When dirty rats rise to power, it's time to fight the dirty rats with everything you have. Don't let the dirty rats win! From the January 1953 issue of Tales of Horror #4, and reprinted a couple times in the Eerie Pubs, as well as Haunted Horror #6. Make the dirty rats pay. Are you hearing me? Do you fully understand what I mean? Fight a dirty rat-- today!
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This follows the proven formula, where a guy looks like some animal, is made fun of, and then turns the animal into a killer army and at the end we have a dun-dun-DUN ending.
Yet this rises above all of them. Every fight panel is just great. Rats sneak attacking! Rats using machine guns! The run for the ship, everything! So many fun panels.
Page 6, panel 1 is a real stand out. I love how the colorist makes it much better (I know I'm sometimes down on colorist but this shows how important they are.) Molek stands out in green, all the soldiers are in pale yellow and the rats in brown, so each element either pops (like Molek), fades into the background (like the humans) or shows up (like the rats.) It really gives you this feeling of numbers and overwhelming rats, even though there really isn't that many in the picture.
The rat with the key at the end ... chef's kiss.
It's easy to have a sort of love-hate relationship with them, but I immediately halfway expected one of those Atlas-Marvel type Cold War stories - unnamed European government hears about scientist's big breakthrough, gets ready to use it to conquer the world, and gets it comeuppance.
So, seeing what DID happen really surprised me.
And along with everything else about it, this story is Willard BEFORE Willard.
Anyone who has ever had to deal with unwelcome rodents in their home can relate to this comic.
The TV show Monsters touched on this idea from the episode "Stressed Environment".
One question, if this was supposed to take place during the time of atomic weaponry, why didn't they first try to use poison gas to kill off the rats? Even tear gas dropped from airplanes would have been effective, I doubt the rats would be able to figure out how to make gas masks.
-Come to think of it, this is a proto- Planet Of The Apes story, I for one would rather deal with primates than rodents any day.
This was an absolute delight, visually. Color-coded German Expressionist background buildings are one of the many reasons I show up for precode comics, and this story delivers in spades. The second panel of page two is the bee's knees, but there are good examples on every page.
Another excellent example of the block coloring Brian mentions is in the splash, which is such a strong image that I hope it's been used time and time again for punk band flyers. Across the whole comic the shapes and colors lend a sense of Dadaist political horror collage, with elements abutting and overlapping instead of resting together in the image. Just the very eighties punker aesthetic I loved as a kid. And those gnarly whorls of rat hair!
The look and the story come together to remind me of Czech animator Jiří Barta's film the Pied Piper (Krysař, 1986), which I recommend. I wonder if Barta ever read this comic? Or perhaps the recasting of Nazis as literal vermin is now so natural to the world that it pops up again and again of its own accord, and with signature Wiemar visuals.
For just a second - instead of a bomb - I was almost expecting a really gimmicky ending, like the plane dropping hundreds of cats on the town!
Which would be like the ending of some "Post-Code" horror comic, the kind of aggravates reviewers so much.
"...dropping hundreds of cats on the town!"
This feels like the genesis of a great cartoon short, Grant. The humans inject a box of cats with the genius serum and then hoist it into town. The rats, outmatched but smart about it, begin a program of injecting street dogs. The dismayed cats, caught between allied armies of artificially smartened enemies, inaugurate a program to enhance the city's dogcatchers. Etc.
This had to have already been a plot for a classic Mighty Mouse short! Haha
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