We spent the first half of May in bloodthirsty Beware mode, so time now to switch it over to something darker and more mysteriously batty with another vampire bit, errr, HIT from the March - April 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries #11. And hey, it's also time to learn something new about how a bloodsucker even comes to be... I think you'll all be verrrrry interested!
7 comments:
This is a rather inadvertently funny one. I especially like how the daughter didn't think to throw out the dead bat before sending her dad the chest. The idea that anyone falsely accused of becoming a vampire becomes one of totally new to me; I assume that they made it up for the story, which itself makes Charles having to disinter and skeletonise his wife redundant. It was pretty funny watching him lecture the skeleton, though.
The art is serviceable but kind of stiff. There's hardly any movement, it's like one of those photo comics whatever they're called where every panel is a posed still. However I loved the panel where the "Young couple" Charles and Mary are introduced; Mary looks in her late 30s and Charlie boy a not particularly well preserved 50.
I'm glad Rhonda survives.
I was really expecting a "sins of the fathers" type story, and I almost never like those.
Instead, she becomes an "instrument" for the revenge, and the story leaves it at that.
This was another twist on vampirism where the husband turns his wife into a vampire only after turning her into a skeleton. Thats a new one for sure.
Mary could have saved herself from the charge of vampirism by wearing a cross proving she wasn't one of the undead, but if she had this would have been a very short tale indeed.
The somewhat stiff artwork reminds me of Pete Morisi's style from the fifties, stiff but not as rigid as Morsi's style from the sixties onward.
An interesting vampire tale with a lore all its own, one more welcome addition to THOIA's catacombs.
I love that dreamy splash, with its blue night and dashing teal vamp--this lady's kind of 7th Victim or Lady Satan look always gets me. But mostly I love that groovy lava lamp skull in its orange mudslide of candle wax. The whole blob feels a little bit like French fantasy art, or at least a bit closer to Moebius than we usually see in the fifties.
I was going to say the balance of the story reminds me more of Toth or somebody (the last row of panels on page four is beautiful and could have come straight out of Zorro, bat signal and all). This has really well delineated characters and careful but spare detail work. I can do without the cross-hatched skies, but at least they're well done. Surely this was made with a technical or dip pen, and yet there is still some variation in the width of the ink lines. And yeah, there is also a demonstrated fealty to the look of reality--some characters feel posed, and everybody is recognizable from frame to frame. But it's not so rigid as to defeat Goldfarb's sly use of exaggeration (in expressions, hand gestures, and hairdos, for example). I don't know; is that what people are calling stiff? This doesn't feel at all wooden to me.
This mechanism for creating a vampire feels like it came right out of folklore, where already you can become a vampire if you are buried at the crossroads or born on Christmas. I kind of love the fact that reading spooky lore to the skeleton of his well-rendered spouse turned out to be immaterial. Just wanted to do it, I guess! Passing the time till vengeance. That gets a pretty high score on my creepometer.
Well, I’m glad someone else said it because yeah, I’ve posted a lot of Goldfarb here over the years and have never once ever thought that anything he has done looked even remotely stiff either.
Late in on this one, but I'll second the art. It feels stiff because there's not a lot of action in the story, it's mostly talking heads. When there is action, like the splash or the very last panels, it's shows good movement.
Not the biggest fan of the cross hatching, it's a bit distracting but that's a minor quibble.
I like how recognizable all the characters are, and I love how decrepit Anton became.
Page 4, panel 5 is a complete lift from an EC cover.
"Page 4, panel 5 is a complete lift from an EC cover."
So not Alex Toth but Johnny Craig! Good catch! (It's Haunt of Fear #5 for anyone who wants to look it up.)
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