Slaughterama time again with a pulse-poundin', shudder-shaken'-shiveroonie packed Comic Media classic illustrated by murderin' Max Elkin, and from the September 1954 issue of Weird Terror #13. Man, if this one doesn't contain enough ghastly gruesome business for your tastes, then stick around at the end and learn how to embalm a goddamn corpse-- it's fun for the whole freakin' family is what it is, I tell ya...
4 comments:
In Panel 1 of Page 3, the inspector looks like a cartoon of Edward G. Robinson.
Damn! I had taken it for granted that Williams was the killer.
This comic is from 1954, right? Jack the Ripper was active in 1888. Not only was his spree not "over a century ago", he could theoretically have still been alive at that date and gone back to his old ways.
Good art, but the fang toothed maw is a cheat. He's not a vampire.
Bottom of page 1 and top of page 2 is pretty cinematic; now, by this time, this kind of sequence had probably been done a million times (and 90% of them in the spirit!) but it's always effective and is a really good way to start a "who is the murderer" story. Keeping the third panel on page 2 silent works really well. It's been used, but that's a good collection of panels.
In the "guess the murderer" type of stories you usually don't have that many suspects; here you have two and it spends a good deal of time trying to make it Williams. I immediately suspect anybody that smokes a pipe!
I always like the unexplained monsterization. Not just the teeth, but he grows hairy hands and claws. The last page is really well laid out. This is some pretty good work!
I love the little mummy picture on the text page. He's cute!
I love the way Williams imagines the murderer throughout the story as being a literal monster. Surely part of this is the power of those suggestions by the inspector, who claims the perp is some kind of exotic throwback to the Victorian age. But it's also a perfectly understandable emotional personification a bloodthirsty mystery that he cannot manage to solve. But also maybe the ripper really is a literal monster?
Is there some reason to assume that the inspector isn't the exact same Victorian Jack the Ripper? And that he also isn't some kind of hundred-year-old hairy-handed fang-faced vamp-ghoul?
I love the mummy write-up. I'm impressed to see the customary text page in a precode horror comic citing Herodotus. As as far as I can tell, it's pretty durn accurate, too. With this, and the bog people from last time, we seem to be having a bit of a mummy month around here so far. This is right up my alley! If you are the kind of person who is interested in recommendations, I really liked Heather Pringle's the Mummy Congress. I also learned a lot from the long article I read online back in the day (Discover Magazine? National Geographic? I can't seem to find it now) of Bob Brier's modern recreation of the mummification process using ancient Egyptian tools and techniques back in 1994. It's a great read if you can find it.
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