Today’s tentacle adventure brings us a bounty of Gold Key covers.
The Close Shaves of Pauline Peril no. 2 (September 1970). Cover by Jack Manning. I love the Pauline Peril series – it’s such loveable nonsense, with dynamic art and fusillade-style dialogue. However tempting it may be to jump to that conclusion, It’s not a comic-book adaptation of a TV cartoon. Read a whole issue (number four, to be more precise, the last one) at, appropriately, the Ominous Octopus Omnibus blog.Hanna-BarberaThe Addams Family no. 3 (April 1975). The adorable cover is by Bill Ziegler. Is there anything groovier than a froggy belt-buckle? I think not.Looney Tunes no. 11, 1976. Cover artist unknown. The boat has been filled beyond legal capacity, and no-one’s wearing their mandatory Mae West. The Safety Octopus is here to ensure that the offending parties are brought up to standards (or at least given a tentacle slap on the wrist).
And just to offset all the cartoony, cutesy stuff, here’s a cover featuring an epic struggle, a life-or-death situation, a decisive skirmish between Man and Beast. (I’ll let you guess which is which, though.)
Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery no. 37 (October 1971), cover by George Wilson. Here we have a tentacled creature – “Sea-Beast” for friends – defending a village of innocent people against some sort of flaming monstrosity by shooting water from its tentacles (trunks?) at the flames. Hey, somebody should hire it as a firefighter!
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