Even though I've spent a lot of time indoors thanks to unending rain, enough day-to-day nonsense popped up to keep me from staying current with the Reading Group. Let's see if I can catch up.
Weird Tales of the Future #3
In the like-him-or-dislike-him debate over Basil Wolverton, I come down slightly on the "dislike" side of center. I've always liked his space stuff more than his horror or humor. His fusion of 20's s-f magazine drawing and streamline deco design appeals to me. The likes of Spacehawk and Stratosphere Patrol are my favorite Wolverton.
"Monster on Mars" has more of that vibe than the rest of these stories. Wolverton had a heck of an imagination. No one else would dream up a giant talking hand to disguise the beautiful princess. The lightly-dressed figures call attention to the fact that Wolverton wasn't the world's best figure artist. His guys look better encased in their iron spacesuits.
There's no way I can think of "The Slave Pits of Uranus" without thinking it's a proctologist's nightmare. This is unremarkable typical 50s comic-book s-f. It's funny that the artist swiped Ming for the bad guy but didn't swipe Flash Gordon and Dale for the protagonists. It makes me think using Ming was Smalle's joke rather than a copout. The ending is a little off. The slaves are still going to die of radiation poisoning in the pits, but supposedly that's okay since Ming will rot along with them.
I've never quite been able to get into Wolverton's humor strips. I'm not sure why not, because his love for word play is right up my alley. The alliteration, puns, and silly signs are like those in "Smokey Stover." But Bill Holman cracks me up and Basil Wolverton seems flat. Why? Ask my therapist. I have to agree with Robb that the underground-style rendering looks clunky. "Jupiter Jones" isn't terrible, but not my cuppa.
Tony Mortellaro's art on "The Desert Castle" fits right into the book's title: weird. The characters' heads get bigger and bigger until they look like Supermarionation puppets. Adding to the impression is the way that Cowles' face is drawn the same in every panel, as if Mortellaro was afraid he'd lose the likeness if he changed the expression. The story makes no sense. "Live cells," even sentient ones animating a suit of armor, don't need to generate a human skeleton. Whatever. But then the story title doesn't make much sense either. Is this some comics author's first script?
"Nightmare World:" trippy, unsettling, darkly imaginative. Hard to forget, hard to like.
Mister Mystery #7
Of all the weird-story comic book hosts, Mister Mystery is the least impressive. He's just some middle-aged guy wearing a top hat and--heh, heh--a dime store carnival mask.
"The Brain Bats of Venus:" I'll confess, this story hits some deep nerve. It genuinely creeps me out. I must not be the only one, considering how widely-known it is. I like the s-f aspect of the art but the brain bats--ugh.
"The Killer" tries hard to be fairy-tale like but it misses the point. Why did the forest folk need Ernest to "free" them from Hackman if they had the toothy giant? The big guy could have sneaked up behind the hunter whenever he was alone in the woods. The forest folks' original plan--to get Ernest to murder Hackman--cost them my sympathy. I half expected that it'd be Ernest who suffered an awful fate at their hands. At least Ernest gets to hang out with the fairies after he goes nuts instead of being locked in an institution.
"The Man Who Beat the Chair" belongs in a second-rate crime comic. It's only six pages long and seems to last forever.
I can't figure out if we're supposed to empathize Al in "The Wedding Eve." He comes off as a jerk on page one, seems to be dragged into the other world by accident rather than design on page two, and can't seem to make up his mind what to do when confronted with the warring tribes. Except smoke his pipe. Come on! You expect me to believe that even a "man of meditation," faced with a horde of furious vikings threatening him with "a thousand terrible deaths," would light up his pipe "to comfort him in times of stress"? Gimme a break! The one thing he seems sure of is that he wants to save Sigurd, the other-world Joan. Which he almost does until she dumps him. It seems like the real-world Joan gets the short end of the stick in this one. If he'd got Sigurd through the door would she have stayed young? It's all too confusing.
By the way, Mister Mystery somehow looks even further over the hill in this story than in the earlier ones. I feel sorry for the guy. A faded trouper, living on memories of treading the boards in vaudeville days, now eking out a pittance narrating second-rate weird stories.
Ibis the Invincible #3
I guess I'm in a hard-to-please mood tonight. Ibis the Invincible is one of two Fawcett superheroes that strike me as irredeemably stupid. The other is Kid Eternity. Though KE's total lack of internal consistency makes him hard to take, I do find some things to like in his stories. Ibis, on the other hand, is just a bore.
That damned Ibistick can do anything, but for the stories to work Ibis must use it only when it serves the plot and he must use only enough power to meet the immediate challenge. At any point he could say, "Ibistick, find all the Jaguar Men and render them permanently powerless!" Problem solved. The only way Ibis can't solve a problem is when he doesn't have the stick. So time after time he loses the blooming Ibistick. He trips. He's bopped from behind. He drops it in a fight. You'd think he'd have attached it to a wrist strap by now.
"Music Madness" is the one story that's real fun, because of the wacky concept of a world of living musical notes. Gus Ricca's designs are wonderful.
Gus Ricca deserves special note. Like Bud Thompson, he was a solid artist with a hint of Mac Raboy influence who drew many fine pages yet is basically forgotten. His art's the high point of the issue.
"Mystic Moot" gets the same reaction as "Jupiter Jones." It's clever in places, but it just doesn't raise a laugh.
"Karlan the Sorceror" is a typical Ibis story. You'd think, though, that after taking up so much time establishing Bobby and turning him into a black cat that the writer would have given him a bigger part in the action beyond making Ibis lose his $%#$%! stick. Again. The ending was a surprise, though. I didn't realize the Ibistick couldn't be used against Ibis. But in the Jaguar Men story, Talia uses the stick against Ibis--at Ibis' urging--and it doesn't blow him up, it cures him of jaguarism. What's a little inconsistency between friends?
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Topic: Reading Group #292 The unusual art of Basil Wolverton (Read 2553 times)
