House of Mystery #40 2011 | English | 25 pages | CBR | 18.3MB This is it: the big confrontation between Fig and the Conception, between Fig and Lotus Blossom, between Lotus Blossom and the Magical Physicians, between Fig and Lotus Blossom and Harry, between -- okay, between everyone and everyone else, and it's been building since issue #1. What will become of the House of Mystery? There's only one way to find out... Download MIRROR #1
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Unknown on Chủ Nhật, 30 tháng 10, 2011
Number 1043
The monsters that weren't
Halloween is tomorrow, so I have a couple of Halloween-style stories today from DC; kind of a trick, or a treat, depending on your point of view. In House Of Mystery the stories, which start out looking supernatural, usually turn out to have a "logical" explanation. The monsters usually turned out to be not what they looked like.
A couple of examples are "The Mark of X," from HOM #2, 1952. "X" is the creation of a writer that appears to have come to life. "X" reminds me of the monster from a Bugs Bunny cartoon:
The story is drawn by Curt Swan* and George Klein. "The Weirdest Museum in the World," drawn by Bob Brown, is from HOM #10, 1953. It starts out looking like a werewolf story.
There's nothing wrong with these stories, but I wonder if readers of the time felt cheated by them being "fake" supernatural. House Of Mystery apparently sold well, so perhaps not.
*I showed four more of these tales by Swan in Pappy's #757.
Halloween is fast approaching. I suppose one of these first days I'll have to buy a bag of Mentholyptus cough drops, one cough drop each for the kiddies' trick or treat bags. Hey, nothing's too good for the kids in my neighborhood. All 600 of them, many of them with mustaches and tattoos. And those are the girls. Without costumes.
Anyway, speaking of the hirsute, how about a bit of werewolf action? First up, "Wanda Was A Werewolf" is from DC's House Of Mystery #1, 1952. "Wanda" is my mother's name, and, while not wishing to disparage her memory, there were times when she sprouted long pointy teeth and deadly sharp claws. I exaggerate, but "my" Wanda did sometimes let out her inner beast on me, especially when I was guilty of something (which was often). The Grand Comics Database says Win Mortimer ? (question mark means they're not sure) drew it.
Second, "Your Grave Is Ready," originally published in The Unseen #9, in 1953. This version is scanned from Eclipse Comics' Seduction Of The Innocent, #6 in a series of 6, from 1986. It's drawn by the team of Andru and Esposito.
If you don't know Curt Swan's work at DC, then you probably didn't follow the Superman line of comics for decades, where Swan was a star. His work stood out. He was an artist who came into comic books after World War II, drawing Boy Commandos stories. Later he drew Superboy and Jimmy Olsen, and then became the Superman artist. He worked mainly as a penciler, and just about every guy who wielded a brush for DC inked his pages.
In the early '50s Swan did these "horror" comics for DC's House of Mystery. DC's technique was to make it look like a horror comic, while the stories ended up with non-supernatural denouements. To be honest, the rational explanations to the mysteries in these four tales, all from 1952, are almost harder to believe than if they'd given a supernatural reason for the goings-on. "The House Where Evil Lived" is from House of Mystery #3, and was inked by Stan Kaye. "The Tell Tale Hand" appeared in HOM #6, inked by George Klein. "The Devil Was My Partner" came from the same issue, but GCD didn't identify the inker. "The Grim Jester," inked by Ray Burnley, is from HOM #8.
