Time to end the month with one more weird war tale from the pulse-pounding pages of Fiction House's Wings Comics, our spotlight series for March 2025 (check the archive if you missed any.) And though I typically tend to fly clear of stories created in a sort of historically factual, narrative style as this one, I do find the highly efficient story-telling and surprisingly chilling final panel to be very worthy of a THOIA post. Hope everyone enjoyed this month of high-flyin', hair raisin' hits from above, stay tombed in April for more hits coming up from below! From the November 1941 issue of Wings Comics #15.
3 comments:
A great ghost tale featuring a phantom fighter plane. A few decades later
Weird War Tales would be publishing stories like this.
Great storytelling and great art, this was a real winner.
I like that bit on page two where the narration straight up lies to us about Ober Broeck's fate. Because see, apparently, the news of his death was indeed not so erroneous after all, was it?
This is a really interesting format. Much closer to a true halfway step between comics and illustrated prose, with the narration broken into columns above an equally rigid panel grid. I dig it. It's also interesting that, owing to the episodic nature of the story (or stories) here, most pages can be read in any order. Only the introduction of Kent provides any story arc beyond the first and final pages.
I'm really interested in stories like this, in which inanimate objects, often vehicles, are manifested around the ghosts of the dead. Here an airplane, there a floating galleon, but isn't it wild? A ghost man in his spirit plane? I keep waiting for a haunted house story like this, one in which the house itself is false, merely a aspect of a dead man's spectral goals.
Course, another way of looking at this is that the galleon in that story, and the fighter plane in this one, actually had spirits of their own loosed at the same time their occupants died. I like that idea too. I always wondered if that's what the cowboys who bought into the original Ghost Rider's shtick imagined: An afterlife team-up between the ghost of a man the ghost of his horse.
1941 -- and just 7 years the later the great suicide smith story. I love comparing stuff like this; suicide smith is pretty much a modern comic, and this is more like an illustrated tale.
Both work but smith uses the comic format to its full extent, and the flying dutch-man is more like an illustrated book.
Good use of processing to make the ghost plane. This is very much your kind of radio ghost play of the day; you see the ghost a number of times, and it's always the end that "verifies" the ghost. Weird signal man? Only at the end do you find out about the guy that died, etc. Works just as well in a comic!
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