Another top notch terror tale originally published in the April 1953 issue of Mysterious Adventures #13 (see our previous post HERE!) is this incredibly icky, super-smelly spooker by the always awesome, Art Gates. The superb splash, and almost alien final panel are really something, and I seriously regret not adding this to my Haunted Love mini-series. Later silver age reprint publications though, including the Eerie Pubs, brought it back from the dead in the 70's, and even Australia's Gredown resurrected it a few times too, most notably in Tales of Torment #2 (1978), all wrapped up in a rockin' rotten zombie cover design, --as you shall see below!
6 comments:
Well the way Bernice was decomposing, Ralph just had to keep his distance until she completely fell apart.
Ralph should have copied what Dr. Muñoz did in "Cool Air," keep his living dead wife in a refrigerated room to slow down the decay.
Bernice is the real victim in all this, she truly loved Ralph and couldn't live/unlive without him. She didn't mean to turn into return from the grave and become a walking cadaver. This is another unhappily ever after story.
Nice art, good plot, welcome addition to THOIA.
The splash page exposed mandible in Bernice's face is actually very anatomically accurate, though the condyle (the knob at the top) is out of the receptacle at the skull base and the connecting ligaments as well as the overlying muscle layers are gone. Still, it's highly detailed and impressive. The last panel, a lot less so: the skull looks like a newborn child's in is proportions.
Good story, albeit with a rather predictable ending.
So Vault of Horror's "Till Death" was a couple months before this, it's not hard to see the similarities but the endings are different (you can kind of say Craig's version had a happy ending and this one has a horrible ending.). Obviously, voodoo bringing back loved ones is an old plot and it's likely it was a coincidence but these are published really close together.
I love the art on this, page 4 with the go into / go out of the cemetery is well set up and, of course, the slowly dissolving Bernice is a fun sight. Why it took a week for her to start decaying is always the weird part of these stories.
RickH is right, it's the same solution I'd take during a zombie crisis, just wait for them to rot!
Definitely sucks, but it is only kind of a temporary thing... unless her skeleton sticks with him?
Neat job of artwork sandwiched between two showstopper panels. I quite like the color design here, too, but I feel like the breakdowns were imprecise on the splash, coloring in part of the skull intended to be exposed. The illustration is tight and interesting throughout--I agree with Brian that page four is absolutely excellent top to bottom--and I really dig that art brute leopard, too, what with its half-human face.
The story is quite an interesting look into modes of slavery, though I would love to have more evidence this was intended. Our main character goes off to Africa and comes back home with a black man he's rewarded with servitude. Then that man confers a state of slavery onto our main character's true love after her death. Honestly, I'd like to think this was revenge. But all of it is quite acceptable to Ralph Cooper--the manservant, the creepy conjugal ownership of a woman who has returned from the grave without agency or dialog balloons (if you don't count that purely expository exchange in the splash)--right up to the point where it endangers his own comfort. He has no concern over the systematic appropriation of human bodies beyond that.
Too bad for him plastination wasn't fully developed until 1977.
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