Sunday, bloody, Sundays are back, and it's time to borrow a little bit of the 'ol red stuff ourselves from the same icky issue as our previous post, the November 1953 issue of Beware #6! Classics Illustrated legend, Henry Kiefer overfills your creepy little cursed cups with a terrifying tale of crimson retribution, --where even the blood of the innocent can still face terrible consequences! AAG-GHH!
I don't know the book, just the movie, but this reminds me of Stephen King's THINNER.
ReplyDeleteThe character in that story isn't likeable, but the gypsies' curse is still pictured as unfair.
The character in this one is a selfless doctor who did nothing to them, but he's a permanent victim of a curse too.
Talk about an unhappy ending.
From the splash image the narrator looks like a sister of EC's Old Witch, though maybe she was supposed to be the elderly gypsy woman shown on pages 3 and 4.
ReplyDeleteThe doctor has type 4 blood, did they mean type A but the letterer make a mistake? It wouldn't be a first in comics.
The story takes place in Riverdale- too bad the doctor didn't think to call on Sabrina to counteract the gypsy's curse.
This had an early Weird Tales Magazine or spooky radio show vibe to it, a great addition to THOIA, thanks for the post.
Another giant elephant tramples into the room that is blogger but I am happy to know that Wanda is now the sorcerer supreme over at Marvel so that's at least a little bit of progress for gypsies in comics!
ReplyDeleteI love the art in this. It's got a weird clinical (ha) nature to it, and artist seems less like a horror artist but they do a good job here. I love the witch splash, rolling in the skull (!!) the weirdly stern but at the same time good girl art nurse. The action, where it's at, is pretty decent, too.
Another fully articulated skeleton -- this time with a stethoscope. It's an interesting ending -- there isn't a twist, it just goes exactly as supposed. The ending is finding the skeleton, something we already know is there, but it works. It's more grisly then clever, and sometimes, that makes a good horror story.
It also helps that it feels so unfair. The guy really did not deserve this, and I love how they go out of their way to setup that he's about to get married and get his own practice to drive the point home.
Yeah, as as for the elephant, the gypsies do not come off well here. At all.
Man, those gypsies were a bunch of assholes.
ReplyDeleteThat could have called on Archie and the gang to all donate blood.
ReplyDeleteWhat was hilarious to me was blood flowing directly from the donor to the recipient. How was that done? How is it even possible?
The method was known as direct transfusion or arm to arm transfusion. While it is rarely done nowadays (except in cases of extreme emergencies or battlefield conditions) it was a method employed in the 1950's and earlier. The method was abandoned as blood bank and blood screening techniques improved over time.
DeleteSorry, I’ve been driving all morning, but thanks for that JMR. You beat me to it.
DeleteWell you certainly don't see a minority group lynching a white dude for creating mix-race bloodlines every day. This story might not have a twist ending, but it certainly is twisted. This is not a kind of appropriation I really expected to ever see. The first panel of page two belongs in a meme skewering the anxieties of the privileged class.
ReplyDeleteThis curse is equally unexpected. I guess there's something magical about forcing your hypnotic blood backward through an infuser, but the rest of this seems to involve strictly mundane stuff like throat cutting and bowling a child's remains at the target one night.
I definitely like that last page. The throat cutting panel, the stack of newspapers, the skeletal finale. It's all well done and plenty hard-hitting.
I agree I kind of adore stories that don’t just hand us a far out twist or some typical happy ending. Sometimes the good people just die and the bad people just win.
DeleteYou don't have to tell me. I got a B+ on my phlebotomy test! Rimshot!
ReplyDelete