One more whack-a-doodle tale from the November 1953 issue of Mysteries Weird and Strange #4 (see previous post as well), and this time we're hangin' around the ominous old haunted house and having ourselves a truly swingin' time. Happy Friday the 13th to everyone too!
6 comments:
Were those really candles the rats were eating? Perhaps it's only to my 21st century eyes that the shape is a bit suggestive.
OK, so Crandall was hallucinating about the giant mushrooms and getting hanged. And OK, he deserved to be killed, by the logic of the strip. So what was the fault of the policeman Kolb and his friend? Why were they killed? As filler?
I love it! One thing that is interesting about some of these lesser known pre-code comics is how murderous they are; for instance, the cops didn't really have to be involved -- he could have just killed his partner and then ran off to the country ...
... but we have a good page or so of the cops (added up) and only for them to just get killed by ... the hanged man's spirit? The ghosts of the people who were hung? It's not exactly clear but they were completely innocents, trying to catch a murder, and boom, dead! There's absolutely no reason other than to increase the body count, and that's the kind of things that fills pages!
I love the giant mushrooms in the dream (?) that's a great gimmick.
The hanging house is a wild splash you'd only see in a horror comic!
With a little reworking this tale could have been a whodunit instead of or hor-dunit.
Instead of adding the ghostly hangman the killer could have panicked and ended up hanging himself while trying to escape a nightmare.
A bit off topic but worth mentioning- There was a three-part miniseries shown on BBC 4 called "Crooked House" made in 2008. The first story, titled The Wainscotting" deals with an unscrupulous investor from the 1700's who has his mansion refurbished, but the wood used for the study came from a famous gibbet/gallows called Tyburn Tree. The miniseries can be seen on the web but you have to look for it, its a fine tale for the Month of October.
Watched Crooked House quite a few times, really enjoy it— especially the ending
The set-up here is priceless. I'm really charmed by the notion of business as life raft. "Welp, there's only enough left in the coffers to keep this company afloat for another week with two mouths to feed. I can double that if I kill old man Ferris. Maybe triple it--hah hah--if I dine on his body!" It's odd the lengths Americans will go to keep on working. It's also really odd how often Jasper's inner narration is interrupted by his thoughts of laughter.
I love the wild splash, especially before I knew it was just a summary of the story read left to right. Subtle: I love the silhouette of the hula girl office lamp in panel two mirroring the hanged men above.
Those "business as life raft" comments remind me of the famous COLUMBO episode "Murder By The Book." A man who tears through money murders his partner, partly out of a grudge, but partly for the insurance money, which he'll ALSO tear through.
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