Monday, June 24, 2019
Blood Vengeance!
Like our last post, today's bloody ghost tale is also nicely illustrated by Charles Nicholas, and while it feels like the usual, colorful sort of 7-page ACG or Ace Magazines story, it's actually from the October 1951 issue of Weird Adventures #3 (see the Dr. Psycha tale posted last month from the same issue HERE!) Oh yeah, one other thing setting Blood Vengeance apart from the auspicious ACG or Ace tropes is the horrifically holy moly brutal climax which you just have to see to believe. THUD!
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7 comments:
The flip between pages 2 and 3 was confusing, I had to back up and re-read it again. I sometimes complain about stories being text-heavy but we could have used a caption there!
This is a good grisly tale, especially as two pretty nice folks are caught up and murdered for basically no reason, and the murderer himself goes down. Was the ghost mistreated? Sure! Is his vengeance righteous? No! Our doomed couple had nothing to do with the original execution. That always gives these tales an extra push; our victims were truly innocent and their deaths leave a bigger impact.
You can tell this whole story was written around the writer getting the idea of the window. What a great ending!
Madness! We are going insane on this one. Just crazy swear word stuff. Crisp art and coloring though. It does land with a thud dead ending, ancient vengeance served very cold. Thank you Mr. K. Madness!
Hey, look, everybody. I found Waldo!
It's neat to see this story's dedication to a really modern-seeming nine-panel grid (only broken here and there to pretty good effect), but that brisk Silver Age style doesn't really support reams of exposition quite as well as the squarier six-up Golden Age norm. It works because "Charles Nicholas" forces it to, but I think maybe a whole new page between two and three, (for Brian's reason, but also) to break those multi-sentence balloons down to the point where they fit in the tops of the panels again, might have looked even better still.
And wow but the art is clear and clean though, and that helps out a lot. Besides the modern look, these action panels are so dynamic and powerful that I had to look up the name Charles Nicholas and, welp, now suddenly every observation I'm making seems totally banal. Ha. Learn something new every day.
I guess I'm in the minority here. I love a good yarn where a werewolf eats the bad guy, but psycho killer graphically murdering his girlfriend and best friend for batshit crazy reasons and getting away with it is sort of revolting. I'm grateful you post the wide variety you do, and not everything can be everybody's favorite, but this might be my least favorite. Can't say I wasn't warned!
Wow. Henri Marbeau was a huge asshole. It's all about him isn't it?
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