Picking up where we left off last month with another wild Joe Kubert horror classic, and this one from the December 1952 issue of Strange Terrors #5. More top notch illustrative work, and correct me if I'm wrong, but in all the years I've been producing this blog, this may be the first post featuring a monstrous minotaur! Meanwhile, this is probably the 700th post featuring a pencil mustache. Cute girl art too though!
6 comments:
Early Kubert reminds me a lot of Alex Toth from this same period. Really strong stuff outside of EC Comics. Still I was hoping for twist… like Marian being the actual Minotaur and Peter set up as sacrifice a la The Wicker Man….
I was just gonna say the same ting as BTX. This era of Kubert's art is by far my favorite period of his work--and that's perhaps because it reminds me so much more of Toth than it does the work Joe was doing twenty years later when I first discovered it. Both men have a decided knack for creating indelible, believable characters out of thin air. Both are willing to let heroes and villains alike be all craggy and warped looking. I really dig Kubert in this mode; in my opinion he was better at horror than adventure. And I freaking well love that crew cut on the Minotaur! I'm a little disappointed he didn't have the pencil-thin mustache, too.
My favorite thing about today's story is probably the color design. Sadly, the printer's assistant making the actual separation plates dropped the ball hard. For once, all the blobby mistakes do not look to be happenstance, the result of slapdash high-speed printing registration, which I tend to like. There's a little of that, yeah, but most of the problems stem from bad workmanship, and that's a damn bummer because whoever it was coloring at St. John Publications at the time was really killing it.
This could have been posted in an action/adventure comic and it would still work flawlessly.
Action/adventure/horror is an overlooked genre, though I suspect it is a bit too niche to get a blog site of its own.
I generally agree with Mr. Cavin on about everything but I think the coloring is a good bit too simplistic. The red light/green light on many of the pages is distracting to me, and it's more wrong IMHO because the art is so great!
Page 4, last panel is one of the fun type of horror panels, the old worshipping the big ugly statue, and I love the close up of the grizzled old man on the next page.
One thing that's interesting about these last couple stories is, as they were close to WWII, how many of them start with "a guy from the army."
Marian doesn't get out much, but at least her guardian got her a rocket bra, per panel 3, page 1!
This story is like a more serious of THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS. Although with a happier ending for the three characters.
. There's the "old coot" professor, who even looks like Jack McGowran in that film, there's his assistant, who does at least one really dumb thing (shouting at the cultists from their hiding place). There's the beautiful heroine that the assistant falls for.
So for that reason (as opposed to THE WICKER MAN), I wondered the same thing as BTX.
I was hoping this one would have more of an ending. Still, it kept me hooked, and I guess the ending is happy enough.
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