It's Midweek Murder-thon time again, so lets crack open another perfect pair-up of crime horror mystery cases guaranteed to knock your nylons off and well into next week! Hollywood dick, Dan Turner has himself a heckuva of handful trying to straighten out a murderous screwy angle or two while on a macabre movie set in, "Murder in Wax", from the July 1953 issue of Crime Mysteries #8. But first, Hollywood glamor girl, Queenie Starr starrs in the new Sam Wilde horror picture over at Paragram Studios, (via the July 1952 issue of Crime Mysteries #2), and if she's not careful, she too could find herself playing the lead corpse! Heater bangs, head bops, horror chops, and heavenly babes a'plenty-- what more could you ask for in a THOIA Double Feature, anyway?
4 comments:
I think this is the first time I've heard of Keats Petree. Excellent artist! And not just the "good girl" aspect.
When you do double features, I can't help but compare and contrast them. I think the art -- from an unknown unless we are counting "Keats Petree" also as the artist, and GCD doesn't think so -- is really nice, lots of backgrounds, some interesting angles, lots of different distinct looks on the characters.
Good art on Wax but it seems a lot quicker art, not many backgrounds, but good characters and good action. Dan Turner is the most trigger happy guy around -- he's on the set of a horror movie and he aims a gun at a guy carrying a wax head, calm down, buddy!
Where I think they differ is the first story is super clean and easy to follow; the second story is kind of hard to follow a lot of characters come and go and I had to re-read a couple parts of it.
Of course, what we are really here for is dames fighting so we get our fill here!
I'm liking this side track in crime comics!
The art in both tales are well done and the plots kept readers guessing until the end.
I think it was said somewhere on THOIA before that human beings can be just as horrific as any vampire or werewolf, if not more, crime comics are a good fit for the annals of horror comics.
Ha ha, Dan Turner is a hoot. He just roams the halls accusing everybody he meets of murder. Even before any crime has been uncovered, there he is, working hard to accuse folks. He knows that odds are even that, if he points the finger at everybody everywhere, he will eventually identify some perp. Really, I don't know why anybody listens to him at all after page one. Vicki certainly should never have admitted anything. He'd have been off accusing someone else soon enough.
I like the art in the first story well enough, but it's clear that most of the artist's bandwidth was paid into the anatomy of the human figures. Fine, fine. I do really love that secondary splash at the top of page three (uh... you buried the lede on this one, guys), and all the spider web props draped here and there all around the movie set. But ultimately I think I dig the strange, malleable look of the second story better. That illustrator seems to be really pushing the limits of his ability and I appreciate that. Frames like the profile at the top of page three, or the foregrounded victim at the bottom of four, may not be medically accurate but really do have verve.
Post a Comment