Bummer. I wrote a long comment yesterday. When I posted it I got a message that others had posted while I was composing. When I checked the forum their comments showed up but mine never did. Lost in the chronosynclastic infundibulum. I'll try to replicate it.
I came back to the board, saw this comment from you, and thought: "Been there; done that! That's why nowadays, whenever I want to post something that's much longer than a quick paragraph or two, I prepare it in Notepad and then cut-and-paste. Every once in a while the software (of whatever forum I'm on) hiccups -- or my Internet connection does -- and the post doesn't make it, but I still have the 'master copy' to fall back on for a second try."
Now comes the irony . . . after I had all that flash through my mind, but
before I ever started typing out this response to you, I looked back through the earlier posts in the thread, and realized that it was a darn good thing I still had a 'master copy' as described, because when I pasted some stuff into a new post in this thread, earlier today, I had not pasted as much as I thought I had! (Still not sure how that happened.)
Specifically, I failed to include my thoughts about the "surprise twist" in the final tale of the issue -- "The Ghoul Walks." I'll save them now until I'm reacting to your own thoughts on the subject.
So many unclear details in this story. Lorendiac, I don't think that woman in the foreground is supposed to be Anna. She's some guest at the inn witnessing the rampage. The writer has already forgotten Anna. And her mom and dad, too, for that matter. All very messy.
I'm not following your reasoning. Why do you think she's just a guest instead of a familiar face from previous scenes?
My thinking was: Anna lives in the inn. Anna is a girl with light brown hair. Anna is probably at least four or five years older than Erik, who is twenty when he goes on his first killing spree. By Occam's Razor, it seems to me that when we see a beautiful woman with light brown hair who obviously has been sleeping there in the inn, there's no need to assume she is anyone other than Anna, "all grown up now."
Why would the author go to the extra trouble of introducing a nameless Anna-lookalike for one panel before abandoning both her
and Anna for the remainder of the tale?
I thought
my opinion of the author's storytelling skills was
low, but apparently
your regard for his ability to tell a coherent story without pointlessly introducing superfluous characters is
even lower that mine?
"Black Means Death" has the germ of a good idea torpedoed by a huge lapse in logic. Karen assumes a double identity to trick Harry into murdering her?
Where'd she get this death wish? Especially considering that, as Mara, Karen receives the attention and the expensive presents she demands from Harry. I could buy some elaborate scheme to frame Harry for the faked "murder" of Mara. I could buy some convoluted plan to drive Harry to kill himself. But to use Harry for assisted suicide? At least the writer could have given Karen a dual personality so Mara wouldn't realize that killing Karen would mean her own finish.
Your reactions to the gaping flaws in her "master plan" are
almost identical to my own doubts about the plausibility of the idea that everything turned out
exactly the way Karen had intended all along! In this case, at least, it seems to be true that "great minds think alike!" (I say modestly.
)
Ever see a story where the surprise ending is blown on the first page? "The Ghoul Walks" is one of them. The moment you read the caption on panel 3, you know where the story's headed. The obviousness of the outcome makes a three-page story seem much longer.
And here's where I'll paste in my own concerns about
that surprise twist (even though, like you, I saw it coming from very early on). Although first I will mention that I was
impressed by how much plot the writer managed to squeeze into a mere three pages.
I'll just do a little editing to what I had typed out earlier today:
My main problem with the "surprise twist" at the end of this one was that it flat-out
contradicted the forensic evidence!
The writer made sure we knew that "The Ghoul" was in the habit of leaving
black hairs at his crime scenes. (They even turned up on the chief's body to remind us of that vital clue.) But the narrator of the story, Detective Dan Noren, has
reddish-brown hair. And that monstrous reflection in the mirror in the final panel seems to have hair of a
lighter hue ("sandy," I might say), rather than its having magically turned black. (Whether his face had literally transformed because of a curse or something, as opposed to his hallucinating that ugly reflection, is not even the point. Either way, his hair came nowhere near fitting the "black hair" clue!)
So how can Dan Noren possibly be guilty of all those previous murders? There's no indication that, when he's in a murderous mood, he always carries around a supply of someone else's
black hairs and makes sure to leave a few on the victim to confuse the issue, as if they had fallen from The Ghoul's scalp during a struggle. It leaves me wondering if Noren has never committed any violent crime in his life -- or not until his panicky fight with the chief in a dark corridor, if you count that as a crime -- but he has simply gotten so obsessed with this case that now he's delusional on the subject and
really thinks he is the woman-strangling fiend whom he's been chasing?
That would mean that if he commits suicide to end it all, or turns himself in to the other cops, or whatever, the real black-haired maniac will keep right on strangling pretty girls every night!
P.S. A "real-world" explanation could be that the colorist
didn't bother to read the script carefully, and thus had
no idea that he was really supposed to make sure Detective Noren had jet-black hair.
P.P.S. I didn't mention this in my "first draft" of these remarks, but when I checked back just now, I saw that the
other woman-strangling brute whom Noren pummels and captures on Page 2 had very
blond hair. When everyone was congratulating Noren on arresting The Ghoul,
nobody noticed that yellow hair was painfully inconsistent with the known profile of the maniac who had the city terrified? Again, it seems as if the colorist wasn't even
trying to stay consistent with the script. He could have given both men jet-black hair, and thus removed all these concerns of mine, but he couldn't be bothered to do so. Was he usually given a free hand to color anything in the story any way he pleased, according to his personal whims about hair color and so forth?
