Tomb it May Concern Thursday is back, and let's see if we can crack the lid open on not only this ghastly bit of horrifying grave gamery, but also on the actual origin of this gruesome great Kenneth Landau shocker, via the September 1969 issue of Shock V1 #3. Similar to the Eerie Pubs, Shock was a cheap Stanley Morse publication known for taking Golden Age comics and reprinting them in a larger, magazine size, black and white format. GCD notes that this story was also reprinted in the April 1973 issue of K. G. Murray's Haunted Tales #2, which is equally loaded with precode reprints. But where did this story ORIGINALLY come from, and is "Within the Tomb" even the original story title? Does anyone recognize the horror host introducing the story? Landau did a tremendous amount of work for ACG back in the 50's (check the THOIA Archive for many examples HERE), and this story does feel like one from that time era and publisher. I'm just not seeing any information online about it anywhere... any help on this matter is gravely appreciated!
It's interesting -- with so many people who do research on these comics -- to not know where a story came from. I wonder if it was an inventory story? Or one never published for some reason that the re-printers found in the ACG files?
ReplyDeleteMaking matters worse, the "trapped forever in a coffin" story (and a lot of times it's a science story, like this one) happened a number of times in pre-code, so when I read this I swear I've read it before. And I might have!
That cover is pretty risqué, and for some reason the half submerged lizard guy is really adorable.
The story itself is great; it's gruesome, it's obvious he's being tricked from the very moment he involves his daughter and her lover, and you just have to watch him being tortured for a large number of pages.
That said, the B&W process does not do a good job on pages 6 & 7. Maybe it was actually never published and those pages were the reason? Mindless speculation is fun!
It's truly a pretty horrible story to read. Sends chills down my spine!
I could be wrong, but I have a feeling the narrator, The Old Undertaker, was added to the top of page one in this version of the story. It could be in the original it just had narration, no narrator shown.
ReplyDeleteThe few details I found out about Kenneth Landau was he worked in animation as well as comic art and may have done some comic strip work in newspapers, maybe.
His daughter runs a tribute to his work online, he was one more of the unsung heroes of comic art, horror or otherwise.
The story itself is one more version of Poe's The Premature Burial, though readers lose sympathy for Professor Joad by the way he mistreated his daughter. It is a chilling tale as Brian mentioned, not just to be trapped in a tomb forever but to mentally know what is happening is a fate far worse than death.
This was a chiller for the chilly month of December.
Appreciate the help on this one, but I guess we'll all just have to wait until something more definitive rolls in about the story origins. More spine-chilling, golden age classics on the way, you know how to stay...
ReplyDeleteI also toyed with the idea that this was a golden age inventory story that got picked up in a slush pile. On the other hand, it totally looks like it was drawn for black and white printing, with all that hatched shading everywhere. On the third hand, I think I detect the telltale signs of color leaching--the splatter of artifacts, especially in the areas where thin lines intersect, could be the remnants of red, for example (the magenta and the yellow leach more successfully than their combination, which reads as black when photocopied). And that would mean it had definitely been printed somewhere before. But those artifacts can have other reasons too--including the scanning and file compression process of just putting art this spidery onto the internet. So this is just a long a paragraph to say I got nothing.
ReplyDeleteI dig the story. I feel like some writer somewhere had terrible insomnia. And maybe an insufferable professor or two, also? Professors! They always say there's no way anything can possibly go wrong--don't be a fool, everybody--but then they spend all their time in the coffin after their injection coming up with plenty of ways things might have actually gone awry. And they still get it wrong! The ending still surprises them!
In this story, I'm perplexed by this line at the top of the very last panel of page three: "The three of us rehearsed the plan for weeks...." I mean, we learn later that the never even attempted to inject this drug into a human. So how did these rehearsals go, exactly? Did he just practice laying there for three days? Did they get acting coaches? Or dig up a grave to see what it was like? Three weeks seems like a lot of time to spend ignoring the fact that your veterinary drug might effect human people in an entirely unexpected way.
I love the intro. Not the tacked-on narrator, but the Professor's tiresome (and somewhat Dr. Seussian) lecture about corpses. In this commentary space, I've often used the phrase "twist beginning" to cheekily indicate a splash page that is entirely disconnected from the story that follows (one illustrated based on the title and not the script, for example). A practice that sets wildly inaccurate expectations. But this is maybe what I should be using the term for. The Prof's lecture subtly opens the door for his corpse to endure a public dissection at the hands of his colleagues, something that could happen but does not. So the particulars of the actual end here really did come as some surprise to me.