[movielover]

This week's book is the Beyond #27, located here https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=23094

Take your pick of a story

[SuperScrounge]

Cover - Having seen so many Superdickery covers I can't help but imagine Superman off-cover laughing at his latest prank. 

Haunt of the Howling Head - ...was this supposed to be horror or comedy? Shrunken heads that weren't shrunken. An evil murderer that we're supposed to care about? Severed heads rolling down the road like something out of a cartoon. I'm not sure if the writer thought this was serious or was laughing while typing.

Tales of the Supernatural #53 - Eh, okay for a one-pager.

Fangs of the Fiend - Well, the art is nice... Man that Eloise is a piece of work. The doctor should have given up on her and found a loyal woman rather than enacting a crazy plan involving teeth.

Tales of the Supernatural #54 - Eh, okay for a one-pager.

Catastrophe, Inc. - Story seems to be a knock-off of What You Need by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore) with more overt fantasy elements.

The Claws Rip Deep - Not bad.

Strange Potion of Dr. Lorch - Okay.

More-Wate ad - Can you believe there was a time when Americans had trouble putting on weight? *rimshot*

[narfstar]

Great cover. I read Fangs of the Fiend. It was so offbeat that I actually loved its craziness.

[The Australian Panther]

well, I just gotta disagree about that cover. First of all ;Beyond' must have one of the worst-designed mastheads ever. it just looks cheap and shoddy. That cover is all wrong. The idea is good. It should have been laid out Bob Kanigher style. Kanigher war covers usually had something terrible about to happen to the main characters, but only the reader could see it, not the characters in the story. So, they should have been turned away from the 'monster' and preoccupied with the treasure, And the dialogue should have been  'Bill, we found the treasure of death! And we are still alive! ' period. Suspenseful. 
' Haunt of the Howling Head' > Just too wordy. Too much dialogue, including from the radio. there just isn't anything left for the Artist to do.   
  True Tales of the Supernatural 53  > A twist on Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado' Not great but you can't go too far wrong if you start with an idea from Poe.
'Fangs of the Fiend' > As some of you will be aware, I am a huge fan of Lou Cameron, so I am extremely biased.
Love the 'Fangs' in the first panel. Cameron uses a lot of black in this story. Almost Alex Toth level. Cameron was also great with facial expression. Not the most wonderful narrative tho.
True Tales of the Supernatural #54.> Doing a story like this on only one page robs it of any buildup. Just filler.
Catastrophe Inc.> It seems clear that this is an adaption of a written story, because once again it is too wordy. The dialogue here blots out a lot of the art. The Artist should have been given the freedom to draw the story and the dialogue added to the illustrations. obviously it was done the other way around. Dull.
I almost never read the text stories in old comics.
'Strange Potion of Dr. Lorch' > Mike Sekowsky. Alascia's inking didn't do him any favors. The result lacks something usually found in Mike's work. The monster just isn't frightening. [Aside, - I find myself wondering what Sekowsky's Hulk might have looked like. Skinny legs?] This story is yet another variation on R.L. Stevenson's Jeckyl and Hyde and pretty blatant it is too.
If I had picked this up on the stands and paid for it as a kid, I think I would have been disappointed.
 
           

[Morgus]

yeah, I had to do the Lou Cameron story as well, and was not disappointed. Panther, his art work reminded me of Toth too. A lot of Toth's work wound up in the Standard mags, and that connection reminded me of something else; the one pagers in this one were pretty well done, which was usually a Standard specialty. It's another lost art form. 'Scrounge, I thought the same thing about that ad...nobody would believe it if they didn't see it themselves.

[lyons]

This was fun - a phantasmagoria of twisted pleasures.  Eye-catching cover and good horror imagery throughout.  Love these bizarre and quirky stories from the golden age.  Thanks movielover.         

[ghmcleod]

I agree...the cover is off...
there are lots of nice panel throughout...i like the train scene on the bottom of page 23...i also appreciated the Negro image was other than the red lip monkey...but my favorite was the Incorporated Inc cover page...that was pretty decent...

[crashryan]

This is a mixed bag. Artwork by the great Lou Cameron and  by Jim McLaughlin keeps it from being a total bow-wow.

In the lead story and "Catastrophes, Inc." the main characters are creeps. I can't work up any interest in them and when they meet their deserved ends I'm not moved. But I don't care for horror stories that inflict awful fates on people who don't deserve their ends. Guess that's why I'm not much of a horror fan.

Like SuperScrounge I found it hard to take "Haunt of the Howling Heads" seriously. Maybe a super art job would have made the rolling heads look scary. As is they just look silly. I laughed aloud at the panel where the mismatched head in a porter's uniform chats with the boss head as it peeks from a suitcase.

"Fangs of Death" looks lovely. Lou Cameron is an underappreciated master. The story on the other hand left me scratching my head. Eloise is two-timing Dr Arduino and affairs like that always bode ill in horror comics. Then Felix gets the fangs and murders several people, including disassembling poor Eloise. That seems excessive punishment just for preferring another guy. The puzzler is that after his fangs are removed and Felix returns to normal, nobody seems to mind that he dined on their neighbors. Stranger yet, the only comeuppance for Dr Arduino, who caused all this mischief, is living out his life as a freak being taunted by the local kids. The punishments don't exactly fit the crimes.

What I like in "Catastrophes, Inc." is that the seer (Rees-->Seer? Get it? ) uses his abilities to save lives. This is a switch on the usual mysterious stranger trope. Except for the protagonist getting greedy and dying, this is the sort of stories that appeared in Gold Key's Boris Karloff and Silver Age DC weird comics. Especially the latter. They too featured crowds who took bizarre phenomena in stride: "Look! That giant hand is breaking open the plane!"

I was burned out by the time I reached "The Strange Potion of Dr Lorch." Alascia did a slicker than usual ink job on Sekowsky, and the result isn't too bad. One thing I learned from this story is that two boys shouldn't go anywhere together at night.

The "True" stories are just page-fillers. Why do I have this strange feeling that they weren't all that true?