Fish Tank Terror is back (thanks for waiting!) and it's another weird one from the murky depths of the November 1954 issue of Journey into Mystery #19! Vince Colletta adds a good amount of creeping, disembodied eyeball chills throughout, --though if you're like cantankerous 'ol Mr. Karswell, the only thing I want creepin' around in my aquarium is the Penn-Plax Creech aerator from 1971! *glub! glub!
8 comments:
Vince Colletta drew horror comics? Very surprising but nice work!
For no good reason I am reminded of Julio Cortázar's "Axolotl", and I know that nobody involved with that comic would have read it because it wasn't even translated into English until 1963.
I kind of love how we never even see what this creature in Jules' fish tank is--it's just a pair of baleful eyes staring at him 24/7! 🤣🤣🤣🤣The little old man reminds me a lot of Mr. Magoo. I feel bad for Jules though. He doesn't deserve to get his body stolen from this creature inside his tank. He's done nothing wrong. I do love that last panel of the poor guy hiding inside the tank and his evil dopleganger two panels prior to it just smiling.
This Atlas tale predates Carl Jacobi's short story "The Aquarium" by eight years, with both tales featuring a mystery from the oceans depths residing in a fish tank.
The fish featured on page two middle right panel, are not too much of an exaggeration of the Sloane's Viperfish (top) and the Slender Snipe Eel (bottom). Vince Colletta did his homework, or at least glanced at a few pictures of deep sea life, to create mostly realistic deep water fish instead of fantasy creatures from the depths below.
This was a great tale.
As the owner of two large aquaria, I agee that that's some pretty damn competent aquarium artwork. I wonder who the old man was, and how he managed to make his entire setup disappear without a trace. Did he even exist, or did the other fish and aquaria exist? Was it all due to the protagonist being hypnotised by the Atlanteans into taking one of theirs home with him? That would explain the other fish vanishing. So many questions.
This is pretty neat work from Colletta. I like the long, contoured ink lines being used for shading in many panels. It's a technique that really works to texture those areas like the overlapping strokes of a paint brush. And because of that, the visual technique here feels less like drawing than usual; a lot of the imagery feels more related to fine-art than the usual commercial illustration. I think the second and third panels of page two are especially artsy. I like the abstract shading in the second panel of page three, too.
Quite a nice story. And that Aerator from the Black Lagoon is the coolest. I hope there's a video of it in action out there somewhere.
I know it's predictable to act like everything in horror somehow leads to Lovecraft, but this story feels very INDIRECTLY like "Shadow Over Innsmouth" and all those sequels to it, by Lovecraft and others.
Somebody I knew when I was young had one of those creatures in their tank. It didn't do much other than the top rock back and forth, when I was a kid animated by bubbles was one of the cool bits you could put into a fish tank. I seem to remember my parents might have a diver one?
I really like this tale; it's a tight 4 pages, plays very fairly, and is pretty creepy. Getting the eyes to work right panel after panel in the kind of printing of those days must have been a real chore, especially the all black panels. One color plate off and this might not have worked. But it does, and very well. It has a real menace to it, and Jules fate is frightening. This is a good one!
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