Witches Tales #24K1ngcat and I often agree on old comics but not this time. I have never liked horror comics, neither pre-Code nor post. Do I dislike them as much as I do war comics? Hard to say. It depends on the artwork. I'll suffer a pre-Code horror comic if the art's good.
Harvey's horror titles often featured excellent art, mostly by Bob Powell, Howard Nostrand, and Lee Elias. The quality of the stories varied wildly. Being me, the less gruesome the subject matter the better I liked them. What the stories had in common were frequent, often incongruous, humor and short, rather choppy stories that often sacrificed making sense in order to reach the punch line.
"Undertaker" boasts a remarkable art job by Nostrand. There's no missing the heavy Eisner influence in the layouts. Combined with dramatic lighting and several cinematic three-panel sequences it makes for an impressive-looking production. The art is way too good for the slight story, which could easily have fit into one of those half-page filler poems.
Speaking of
"Mother Mongoose's Nursery Crimes," they're good for some decent art but the poems are pointless. And they don't scan.
"Mutiny on the Boundary" hearkens back to the 1935 feature film with Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. Bob Powell does a savage caricature of Laughton though "Mr Gobble" doesn't look much like Clark Gable. Overall his art is excellent. The slow-moving story veers from movie parody to straight drama and back again. The horror element in the payoff seems tacked on. Incidentally, I found the captain's lisp aggravating to the extreme.
Whoever wrote
"Eye, Eye, Sir" was in full-out "copy Kurtzman" mode. I never cared for Kurtzman's shtick of having men go insane and babble nonsense at the sight of an attractive woman. It always seemed idiotic rather than funny. This writer pushes Kurtzman's already over-the-top gimmick to the limit. At least he gives us the immortal monologue "Wow! Zowie! Zoom zoom zoom! Adolph Menjou! Go...go!" The ending is a total non sequitur. I want even a dumb story to have some sort of logic. We're teased constantly about the woman's glasses so we expect them to figure in the final payoff. But candles in her eye sockets? How the devil does that connect with anything in the story? We don't even get a weak play on words like "her glowing eyes" to set up the finale.
The imitation Wood art perfectly suits the imitation Kurtzman story. I didn't recognize Sid Check. I'm more accustomed to his Williamson-inspired fine line style. Check's take on Wood's
Mad style is quite good. It has enough personal traits to be more than a flat out Wood copy.
"Monumental Feat" is the worst story in the issue. By page two you know exactly where it's going and all you can do is twiddle your thumbs waiting for the non-surprise ending. It bugs me is that the entire story is built around the ridiculous notion that a football field would have a line of stone monuments in the end zone. You'd think that after harping endlessly on these monuments the writer would use them in the story's resolution. The obvious way would be to have Chappie smash his head into one of them after his record-setting run. But no, he snuffs it on the goalpost and the tale ends with a dull thud. As for the art, Joe Certa's heavy inks almost bury Manny Stallman's pencils. It's a competent job but lacks the flair of the art in the other stories.
The ads are always interesting. I puzzled over
Take Orders for Famous Nylons! Usually such ads give you an inkling of how the scam--sorry, I meant the sales opportunity--works. Not this one. How are you supposed to get your orders without house-to-house canvassing? By posting classified ads? I wonder if it was like some sales operations in the 1920s and 1930s. The manufacturer loaned you a car which you used to travel the boondocks wholesaling their product to local retailers. You paid all your expenses including gas and you earned a commission on each sale. No sales, no income. Of course you were on the hook financially if anything happened to the car. Could this have been the Wil-Knit Hosiery Company's system?
Mason Shoes reminds me of an episode of M.A.S.H. in which Radar signs up to sell shoes for the Style-Rite Shoe Company. I wonder if any of those Professional Selling Outfits still exist. I should look them up on eBay. I could be walking on 10,000 little air bubbles in a pair of Velvet-eeze shoes. Unfortunately every time I read "Velvet-eeze" my mind wants to read "Velveeta" and I'm left with the mental image of slogging around in shoes filled with that weird yellow cheese-like substance.
The crazy thing about the
Real Jet Plane is that it really was a jet-powered plane. More accurately, it was rocket-powered. You loaded the Jetex motor with solid fuel pellets. It produced enough thrust to power model planes, cars, and such. Jetex motors were used by the Supermarionation crew for exhaust effects! Here's the Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetexA couple of lines in the ad for
20 Dresses for $3.50 caught my eye:
All Sizes in Good Condition and
In excellent condition, slight repair needed. Sounds to me like they're trying to hide the fact that they're selling used clothing. Maybe these are factory seconds or unsold low-quality merchandise sold off in bulk to comic book advertisers.
But I digress. Bottom line on
Witches Tales #24 is good art, poor stories, and thankfully not overly gross.
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Topic: READING GROUP # 295 Witches Tales 13,24 (Read 2486 times)
