Time for one more reason to beware, and it's another Art Gates classic, this time from the May 1954 issue of Beware #9. And not to be confused with yet another Brian Barnes unlocked fetish (really Brian, vampire roosters now??!!), but this blonde blood sucker story might just leave you all with a serious case of hellacious heart burn! And how about that wonderfully silly Hollingsworth cover design? haha
5 comments:
The vamps are rather sympathetic and I like that. The art is serviceable too and the staircase scenes are very well drawn; there is no ambiguity about whether anyone is headed up or down as so often in old comics. However, good luck getting people to take you seriously if you're in a foreign country and come running in the middle of the night to town gibbering about vampires. Also, stakes in vampire stories enter vampire hearts so easily: do the ribs disappear over the heart or something?
Sure, vampire roosters are goofy but man can not live on booty short devils alone!
I really like this one; there's a lot of suspending disbelief (after 100 years the fact that the villages didn't think to check the castle is a little questionable) but the vampires are a bit sympathetic, we get some another curse that snares the completely innocent, and the art is pretty good.
Good castle and some interesting angles (for instance, last panel on page 2, the slanted angle makes that panel pop better.). The flashlight on page 5 is an oldie but goodie trick, and the coloring, while a little dull, fits the vibes perfectly.
The story stays pretty dark but understandable, which is harder than it looks.
The whole thing spins on Sandor trying to stop Helyena *after* she already bites the girl. Good going, you dope!
I've seen vampires decide to end it all for everyone's sake, but I've almost never (?) seen one whose sacrifice ends up being pointless, like poor Otto at the end.
On Page 5, it's "cute" that Helen evidently thought that Arthur had a fake beard on hand when he decided to get into the spirit of the castle!
Looking back over the archives, I see that the last Art Gates story we had, at the end of April, was the odd man out, stylistically. Most of his stories--at least the ones I just glances over--look more like this one: A kind of super competent book illustration style, relying on plenty of photo reference and dense, highly textured inks. Normally when I say these things I'm being just a little bit pejorative. My tastes run in other ways. But I do appreciate the fact that the man's characters look like real people (indeed, look like the same people from panel to panel), and the attention he's paid to light sources and surfaces. These things really do a lot to sell the gothic vibe. So what if the work sort of disappears under the story for me, to the point where I stop noticing it. I suspect that was the intent; maybe that's even some people's definition of best practice when it comes to illustrated stories.
I love the second panel of page two. The hairy background shading is neat, and there's not so much super competent realism going on with that coloring, either. The juxtaposition really works for me. I dig the ornate coffins and picture frames throughout the story. I really like the hand panels on the final page. If this has been written by Stan Lee, those panels would have been on the same row, and more effective because of it.
As a dentist in real life, I forgot to mention, please do *not* try to water ski with your teeth. Not if you want to keep having teeth.
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