I'm sure that many of you consider a cemetery to be a nice, quiet, uneventful place. But today's terror-ific Tom Sutton tale from the February 1973 issue of Midnight Tales #2 tells quite a different, action packed story, indead-- errr, indeed! Not only that, but you're going to hear all about it from a very different perspective too! I've also included a vintage comic book ad page absolutely packed with mail-order magic...
7 comments:
Its interesting but these anamorphic "things" stories never get bad ending -- as far as I can remember I'm sure it exist -- they always get happy endings. Sure, somebody was murdered, but the grave gets a new inhabitant and it's happy and there was some good old fashioned vengeance.
Again, Sutton is one of those guys that when I was a teenager I would have absolutely disliked, but now I think the art is just wonderful. I grew up with very realistic art in comics and it took a while for me to appreciate artists like this. I love the grotesque murderer vs the pristine victim. There's a lot to love with the wild exaggerated and deeply inked art.
Unrelated, but I also love the swami art on the 250 magic tricks.
I wonder if this can be considered an homage to the 50's horror comics, the weird faces, the eerie atmosphere, the dreary look. This tale would have fit in with the horror tales from a two decades earlier, though this would have been a filler story since it lacked a vampire, werewolf, etc. and the killing occurred off screen.
The comic ad featuring magic tricks, stamps, etc. I wonder how many comic book publishers ran that same ad? Any of those items would be comic book ephemera today.
The grandson on Page 5 looks like a horror comic version of Michael Landon.
I have this one!
The complex and form-fitting mores adopted by the grave here, mostly on the fly, are interesting--as situationally mutable as a child's morality. I'd be interested to see a story that really explores this. The grave definitely makes decisions that are not self-serving, but which are mostly influenced by a corrupting reliance on ESP. The murderer influences the grave to murder. But then again, so does the suicide--and that's interesting. Each action taken by the grave produces opposite results vis-a-vis the grave's own goal of filling itself up.
I like the way the consciousness of the grave in this story initially included both the hole and the original occupant that was placed there. But we only get to know that identity as an unhappily empty space. How do you think its personality will change, refitted now with a decomposing heart? Do you think it would be different had it been the murderer, instead of his victim, filling that void?
Sutton can go back and forth for me. I mean, I always find his stuff interesting and lively, but usually it toggles between poles of being too lavishly over-baked and being too blithely slapdash. Sometimes it'll veer both ways at once: Lush with expressive and drippy details boiling from ornate props and deco paneling designs placed side-by-side with hard to parse gestural cartooning. Sutton even occasionally hits the razor-thin perfect middle ground for me; but that seems rarer than getting one (or both) of the other two possibilities. For the record, this one's close to the middle, but maybe a little too hasty. For me.
PS, that's quite an ad page. I feel like it targets a uncomfortably familiar market: Lots of magic tricks and some pranks, where to sell poetry and songs, and traps for vermin. The medicine ad feels like a holdover from the Victorian era, though.
Did Ed Goldfarb ever work for Warren? The murderer has a real Warren magazine look to him.
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