I know that some of you are still trying to catch-up with our previous April Fool's Day post, but I wanted to get in this goofy great tale from Fiction House's "The Ghost Gallery", aka the September 1952 issue of Jumbo Comics #163 --you know, for a long awaited Werewolfery Wednesdayery installment, 'natch! Packed with loads of luridly beautiful Bob Webb artwork, this time our lycanthropy problem feels a bit weirder than usual, and when the wild mad science angle finally runs amok in the final pages, you'll be wondering when Santo or the Blue Demon will bust through the walls to save the B-movie day. Fantastic cover illustration as well, we even have a freaky lookin' Gomez-esque doctor that certainly seems inspired by the famous Charles Addams character. So fire up the serpent skull incense burner and dive into one heckuva chaotic monster mish-mashin' spook-a-rama!
3 comments:
There's lot of fun here, mad science, b-movie tubes, ghost, smoke, and regular werewolf varieties, good girl art, Adams family rip-offs, and magic tricks! You are absolutely right that a masked wrestler jumping in to punch a werewolf would not be out of place!
The art is good, though the artist had a bit of a problem with head/body proportions. Page 5, panel 2, that's the first good girl art posing by a dirty fireplace!
That said, needed a good pass from an editor. It jumps around, things kind of happen between panels that are a bit confusing, and it's sort of a hard read. And then the paneling changes on the 2nd to last page as if it is a dream sequence? It's kind of weird.
I love the guards manhandling the werewolf. I guess they aren't that tough!
How can I classify this wild tale? A Mexi-horror in comic form? A high end poverty row horror flick? A 60's Spanish-Italian horror mish mash movie a la Assignment Terror? Maybe it just defies any category and stands on its own merit and its own two paws.
Giving the werewolf a wolf's head instead of the Lon Cheney's wolf man look kept close to the origins of European werewolves.
This was a howling good tale.
Philosophically, is there any difference between a werewolf's head and the head of a regular wolf? I mean, certainly there isn't if it's drawn in smoke, right?
Wild story! I love the way it just sort of ramps-up the weirdness from panel to panel. Nothing keeps the reader off-balance like characters making absurd leaps of logic that turn out to be accurate exposition dumps (body exchange capsules? Hey good guess!); like the first person narration introducing scenes the character can never know (see the top of page three); like a paranormal intro in which the heroine travels out-of-body from coast-to-coast to appear in scenes where she is the solid one and everyone who actually lives there is a ghostly apparition. And really, what is the with the mad science being presented in those flashback frames?
Actually, I take it back. The oddness doesn't really "ramp-up." Returning to the beginning of the story after finishing it the first time, I see that the mystery begins even before the story does. What the what is going on with that splash? I get the mad science, sure, and I guess the head shop smoke viper on the skull in the corner is germane to the tone of stage magical spooky-doo. But what's up with the deer hunters? And why are some characters ghosts?
I love everything about this one. All the way down to the evidence of behind-the-scenes confusion over which twin was which. The bottom of page four is a mess--even Joy doesn't seem to know if she's Jane or not. But I've known plenty of twins in my life, and I've gotta say this feels like a realistic touch.
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