Number 404


Mr. Green and Tubby's ghost


Here are a couple more entries in our Halloween theme week.

I've shown a couple of stories from the John Stanley scripted Tales From The Tomb #1 (and only) giant comic from 1962. I don't know why this comic didn't continue. It could be that even though the stories are great, the artwork can be at times indifferent. "Mr. Green Must Be Fed" is the lead story, drawn by Frank Springer. The green monster ("Mr. Green") looms up much the same way the mud man did in this story from the issue.

If Dell had been under the Comics Code they probably couldn't have shown Mrs. Wittly getting away with feeding Mr. Grimes to Mr. Green. She doesn't seem too concerned that young Harry gets away, even gets away in a police car, because she knows no one will believe him.

The second story is "The Ghost", one of my favorite Tubby stories, from Little Lulu #86, August 1955, drawn by Irving Tripp. Stanley doesn't make it easy for the reader by showing us whether the ghost is real or in Tubby's head. The important thing to the plot is that the ghost is real to Tubby. We're seeing it from his point of view. His parents are puzzled observers while Tubby is on his own, in a desperate struggle to get rid of an apparition. It's funny, but there is an element of paranoia in the situation.

Mr. Green is murderous and violent, but the ghost is benign. Mr. Green wants to eat young Harry, but the ghost seems content to just sit and look at Tubby. Either seems creepy to me.

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Number 326

John Stanley's Mudman

In "The Mudman" from Tales From The Tomb, the Dell Giant Comic from 1962, John Stanley again shows us his storytelling skills. I don’t know who the artist is. A boy and his dog go into a swamp, encounter a monster, the dog saves the boy. It's a compact and intense story. There are some Stanley-isms. With some changes this could be a humor story. There are panels where you can visualize Tubby or Melvin Monster running while yelling, "Ma-a-a-a!" or at the kitchen table hollering, "No Ma! No, no, no!"

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Number 241

John Stanley chills us

It seems right to show this chilling tale on a day when in my neighborhood the thermometer peaks around 0 degrees F. It's from the 1962 Dell Giant, Tales From The Tomb, written by John Stanley, scanned from the copy I bought 45 years ago.
Stanley, who had written and guided Little Lulu through that comic's classic years, had stayed behind at Dell when Western Publishing took their licensees and most of their talent and split off into Gold Key Comics. Despite the promise on the cover, Tomb wasn't what I thought of as a horror comic, but more like a collection of stories told by kids around a campfire. Some of Stanley's work--the Oona Goosepimple stories from Nancy, for example--reminded me of Charles Addams. Stanley had a sometimes macabre sense of humor, and stories of this style would appeal to him. Tales From The Tomb is probably what DC's Plop! should have been a decade later.

As good as Stanley's writing is, the anonymous art is OK, not great. It likely scuttled this title.

These three shorties, vignettes, really, are typical of the weird humor of Tomb. The black-and-white one-pagers are the inside front and back covers respectively. The story, "Turnabout," is one of the shorter stories in the book, and is told in as few words as possible. The grim but funny joke it tells is beyond logic, and is told in visuals rather than dialogue or captions.

Finally, it's the end of another year. I'd like to thank Pappy's readers for making this a very successful year for this blog. HAPPY NEW YEAR, everybody.

Your Pappy loves you!

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