Thursday, July 4, 2024

The Ghost on Television

Crummy weather here in the midwest has waterlogged most of our plans for the 4th of July festivities... guess I'll just stay in and see what's on the old boob-tube instead. From the October 1952 issue of The Beyond #16.

4 comments:

Brian Barnes said...

There's some great art on this one. Very nicely detailed death, the wavy TV effect, and I love a good super villain devil. He's even got a skull on his chest! I love the sea foam green for the walking corpse, and Lida fills in the good girl art role.

Page 6, panel 2, that's really staged great. The Huntley and reaper book ending the suffering in hell Lida is a cool image, and I love the coloring and swirling vortexes.

That said, there is some weird art, too. Lida chocking the daughter looks completely uninterested on page 2.

I think I'd make some changes to the last page, we don't need the explanation of the newscaster, he's just repeated what we've just read. Maybe another panel of the crash and then leave the 2nd to last panel as the last one?

Todd said...

What a convenient ending! Law enforcement should use this as a model to investigate homicide cases from now on.

Grant said...

I don't know many of them well, including the famous ones, but Lida has such a great film noir villainess look. And even in that final scene she's doing some dramatic "thrusting."

Mr. Cavin said...

I think the wavy lines really make the art here. Don't get me wrong, I also like the prosaic adman chic of this illustration style quite a lot too, but it's the fanciful stuff that Mr. Barnes mentioned that really puts it over the edge for me. All that groovy haunted TV screen stuff is nice and experimental (and evocative, even if it does little to represent actual television mechanics). But for all that, my favorite panel here takes place in the real world, at the bottom of page three: Death chillin' sideways in the back seat of Huntley's car, arm cranked up over the headrest looking for all the world like they are tag-teaming a beach road trip. "Pass the Andy Capps Hot Fries, you hogger!"

Well, that or the panel at the bottom of six where all the supernatural characters pause amid their righteous revengeance to point and laugh at their hapless victim. That's also totally awesome.