Our month of dueling Two-For-One Fear Features continues with a petrifyin' pair of terror tales that are really asking a lot from you, dear readers! Yes, come along with us now as we attempt to make some rotten room for a couple of certifiably creepy, cramped companion classics! And Pete Tumlinson kicks it off with an ever familiar, eerie escape trick that is most certainly doomed to backfire every time, guaranteed! From the May 1954 issue of Strange Tales #28, plus a special paralyzin' applause for that superbly scary cover design by Harry Anderson! Then it's Mort Meskin's turn to amp up the mausoleum madness with an apparently "true" crime case from the September - October 1951 issue of Headline Comics #49, via Prize Comics. Yep, THOIA is unloading a hot, double dose of COME atcha this time around-- better bring some Kleenex! Wait, what? They're both tear-jerkers, I meant...
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Also, if you're singing "Come Share My Coffin, Come Share My Tomb!" to the tune of Come Sail Away by Styx, then yes, me and you can be best friends for all eternity...
I can't shake the feeling that in the second story Freya and Necrota were originally intended to be black. Any idea if that's the case?
Second story: Nothing weird about a doctor rubbing his hands over the organic perfection of your fainting wife. Thanks Igor. That's kind of a red flag, I'd think. It's nice to see a story hooked on the notion of revenge gaslighting, and I feel the story is notable because the scheme is both successful and because it's targeted toward a man. I dig the art, too. Fat, lurid blobs and lines fill up all the chunky shapes. Like it was briskly inked with a magic marker.
The rather more refined density of the first story looks almost tame by comparison--and yet it's just as muscly. All those thinner, more sinewy strokes fill the blocky compositions like everything is carved out of wood. I just love the first and last panels of that thing. Absolute knockouts.
The Strange Tales cover, with the eyeballs glaring from the skull's eye sockets, that is horror at its finest. Only an EC cover could match this Strange Tales cover, it is that effective.
First story, the art is well drawn and the story works well as a different twist on the buried alive trope.
For the second tale, as it unfolded I thought it was following the plot of Bride of The Gorilla, where the old servant sought her revenge against the man who wronged her daughter. Come Share My Tomb would have made a great B horror movie.
Footnote concerning the movie Bride of The Gorilla, it starred Raymond Burr as the bad guy and Lon Chaney Jr. as the good guy, an interesting role reversal for these two stars.
That's how it seems to me.
The general idea of "Come Share My Coffin" has been done in several other stories (including one that showed up here?).
But usually it's a real prisoner (not a spy) and the prison doctor who become the two people in the coffin, because the doctor died suddenly after they came up with the plan.
So this story really kept me guessing.
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