In the comments of our previous post, JMR mentioned "EC lifts", and yeah, I guess you could say that Story Comics was quite a bit guilty of lifting some of EC's signature moves and what nots. And this here is a savagely good Bill Savage illustrated example, (also from the same issue as our last post), and without adding spoilers to the introduction, I'll just let you find 'em all for your lil 'ol selves. It's a tasty dish served up extra raw 'n bloody, and with Thanksgiving on everyone's minds this week, bon appetite --a few days early!
4 comments:
Except that Amos and Henry look nothing alike as conjoined twins would, that's a clever ending and reading back you always see that there either unnaturally closely positioned or the one brother shown is right at the edge of the panel. Neat work.
By page 4, and the ask for marriage panel, I guessed they were conjoined twins and then it became obvious as all the panels keep showing them together, still, a pretty good job of keeping up the pretense.
If this was an EC lift, it lifts from a couple different stories. There's a couple good butcher stories (Atlas had one of my favorite butcher stories, though, which I don't think I've seen reprinted here.)
OK, I have to wonder how a skeleton held itself together for 30 years and still has stink lines coming off it!
I really like the art. There's a good bit of Davis in this but it has it's own look and flair. Savage does a brilliant job keeping them together without crowding too many panels, and there's some awesome facial expressions. I like the staging of Ellen's untimely passing; done off camera but you see the blade swinging up and then the bloody result, which is a fine way to handle it.
Happy turkey day!
Most of the time horror comics were morality plays where good triumphed over evil or evil claimed its own. Tales in EC comics sometimes followed that route, but sometimes did so in a mean spirited kind of way. This story falls into the mean spirited category.
One detail bothered me in this one, if Henry could stay alive with Amos dead, why didn't Henry just get a saw and cut Henry out of his life for good? Comic book logic strikes again.
It is interesting to see an EC tale on occasion, but as you have mentioned in the past, Karswell, other pre code horror comics deserve their moment to shine and be remembered. I for one am glad non EC tales have a home (or crypt, tomb, sepulcher, etc.) here on THOIA.
And I once again offer my thanks to you Karswell for saving these horror tales from oblivion.
What the?!? They aren't even in the same position relative to one another from one panel to the next. Sometimes side-by-side, sometimes facing each other, sometimes the other side-to-side. Two frames into the flashback I was all like "oh, they're conjoined twins", but by the third panel I was shaking my fist and saying "they better not turn out to be conjoined twins by the end of this thing." Womp womp.
One way to preserve a twist ending is to cheat the art like crazy, I guess. I can't even tell just how these guys are supposed to be attached in that last image. Actually, I sort of want to embrace the idea that it's all been some psychological aberration, a schizophrenic disorder in which these two men--who were perhaps completely unrelated--mutually labored under the delusion that they were attached from birth. The evidence seems to suggest the skeleton "twin" strangled himself, so maybe that's a symptom of the psychopathy. I don't know, I'm not a doctor.
I dig the art otherwise, of course. I especially like those two raw and violent panels at the top of the last page. And I love the sequential storytelling, too: The idea of juxtaposing Ellen's out-of-frame murder with the graphic slaughtering of the chicken a panel or two later was really clever.
At any rate, it's interesting that this story avoids they usual cannibal angle. At least does with Ellen. I mean, that hermit's been eating something all these years, right? Oh, brother! Happy Thanksgiving!
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