Another full month of macabre May-hem continues with an eerie, satanic classic from the January - February 1954 issue of Eerie #14, with art by the terrifically top-notch terror team-up of Nodel and Alascia. Roll those blood-soaked bones!
Another full month of macabre May-hem continues with an eerie, satanic classic from the January - February 1954 issue of Eerie #14, with art by the terrifically top-notch terror team-up of Nodel and Alascia. Roll those blood-soaked bones!
3 comments:
Satan's hand on the splash is very modern; that's almost out of a more 2000s body horror story. It's incredible!
I like a fair Satan; he disguises himself as a hobo but gives Whitey a bunch of outs. He shows the dice but then demands them back giving Whitey and out, of which, of course, he doesn't take because the poor fool is already doomed.
Minor complaint: I'd have edited the last page, the paneling is confusing.
I love this one, and I also love how super-hero-ish it is. Those magic dice could easily be a bat-man villain gimmick, growing big or become bullets, etc.
The square holes in the victim are such a wonderfully cartoony touch. As are the killer dice which seem to come up snake eyes even after they'd been plundered from the crime scene. Hey coppers, don't touch anything till the ME gets there. We'll never get the devil's prints off them things now.
Satan's play here is pretty great, what with how he makes Whitey guilty of murder right at the get-go. Though it does occur to me that all the rest of the story is moot. Stories like this are often about the devil vying for a good man's soul. But if these dice had faded away in the middle of page four, the doomed gambler would have still been just as hellbound and just as unlikely to survive the night. Depending on your feelings about gambling, he may have been a lost soul from the very start. In another story, his amoral ownership of magic dice might have facilitated the devil's grasp on the collateral souls in this story, too. Maybe Whitey recoups his losses and then purchases a machine gun in an effort to hang onto all that loot? Still, it's plenty refreshing to see him actually try to pay the money back and get double-crossed anyway. For a cheat and a murderer he's a real stand-up guy! But the devil has certainly gone to more trouble than strictly necessary.
I love both the long frames in the middle of the second page. But my favorite image here has to be panel two of page five. It's hard to get a good standing-in-the-headlights effect in such a tiny space, and that wee pic has a lot of energy.
I've never (?) heard dice called "bones" in a fictional story, but that's evidently how the first ones were made.
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