After presenting "The Choker" post (HERE!) the other day, we at THOIA have re-evaulated our gallows stance and decided there actually just wasn't enough hanging around these parts lately to satisfy our terrible tastes! Enter our next story from the June 1954 issue of Mysterious Adventures #20. Charles Nicholas delivers some real swingin' artwork on this (*choke!) classic about a hangman who justifiably, gets no respect... though oddly enough, he does get the last laugh!
5 comments:
I really like this one. I also like that Henreid hung himself upside down; this actually has some mystical concepts to it (though I doubt that is where the author was going) but I like it as some kind of "nobody can pull this off but me" final insult to those that doubted him.
Of course, we get the pre-code skeletons which seem glued together!
Sure he was an odd duck but I really kind of felt bad for his plight after being beaten, though randomly killing the guard, that is where the story kind of turned. I was right with him for his vigilante revenge!
His battered body is a really good horror image.
I just realized that you don't see a lot of outright bald people in this pre-code tales.
Well, that ending was just a twist enough to throw me off. I figured he was going to hang himself, but why upside down? And how did the corpse get skeletonized so quickly? And I do like that even the narrator was puzzled. "How did he do it? Beats us!"
Hanging horror, an overlooked sub genre in the realm of horror comics that has found a home here in THOIA.
Henried should have taken a course in writing short stories, especially short horror stories. He would have made a tidy sum writing about hangings in the middle ages, the old west, revenged of the hanged, etc. If nothing else, he could have written horror comic stories to share his 'fun' with the world.
If Pete Morisi could moonlight as a comics artist Henried could do the same as a horror writer.
Well they had to draw him hanging upside down. Not only is it a nice nod to the tarot card, but it sort of distracts us from the fact that a person hanging themselves is hardly some amazing display of virtuoso ingenuity. Everyday people hang themselves with depressing regularity, which is a kinda downer for the whizbang finish of a horror quickie.
Now if he'd somehow cobbled together an autonomic firing squad out in those woods, well that would have been a real neat trick! Especially if he was found upside down.
I liked the art team here a whole bunch, especially the colorist. The cemetery panel at the bottom of page two and the colors on page three all really send me. And it's nice to see a young Vincent D'onofrio pop up in something.
I like little moments like the warden and Dutch being on the same page -
"Warden, do I have to listen to this?"
"Get on with it, Henreid!"
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