Gah. I must not be reading the right comics, because I have only one Unfunny on-file that could be considered Halloween-related:
From The Brave and the Bold No. 2, back when the book was an anthology about Robin Hood and the Viking Prince and the Glowing Gladiator and so forth, and the dumb cartoons reflected that, which meant humourous comics about horrific bloodsports. Hurrah!
This one ties in to two others! Madness!
First up, it's an EC comic, so assume that I was freaked-out at a low level from cover to cover. I'm pretty sure that this one had a story about people being forced to swallow starving rats, for example - terrific stuff for Grade Five Johnathan.
Secondly, this is a tale about a man who has cancer, and much like the poor kid from the Swamp Thing entry I knew just enough about cancer to be totally freaked out by it. Although if Young Me had had access to the future ladyfriend's pathology textbooks he may never have left the house again. Last night I both learned about a human organ that I'd never heard of before and saw a picture of one riddled with tumors! Huzzah!
This is the tale of a man named Pete, who has either the most or least confidence-inspiring country doctor I have ever seen. On the one hand, his down-home ways and easy explainations of such things as malignant and benign tumours probably make for a pretty good bedside manner, but the way he shouts out SPINAL TAP! BLOOD SAMPLE! in the second panel seems kind of like he's trying too hard, like maybe this is the first case of cancer he's seen in twenty years and he's desperately trying to remember the next thing to do.
I would say something about the doc completely overlooking the possibility of chemo or radiation therapies, but honestly I have no idea when they were introduced. I would like to point out, though, that the tumour is on Pete's forearm, and I don't hear word one about amputating the limb to save the Pete. Why is that? Do arm tumours metastasize especially quickly?
So Pete, bereft of any medical advice better than "go get ready to die," hunts up the local witch and makes what I would generously call a very stupid request: he wanted her to make it so that he would never die. The witch reluctantly does what he asks, under the caveat that he never, ever come back to see her again. Especially when he eventually worked out that he just should have gotten her to cure his cancer.
Folks, I want you to remember for me: if a witch or a genie or something offers you the gift of immortality, remember to ask whether you get to stay young and healthy the whole time. Pete didn't remember, and look at him now. He looks like a hamburger monster.
And of course things keep getting worse and worse as Pete is consumed by his disease. Which brings us around to the setting in which the doc is telling his tale: outside a cave that he and the local menfolk have tracked some sort of horrible monster to.
And that monster is Pete himself, now transformed into a horrific blob of all-consuming flesh. Which is gross on the face of it, but the really disturbing thing about this story, both in the early Nineties and now, is the fact that this is a monsterous extension of something that happens to people all the time. It doesn't bear dwelling on, really. Oh, plus they couldn't actually kill the thing. They just sealed it away in the cave, there to slither around in the darkness forevermore. So gross.
Uh, sorry if this one is depressing you like it is me. I'll try to find something lighter-hearted for the Halloween post proper.
Oh! On a slightly lighter note, here is the cover:
File that sucker in the drawer marked "Way to give away the end of the story on the cover, guys. Geez."
... at least, as far as I know. Give me a shout if I've been creepin' you out on a regular basis with my eerie insights.
In a nice bit of conicidencing, most of the comics that I bought yesterday and have gotten around to reading (*cough*) have some spooky overtones. Or undertones. Or whichever tone it is when the book is all about being spooky, and I guess that a fair numbe rof my regular purchases are all about that. Zatanna No. 6, for example, continues the tale of her rumble with the demon Mammon, and what's spookier than a straight-up demon from Hell? And have I mentioned The Bulletproof Coffin lately? Issue 5 (of 6!) of that just came out, and it remains full of the kind of surreal, vaguely disturbing stuff that would have had the Young Johnathan raptly freaking out and makes Old Johnathan just plain happy. Seriously, this is a fantastic comic. And of course Creepy No. 4 came out this week, if you want a comic that's going to be overt about it.
Big news! Action Comics No. 864 features the return of Neil Gaimen's version of Death to the DCU proper! Unless that happened recently already and I missed it! Really, it's the fact that this might herald the return of such fun types as John Constantine and the ever-lovin' Swamp Thing to the super-hero-style comics that they were birthed from that makes me happy - it's the contrast between the grim Vertigo types and their four-colour counterparts that makes for some really terrific stories.
Even better, though, is the fact that this is a comic about Lex Luthor coming to terms with having died (spoiler: Lex Luthor will not be dead in the next issue), and hot damn does Paul Cornell not continue to nail the characterization of one of my very favourite super-villains. I can't really go into the whats and hows of the tale without ruining it, but that won't stop me from declaring that it is pretty much perfectly delightful.
And speaking of perfectly delightful, how about Hellboy/Beasts of Burden: Sacrifice, which not only features a Jill Thompson-endered Hellboy, but has that Hellboy team up with the titular Beasts in an in-continuity adventure that clears up, like three or four of the mysteries left hanging from the last BoB miniseries. As witnessed a couple of weeks ago with the Masks and Monsters collection, I love me some Hellboy crossover, but I don't know that I ever expected to see one as satisfying as this. Plus this is a big issue for Puggs, my very favourite of the Beasts. If you don't mist up a bit over his last couple of panels then you are a monster. A monster, I say.
And the final spooky book in my pile, issue 2 of Billy the Kid's Old-Timey Oddities: the Ghastly Beast of London. If you're any kind of fan of The Goon or the original Billy the Kid's Old-Timey Oddities series then you're probably already reading this or at least calmly waiting for the trade. If not, well... unless you have an absolute aversion to anything of a bizarre nature in your comic books you should at least give this one a flip through in the store. Kyle Hotz has done an amazing job with the art on this series - it's detailed without becoming illegible and horrific without, you know, looking horrible. And of course there is the continuing delight to be found in the absolutely irredeemable character of Billy the Kid. Such an ass.
And that is that. WoOoOoOoOOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoo....
This one is a bit weird.
What you are looking at is a scene from the third issue of DC's mediocre late-Eighties crossover Millennium. Specifically, it is the potential Russian New Guardian getting his head blowed off because, you know, evil empire. Millennium: the series that shows every country on Earth in the worst possible light. Except China, as I recall.
What messed me up about the whole thing is a two-parter: firstly, I only had the one issue of the series, so I had absolutely no idea what was going on. And secondly, the toned-down nature of the headshot in question totally made me think that the guy's head was popping like a blown bubble. Why was the idea of someone with a bubble-head so disturbing to Young John? No one will ever know.
By the way: here's the best thing about Millennium.
Booster Gold saves the day by containing an exploding Manhunter, and then Batman calls him "m'boy."
M'BOY.
EC COMICS
Like Creepy and its cousin Eerie, the EC horror comics were a fruitful source of things for me to freak out over in my youth, especially as I had much more exposure to them through the reprints that were coming out in the early Nineties. Tales From the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear all made their impressions on my young psyche, but it always seemed to be the more science fictiony yarns of Weird Science and the like that would get me fretting about the potential occupancy of the space under my bed. Here's one such:
The story in question is set in the far future (natch), and on a colonized planet that is just receiving its second load of Earth-types. There's nothing in the text to indicate that Mother Earth was using the opportunity to rid itself of pirates and lounge singers, but the implication is there.
Straight away, we are introduced to the planet's most nightmare-inducing inhabitant, the moko, and told of its suffering at the jaws of the hideous hydra-files. Humans (especially 1950s-style colonial space-humans) being humans, the underdog mokos were welcomed into the colonists' hearts and the hydra-files started to get a taste of the old "hunt 'em to extinction" trick that has been such a perrenial favourite since we first showed it to the mastodon. And also they were given a terrible name, presumably just in case they were able to feel shame. Hydra-files, pah.
But, I guess that the extinctioning was warrented! The things hunted the allegedly adorable mokos, and now were after the colony's precious, precious children, who were also adorable.
Look at the middle-ground of the second panel. That man is in a personal tank-suit, and he has a little hatch so that he can keep smoking his pipe while he drives it around. The wonders of technology!
And then the General's son gets killed and the species-murder gets personal. Hydra-files start dying by the bucket-load.
Another shot of that man-tank. So cool.
And then things get real. Yup, it turns out that wildly unbalancing an alien ecosystem that you have little to no understanding of can have some unforseen consequences, go figure. The individually-weak mokos are horrific pack hunters once a critical population mass has been reached, and breeding the things like rabbits was a surefire way to make that happen. Even entire communities must keep in mind the cardinal rule of horror comics, referenced yesterday: don't be an asshole.
All in all a nifty little ecological fable, but a swarm of kill-frenzied pink insect-monkeys? Add some scales to that description and congratulations! You have flipped all of my visceral horror switches at once. Bleah.
MORE FRAZETTA
Yes, it didn't stop at the cover reproductions on that fateful Creepy paperback. Inside lurked a story that was to make me feel uneasy for years to come - the story of the...
The story itself was pretty standard Creepy fare, featuring an asshole named Demmon and the ever-popular moral "don't be an asshole" (paraphrasing!). Nothing I hadn't seen before, honestly. The part that really haunted me was the werewolf itself.
I don't know if it's because this was an African werewolf or if Frazetta was just having fun with some crazy monster design, but the thing looked completely eerie and alien to me. The short muzzle and enormous mouth, the spiked black fur, all of it combined to make something that clearly did not belong to the natural world.
Plus: bats! The most frightening of mammals!
Eventually, of course, it came down to a one-on-one between Demmon and the beast, and of course that scared the hell out of me. The very thought of standing there attempting to stare down such a creature... brrr.
And then Demmon gets in a lucky shot and rips off the Gorilla-Man's origin story. That guy - what an asshole. I think that it's safe to assume that he didn't get to spend any time on a delightful super-hero team at any point, thank goodness. Note, however, the emaciated, half-transformed figure in the upper left. Frank Frazetta, why did you hate eight year old me? Why would you haunt me like this? I demand answers!
Or possibly money.
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