting corpse of what used to be a man staring up at you through unblinking eye sockets. He keeps doing this too, even when he finally finds the girl he's been looking for all this time. He doesn't ring the doorbell or knock.(Then again, the undead normally have no manners.)He just saunters in and flat-out kisses her before she can get a word in edgewise. Dead or alive, that would have gotten a slap on the face out of me if someone tried to do that.
Also, Ted only saw her once--that's not love at first sight, that's merely infatuation.
I also appreciate his last name. Femur--hah!
I'm also surprised that Bud actually lives through his car crash. Usually these sorts of stories end with the undead rival killing the living one.
It sure is interesting to see such a positive spin applied to the classic zombie-meets-girl yarn. I guess there are two sides to every story, and here we see how slinking out of the dank grave and stalking down some nubile prey is chuffing good sport for today's rotten young incel. That's a new one on me! But there's even some collateral romance sprinkled on golden oldies like home invasion and nonconsensual necrophelia (or at least necking). Consider those lines blurred.
But this is a solid gold classic. The art and colors are beautiful (I'm a sucker for playing process tricks with the brush lines), and holy cats but Moldoff gives good dead people. The next time you're looking for a t-shirt image, you could do a lot worse than any of half a dozen panels from this thing.
I couldn't remember where I read this ages ago, so I'm glad to find it here. Maybe there's a lot wrong with it, but it's great if you think of it as some seriously weird dream. I also like the fact the protagonist is good enough to realize killing his true love is uncool, even if she'll hate him for talking her out of it.
For whatever reason, this story made more of an impression on me when I started reading pre-Code horror than pretty much all the others.
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