Sunday, December 31, 2023

Midnight Massacre

Load up those tommy guns, ya dirty rats, it's time for a HOLE new way to send ya's screaming into 2024! Yep, while most of you will be drinkin' it up and smoochin' in the New Year tonight at midnight, THOIA and AEET has a whole different evening scheduled for ya! Two terror tales from the same great Atlas issue, spanning both of Mr. Karswell's blogs to ring out the old-- and creep in the new! So after you finish todays story here, click the banner at the end to head over to AEET for an even creepier celebration, from the June 1953 issue of Astonishing #25. HAPPY NEW FEARS, everyone!

3 comments:

Bill the Butcher said...

Happy Nude Fear to everybody!

Mr. Cavin said...

It's cool when the twist ending isn't so much a big plot surprise as it is a left turn in genre. Of course, it's not particularly unexpected for this to turn out to be a horror gag in disguise--obviously, it's the name of the game at this blog and in the original comic, too. It would have been pretty effective if this story came from the pages of Shock SuspenseStories or Crime Does Not Pay, though. It really is a convincingly effective crime yarn before it goes all horror.

I like the middle of the last page, where the zombie assailant breaks Garris out of the clink. I really dig panels with a lot of shape repetition. All those identical jailers crowded into every frame are absurd and visually engaging.

Happy New Year!

Brian Barnes said...

There's some really fine pencil work in this! The splash, the dying man's face on page 3, panel 1, and some great ghouls/zombies/ghosts (it's a 50s horror comic) at the end. I especially love how sinister their smiles are.

As Mr. Cavin says this works really well as a crime comic; the set up is the same, you have a gangster for whom money is his only friend and motivation setting up his own fate; you could replace the zombies at the end with just other members of the gang without changing the story at all!

Happy New Year of more great comics!