Thirsty Thursdays are here again, with a couple of sex-crazed supernatural thingies out lookin' for some flingies. I believe most people view these Ripley's stories as being a bit G-rated and tame, but how often do you see a comic book tale from Gold Key where a helpless lady in a nightgown is grabbed by her hair, and flung onto a bed where a half-human creature can then "follow his bestial instincts?!" "The Monster of Croglin Grange" is from the June 1969 issue of RBION #14, followed by a screaming second sizzler, "Prey of the Banshee!" from the October 1971 issue of RBION #29, --this one's highlighted with a beautiful John Celardo illustrated lead female looking like she stepped right out of John Buscema's pretty girl playbook.
5 comments:
Probably the best art in the last couple Gold Key comics -- page 5 has some got some great action and I love the camera angle and the werewolf in that. That's some fine work.
Second tale has good art in it, also, there's a lot of good action and the last two pages are pretty exciting. So bravo there!
I feel both these tales are aimed, again, at young boys, to tell them to stop trying to be with women; they either call their brothers to put a stake (what?) in your werewolf corpse or they turn out to be hideous hags that are somewhat sad about it all, but a jobs a job!
I know the first story from a "Fortean" kind of book called "50 Great Horror Stories" by a writer named John Canning. It's probably appeared in several other places too.
I first read this story from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Thanks for pointing that out! Found a bit more interesting info on wiki here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croglin_Grange
News from the Grange:
Cumberland Records Show that the monster never again returned to disrupt the tranquility of the countryside... Believe it or--
--yeah, I don't believe it. In panel four of the third page the doc literally says that the wounds on Ellen's neck look like the fangs on an animal. "Fang wounds" are just fancy pants medical terminology for "bites." Werewolf bites. It's possible that in this particular folkspace, lycanthropy might not fully bloom until the infected is a webbed-up old dust carcass, but somewhere down the road I'm pretty sure Ellen's coming back to, uh, fang wound the next generation.
My favorite panel from the other story has to be the second frame of page two. For one thing I like that surreal bananular car; it's like something from sixties Czech animation. Also I really like how the dialog digs back into interactions Don has had with locals predating the beginning of this story. It's a light touch, but it gets the imagination to work enriching the backstory instead of predicting the outcome, and I think that's a neat storytelling tactic.
Also, from the intro: "supernatural thingies out lookin' for some flingies"
Bravo!
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