Here's a fun, and oddly to the point, 5-page Farrell tale from the Sept. - October 1954 issue of Voodoo #17 (with art that looks like some of it was done by Iger Shop, while the other half by someone with a completely different style), concerning ancient, massacred spirits returning for a successfully swift, boggy vengeance. Hey, where'd that wacky witch go?!!
7 comments:
"Well teach them to obey the Crown!" is no way for the story to gain sympathy for Tony, but from then on, he has mine. I wish he and Pamela had come out all right.
If he'd at least tried to carry on his ancestor's work it'd be a little different, of course (although just as wrong when it comes to Pamela).
What a weird story! As you mention, it looks like the art changes halfway through, and not only that, it looks like there's some cut and paste going on.
Page 4, panel 1, what is happening? Is that a cloak? A blanket? Where's the tree from the last panel? Panel 4 and 5 look like something has been erased or altered. Somebody messed up on a deadline, it seems! Then on the next page, the balloon lettering on the stone makes me think it's another lifted panel? We'll never know but it gives the entire tale this weird dream like quality.
I love the sudden Casper over the tomb, how the ending just snatches the woman and completely forgets about the man (frankly neither of them are responsible!) and the great ending panel. The whole thing is wild!
And I love it!
It's yet but another tale where the innocents get killed, horribly, again!
If the "We'll teach them to obey the Crown" line was meant to mark Tony as a villain deserving his fate, absolutely nothing in the subsequent story backed that up. And the other two were total innocents.
I have a problem with tales like this, which are unfortunately common, not just in comics but in literature, where vengeance is visited on the remote descendants of the original criminal. Gogol's "Evenings In The Village Of Dikanka" even lampshades that in a story where a man who cursed his brother's descendants for his brother murdering him was denied entry into heaven. It makes the dead swamp ghosts(?)/zombies(?) the real villains, in my opinion, though obviously the creative team did not intend it to be so. It's almost like two pages of planned story are missing.
Sykes' positioning on Panel 5 Page 2 - reclining facing away from the car - is also very odd. To do that he'd have to get up, turn around, and lie down again.
Even the title is a bit off. Swamps aren't the "deep".
I'm inclined to agree that multiple people worked on this with no coordination with each other and deadlines were missed to hurry it on its way.
I have the same problem with countless revenge stories.
There's one in issue # 3 (?) of Tales of the Zombie about a cruel plantation owner whose wife is turned into a zombie (or more like a comatose person, which makes it dark in a more down-to-earth way!). And she stays that way as a punishment to him (like the flipside of the ending of WHITE ZOMBIE).
Maybe he's a terrible person, and maybe his wife is a very "entitled" white character, but that always bothers me.
Course, the whole point of bog people is that they don't rot. At least not much. High rates of acidity in peat produce conditions that preserve soft tissues while destroying teeth and bone. It makes for great horror imagery: Rubbery, leathery people the color of strong tea, sometimes with clothes and hair intact. Many of the most preserved corpses dredged out of the bog were sacrifices and executions--people who were completely submerged, on purpose, all at once way back when. Just like the victims in this story.
For the record, I have no problem with innocent people meeting bad ends in horror. As a matter of fact, what usually bothers me much more than that is rank moralizing dressed-up as a spooky story. The kind of horror in which fate is always organized, and then meted out, based on some cultural notion of deserts. This is especially atrocious in slasher movies, where it's often possible to tell not only who will die, but also in what order the deaths will occur and how lovingly they will be described by the camera, all based on character conduct. I find it chilling that much horror is made so that I can feel good and comfortable about bad things happening to people. Deaths occur like punchlines at the end of a joke. Like an amen. I like another way better: One where I feel scared, and then horrified, that people as blameless as myself might find themselves in the crosshairs of fate.
Anyway, I like the splash here. It crams more Halloween vibe into the frame than the rest of the story ever really manages. But I do quite like the melted and abstract horror action at the top of page four, too. Those two panels kind of remind me of Max Ernst. Or maybe AI.
Very glad that you said something, Mr. C. There seems to be an anti-slaughter of the innocents trend in the comments here lately, which to me seems to go against everything I know and love about horror comics, movies etc. But if you guys want, I can certainly change the format of this blog, beginning with an all- new name: The Happy Endings of it All..
I think it’s because these stories are from the “Before Times” that readers are put off… presuming a more “innocent” time when Good triumphs over Evil and punishments are Just… when in fact it was this era that prompted the Comics Code in the first place!
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