What's everyone cookin' up for Thanksgiving this year? The traditional turkey with stuffing, cranberries, yams etc? Maybe a big juicy ham? Might I make another gruesome suggestion? From the June 1954 issue of Dark Mysteries #18, featuring hotter than Hell art by Hy Flieshman, not to mention that weirdly cramped, claustrophobic title treatment (which makes me feel like I'm being buried alive), make for one of the more insane precode horror tales ever put to print...
3 comments:
I love this! It has all the stuff that makes pre-code horror a lot of fun -- it has a premise that you have to buy into (very specific, in imitating the dead brings them back to life.). It is also not often I've seen a corpse reverse build itself in a horror story, usually it just digs itself out of the grave, that's a neat touch.
I also like the ending where Corey ends up becoming stiff like a corpse, and then plays out the entire burning again. It's basically a double twist ending.
The random skull pictures on page 3 are mana from heaven!
Flieshman really gets to stretch his art muscles here -- random skull, rotting skeletons, but also ex-presidents, swamps, boats, reforming skeletons, there's a lot here, and it is handled all well.
This is a real winner. It's got everything a pre-code needs.
The idea of an impressionist shtick that includes impersonations of people long dead strikes me as funny--even though it's completely essential to the plot here. Like, when this was published, John Barrymore was ten years dead and Lincoln gone nearly ninety. The people in the audience would perhaps know if the Barrymore bit was accurate, but nobody would have a damn clue about the sixteenth president. That's baked into the story too, I guess, in the way that only "a recent dead" is really capable of rising from the grave owing to a "perfect impression." Cause just making up the persona of a man killed fifty years before you were born is unlikely to be "perfect" enough. Good on you, story. But in real life, if some huckster impersonator tried to slip pure fabrications into his act I'd have to ask for a dang refund.
The bottom half of page five is the stuff of precode superstardom. What a neat page! I would have loved to have seen this whole story done the same way: The entire plot played out in small panels across the top of each page, while the balance of the lower frames are filled with the lavishly illustrated slow reconstitution of Tony's corpse, his struggle to rise, to stagger through the fetid swamp, to revenge himself on Corey.
Anyway, I also love the last panel on page six, because Corey looks just like a Dave Berg punchline.
This was one that I had hoped to put into Haunted Horror #36 or #37, but alas the series ended with #35.
But speaking of, up next is a terrible tale that actually did make it into HH, though it somehow never made here at THOIA. Stay tombed for it-- and thanks again for the great comments!
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