As we've seen in the last few posts, a scary illustrated skeleton in your story can really elevate the eerie factor! Take for example this rotten Rudy Palais crime horror quickie --which also contains the origins of Dr. Strange! --via the January 1952 issue of Witches Tales #7. Annnnd to all you fans of Lucio Fulci's classic, ZOMBIE, -- you may be surprised to learn today that an undead guy fighting a shark underwater (CLICK HERE for it) didn't originate in his 1979 cult film feature!
4 comments:
I've come to enjoy the nebulous nature of these spooks -- he's at times a ghost, at times a zombie, at times a puddle of goo, and nothing stops him from throttling the life out of some thugs.
The art is great! From growing fangs to get a more Frankenstein's Monster type of head, to fighting the shark, to choking a guy, to melting down (you always call in Palais for that) it's a ton of fun. I love the evil phantom who is completely single minded.
Palais forgets the chains in a number of panels!
BTW, annoying trivia: Dr. Strange was kind of lifted from another pre-silver-age but post code story of Dr. Droom, who then was later retro-conned into Dr. Druid.
Page three, bottom right panel, the skull over the house, that would make a great Halloween cut out to hang in the window.
The shrouded skeleton would have made a great comic horror host back then, an overlooked opportunity by the publishers.
In the splash it looks like The shrouded one is pushing the car with its occupants off the pier. For only being a spirit it could do some real damage without a physical form.
Another great one from Palais without the characters perspiring like marathon runners.
I like the concept of the villain here. It's a phantasmagorical creeper who locates and inhabits the corpses of evildoers so it can reanimate them to further their own sprees of criminal revenge. That's so neat. Its own nebulous desire for horror is focused by the desires of the body it commandeers. I feel like it's more usual to see the reverse in crime horror: The animating spirit of some criminal enacting its own specific revenge through collaterally appropriated bodies. This more satanic (or epidemic) notion, that the horror is the point and the justification is just a means to an end, is pretty chilling.
And wow, yeah, page two is very, very Fulci (and all that green is glorious). I also love the panel at the end of page three, where we are allowed to zoom out from the massacre to see the specter of murder superimposed over the fatal hideout. Rudy was such a gift to horror comics.
This was nutso crazy and I dug it. Little is explained, everything is headlong & urgent, it's garish yet drab - a world where even the Good Spirits are uncaring. Philadelphia?
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