Here we go with the last of the Edgar Allan Poe "Famous Tales of Terror" stories, and today's entry can originally be found in the December 1945 issue of Yellowjacket Comics #6. Ready for a shock? GCD credits the clunky art to a completely unrecognizable Rudy Palais. If this is indeed him, then he greatly improved stylistically in the next decade, like on a miraculous selling of his soul level. Like whoa...
4 comments:
If you don't like someone's eye, narrator, maybe just don't hang out with him? Too simple a solution?
As for the art......aaaaaah! Even I can draw better than that.
I'll give it Palais, just because there's sweat on the very first panel!
So the art isn't great, but it's a good adaptation. That said, this is one of those that might be better in prose, because it's a bit harder to work the creeping sense of dread as the heartbeat grows stronger, and it feels slightly rushed here.
Any minor complaints I might have is erased because these stories are so early and at the time must have been real striking as we hadn't had a flood of horror comics yet. Bravo for the team at Yellowjacket comics. I suspect the editors got a lot of letters as they started pushing them out one issue after another!
The art in this story is like coconut, you either love it or loathe it. It has that look of outsider art or underground art from some of the seedier underground comix of the late 60's-early 70's.
I will cut the artist some slack for this rendition of Poe's classic tale, since back in 1945 comic publishers just wanted a product out the door, no matter what the art looked like.
A quick comparison between this version and the classics illustrated version posted on THOIA back in May 17, 2008, shows how the art and storytelling should be done.
The first THOIA post 2007, what a long but wonderful, thrilling journey it has been for THOIA fans. Here's to many more years and decades to come!
I feel like this adaptation hits all the salient points but somehow loses the tone. But honestly, I have no idea what it would be like to encounter this version of the story without already having twenty other versions rattling around in my head. I might have really loved this with a bit less familiarity (and perhaps nothing better to compare it to).
The art, ahh... I spent more time thinking about why it looks this way than actually reading the story. Was Palais(?) shooting for an old-fashioned look? Victorian woodblock prints or something? That's how the best of this looks to me. Or did someone accidentally dump the art boards into a mud puddle on the way into the printers, so some intern had to copy the lines off onto vellum before shooting it for publication? That's how the rest looks. We'll never know, but it sure does look weird compared to the other work in these Yellowjacket books.
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