« True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. » — Kurt Vonnegut
Tonight, we’re slumming it up on the cheap side of the tracks. If you thought — and I quite understand you on that point — that Myron Fass’ Eerie Publications were scraping the bottom of the barrel for their market share, then you likely weren’t aware of his fellow cheapjack opportunist Stanley Morse. For a bit of background on Fass, check out these entries from previous countdowns: Hallowe’en Countdown II, Day 1; and Hallowe’en Countdown VI, Day 27… so I don’t have to repeat myself.
Furthermore, here’s my brief introduction to the dodgy wonders of Morse’s ‘Stanley Publications’. I recently came upon all the short-lived line’s covers and was struck by their certain je ne sais quoi. Doubting my senses a little, I queried ds, and she concurred: it’s raw, it’s primitive, but not devoid of a bizarre sort of charm.
Here, then… is a gallery of the entire run of Stark Terror!
This is Stark Terror no. 1 (Dec. 1970, Stanley); cover art by Frank Carin (né Carino).This is Stark Terror no. 2 (Feb. 1971, Stanley); cover art by Carin.This is Stark Terror no. 3 (Apr. 1971, Stanley); cover art by Mexican illustrator Héctor Castellón .This is Stark Terror no. 4 (June 1971, Stanley); cover art by Carin.This is Stark Terror no. 5 (Aug. 1971, Stanley); cover art by Carin. Just in time for cancellation, a new logo, possibly by Ben Oda.As a bonus, here’s the surviving original art to the publisher’s Ghoul Tales no. 1 (Nov. 1970, Morse); artwork, again, by Mr. Frank Carin.
« Veteran genre-crosser Carin delivered this new-for-1970 cover, insinuating troll-like creeps into a mad-doctor/torture-chamber situation. (The published version contains a touch of self-censorship, obscuring one conspicuous element of nudity with layers of color.) Carin is an enigmatic figure in midcentury comics, traversing the idioms of Funny Animals, Good Girl Art, adventure, and lurid shock value. » [ source ]
« Poison’s not bad. It’s a matter of how much. » — Keith Richards
Regular readers of this blog will perhaps recall my fondness for those little Peter Pauper Press books of Mount Vernon, NY — at least those of the publisher’s halcyon years (1928-1981). I’ve cast a light on their edition of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary and, in the course of last year’s countdown, their Comic Epitaphs From the Very Best Old Graveyards.
This time around, I’m tackling one of the rare and fairly expensive ones* — that I’m aware of — Cooking to Kill: the Poison Handbook (1951), which proposes « Comic recipes for the Ghoul, Cannibal, Witch & Murderer. Stewing and potting mothers-in-law. Tested recipes for spoiled brats, business rivals, and strayed lovers. »
« Anybody can kill vulgarly. But we should be above the brutal, the direct, the unappetizing approach. This little book will teach you to tickle the palates of your guests so that they will be happy to linger at your table, charmed to malinger, and grateful to take off for the Great Adventure with the taste of your superlative cooking still on their lips! » — from Prof. Ebezener Murgatroyd’s preface to his ‘gentle reader’.
The book is magnificently illustrated by Herb Roth (1887-1953), who spent much of his career toiling as H.T. Webster‘s assistant and ghost. Roth enjoyed a long association with the Peter Pauper Press, illustrating its very first two books, Faithless Sally Brown and Faithless Nellie Gray.
« Head Cheese garni à la Salomé » « Tomato Surprise (Asp in the Grass): this luncheon delicacy should be served only to ladies, as you will find their charming soprano shrieks particularly rewarding. »It’s hard to not think of Joseph Kesselring’s fabled Arsenic and Old Lace, written in 1939.« Walnut Balls: smash nuts with a hammer, fashion into balls and fry in deep fat until a golden brown. Delicious withcoq au vin. »« Chocolate Noose… will help you to execute a crime of considerable chic, and will add a je ne sais quoi to the court proceedings. »« Stuffed Spoiled Brat: select a fine specimen which has been spoiling for a good long time, and capture at opportune moment. » « Crêpes Suzette: take one tractor, and apply to Suzette, rolling in both directions so that an even flatness is achieved. Be careful to eliminate all lumps. Fry flattened Suzette in butter, and roll. Sprinkle generously with Cointreau, light with a blowtorch, and serve on the end of a sword. The French zey are peculiar, n’est-ce pas? »« Marinated Leeks: take a leek, marinate in French dressing, and combine with tender green peas. Serve with asparagus for a very special flavour. Sprinkle with cyanide for that final touch! »« Potted Mother-in-Law: stew Mother-in-law by luring her into the kitchen and pot her with a beaker of martinis to which has been added a pinch of potent powder. Or for quicker results, creep up from behind and apply blunt end of hammer to head. A kindly touch would be to let her have the last word. Remove meat from bones, chop, stew in butter and serve on toast. »This brings to mind those gleefully morbid rhymes about Little Willie, essentially the original Gashlycrumb Tiny. A sample: Willie saw some dynamite/Couldn’t understand it quite/Curiosity never pays/It rained Willie seven days.Why, some enterprising soul has even created these exclusive earrings! Just don’t sport them during the investigation and/or trial. Nobody likes a braggart.
-RG
*the single most sought-after PPP entry is without question Kathryn Paulsen‘s Witches’ Potions and Spells (1971). Just try getting your hands on a cheap copy!
« I prefer hallucinations ’cause they tend to make more sense than experience. » — Todd Rundgren
Today, I’m mixing things up a bit and heading over to Europe. We’ll be looking at various versions of « Le seuil du vide » (Threshold of the Void) a story by André Ruellan (1922-2016), aka Kurt Steiner.
At left, the original novel, published in 1956; at right, the comics adaptation, published in 1973. Believe it or not , both covers are the work of the same man, the prolific Michel Gourdon (1925-2011). He had a predilection for a palette of green and blue hues.
The plot, in a few broad strokes: Young painter Wanda Leibovitz comes to Paris, hoping to forget a romance gone wrong. At the train station, upon her arrival in town, Wanda encounters a mysterious old lady offering to rent her a room, but under certain conditions…
Basically, it’s the ‘New Bodies for Old’ plot, and it ends as bleakly as you might imagine. Ruellan/Steiner wasn’t the least bit afraid to probe the darkness. The victim’s innocence was no protection against the forces besieging her, to put it mildly.
Here are a few interior pages from the Arédit adaptation, featuring art by Cándido Ruiz Pueyo.
There was also a movie adaptation by an ambitious young filmmaker by the name of Jean-François Davy. This was his third try at getting a project off the ground and into cinemas, and his only horror film. They just weren’t making such films in France in those days — the iconoclastic Jean Rollin being the notable exception — in Belgium, sure, but not in France. It took some doing to get the project (barely) financed, lensed and distributed, and its director wound up turning to porn for the rest of his career — hilariously titled porn, to be fair.
The film features such luminaries as Rififi‘s unforgettable Jean Servais, along with a non-coincidental cameo by (yet to be filmed) The Tenant author Roland Topor. Davy soon attained greater commercial success with his Bananes mécaniques, nominally a Clockwork Orange parody.
And here’s the VHS release, featuring the film’s original poster. Airbrush!
« Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die. » — Edgar Allan Poe
Ah, mixing fact with fiction — such an honoured tradition. In the mid-1970s, DC editor Murray Boltinoff (Ghosts, The Unexpected, The Witching Hour, Teen Titans, The Brave & the Bold) hit upon the notion of featuring historic writers encountering in daily life the supernatural object of their eventual inspiration.
The formula was tweaked a bit for the Edgar Poe entry, in that the tale opens after Poe’s burial, and the late writer is not the protagonist. Read on!
“3 Corpses on a Rope“, written by Carl Wessler and illustrated by Lee Elias, originally appeared in Ghosts no. 43 (Oct. 1975, DC).If you ask me, despite his evident illustrative gift, Elias’ depiction of the revenant ends up looking more like Poe’s fellow Baltimorean John Astin, whom I envision starring in a one-man show entitled ‘An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe‘.
We’ve featured Nancy in a previous Hallowe’en Countdown, but it doesn’t quite count, as that was the mind-bending John Stanley mutation of Nancy — not that I adore one any less than the other. This time, we’ve gone with the real deal… which is still plenty odd, thank you.
June 12, 1944 Nancy daily.June 13, 1944 daily.June 14, 1944 daily.June 15, 1944 daily.June 16, 1944 daily.June 17, 1944 daily.And, skipping nearly a decade ahead… July 15, 1953 daily.
Speaking of owls: the other night, we were surprised (to put it mildly) to discover that one of our cats had brought home a feathered guest.
This is a Northern saw-whet owl, one of the smallest species of owls. Seeing she likely had a broken wing, we quickly called the local animal shelter, and the injured bird was picked up by the local wildlife authorities in the morning. She’ll be in good, caring hands.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Tony DiPreta’s striking style. When it came to Atlas’ material, it was generally a case of lousy writing and interesting art. But DiPreta could somehow lend credence to the dodgiest semblance of a plot, because he could smartly provide it with just the right tone. I’ve featured this unfairly obscure illustrator a couple times in the past, so you may want to start there: first, the sublimely ridiculous The Hidden Vampires, then the Tinseltown satire Skull-Face.
I was pleased, in reading a rare interview with the artist, to hear him confide that « In the 1950s I did some comic book work for Stan Lee and others. That was pre-Code horror stuff and I loved it. Some of the illustration I did for crime and horror stories in that period is among the best work I’ve ever done. » Amen!
Aside from an expensive, low print run ‘Marvel Masterworks’ hardcover, this story has never been accessibly reprinted. And so enjoy this scarce gem!
The original appearance: this is Journey Into Mystery no. 12 (Sept. 1953, Atlas). Cover art by Max «Carl Burgos » Finkelstein.
« If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.» (source)
Today’s titillating offering deals in tropes that horror devotees will readily recognize – a Town with a Dark Secret ensnaring The Plucky Girl in its mysteries and underlying violence. Mysterious disappearances, the proverbial ageing small-town creep whose smile hides uncomfortable truths, oblivious locals… it’s been surely done before, yet the graphic novel Ninecrow by Dora M. Mitchell , initially posted as a biweekly webcomic that ran from 2020 to 2022, succeeds in creating an unnerving story out of these readily available narrative blocks.
Amanda, a teenager whose divorced mom relocates them to a town in the middle of nowhere (shades of Eerie Indiana et al.), does her best to adapt to her new life, but her new place of residence is, well… alarming in a number of ways.
Lovingly drawn in mostly black-and-white watercolours, Ninecrow offers the reader plenty of visual enjoyment peppered with hair-raising details faintly glimpsed in shadowy corners. The hand-lettering is also worth a mention, especially given that modern graphic novels often dispense with this element in favour of a computer-generated font. Both art and letters remind me of the tragically departed Patrick Dean, especially some of his work like Underwhelming Lovecraft Monsters.
Aside from its crow population, the town is also abundantly stocked with disquieting old people in various stages of brain fog. Aside from Amanda and a couple of others, everybody seems to be middle-aged going on ‘soon dead’, and not of the pleasant fluffy-grandparent variety, either.
I bought the print version of Ninecrow on Kickstarter because I much prefer reading books in a physical format (you can still buy the deluxe version on the publisher’s Etsy page), but you can still read the full thing story online on the website: https://ninecrowcomic.com/
Like Hawkeye Pierce, Bob Oksner (1916-2007) was a gentleman who appreciated a cute overbite.
Here’s a seasonal Mary Marvel solo tale that originally saw print in the thirteenth issue of DC’s Shazam!, back in 1974. It was scripted by the erudite Edward Nelson Bridwell (1931-1987).
I can’t help but believe that Mr. Oksner might have modeled his Mary Marvel after model-actress and air harpsichordist Susan Dey. The flaw in that theory is that his girls had always looked like her — so it’s more of a case of Susan looking like an Oksner girl than the other way around.
« I fell in love with Laurie on the Partridge Family Yeah I stay up watching 70’s TV And I get off on 70’s TV » — John Easdale / Dramarama
This is Shazam! no. 13 (Jul.-Aug. 1974, DC). Cover art by Mr. Oksner.
« Daddy had an argument on Friday night, with a man from outer space. Daddy said, ‘I don’t care where you’re from, you’re in my parking space!’ » — Colin McNaughton
Here we are, against all odds, at the beginning of yet another edition of WOT?’s annual Hallowe’en Countdown… hope you enjoy the bumpy — that’s the spirit! — ride.
This time, our opening salvo comes courtesy of British illustrator-poet Colin McNaughton (born 1951). Though I’ve been known to haunt used bookstores whenever the occasion arises, I’ve but once encountered a single one of Mr. McNaughton’s productions, a couple of decades ago at that… which is odd, given his rather prodigious output: over seventy books! That said, my mama having raised no fool (my brother notwithstanding), I unerringly grabbed it.
As it happens, Wikipedia claims — though without any context or evidence — that « His most notable book is perhaps There’s an Awful Lot of Weirdos in Our Neighbourhood »… but I’ll accept it unless a stronger claim comes along. It’s a truly splendid tome.
Oh, and here’s the requisite snatch of (auto?) biography: « Growing up in his native England, the young Colin McNaughton had little indication that he would one day become an author-illustrator. There were no books at all in his parents’ home, he recalls, but there were always comics. These were his formative literature, and their slapstick humor has been a lasting influence. “I’ve been talking about the comic format for years,” he says. “It’s the modern way of telling stories for today’s children; it’s about movement, the step between film and the book.” »
I can live with that. enjoy!
There’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood! Yes, there’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood!I know this physical wreck, who has a bolt through his neck! There’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood!And in an upstairs room, an old lady rides a broom! There’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood.A man lives on the square, when he’s in he isn’t there! There’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood.And that woman down the block, whose snaky hair’s a shock! There’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood.We’ve a strange old feller, with horns, down in the cellar! There’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood.There’s a guy who’s green and scaly, has webbed feet and sells fish daily! There’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood.And someone near the dairy, when the moon is out gets hairy! There’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood.Think I’ll leave this miscellanea, and return to Transylvania, ’cause there’s an awful lot of weirdos in our neighbourhood!
How about one more? One more it is!
Mum! The garden’s full of witches! Come quick and see the witches. There’s a full moon out, and they’re flying about, come on! You’ll miss the witches.
Oh, Mum! You’re missing the witches. You have never seen so many witches. They are casting spells! There are horrible smells! Come on! You’ll miss the witches.
Mum, hurry! Come look at the witches. The shrubbery’s bursting with witches. They’ve turned our Joan into a garden gnome. Come on! You’ll miss the witches.
Oh no! You’ll miss the witches. The garden’s black with witches. Come on! Come on! Too late! They’ve gone. Oh, you always miss the witches.
This is a post I didn’t want to write — or rather, a post I didn’t want to write under the present circumstances. While I’ve known Bernie Mireault (June 27, 1961 – September 2, 2024) for a long time, I couldn’t presume to call him my friend. We were never particularly close, but we ran in similar circles for a time. Then our paths split, many years ago. But I always liked him and greatly admired and followed his work.
I remember him as a kind, generous, humble man, with a soothing voice and manner. And blessed — and cursed, I suppose — with massive, multifaceted talent. Now that he’s left this world, his memory and his work linger. Allow me to showcase a couple of my most treasured Mireaults.
« Though this is fictionalized science, it’s not science fiction. We’ve imagined some of the details, but the characters existed, and did and said (most of) the things you’ll read. » Two-Fisted Science: Safecracker (1997, General Tektronics Labs). Published in advance of the Two-Fisted Science anthology, in order to promote it. However, Bernie’s piece outshines everything else, if you ask me. For good or ill, cheap copies of the comic book are still handily acquired.
This is only (most of) a single chapter of Bernie’s contribution — which totals 30 pages! — but it’s fully enjoyable on its own. Script by Jim Ottaviani, pencils, inks and lettering by Mr. Mireault.
A bit of background about Mr. Lavatelli (1917-1998)…Pray note Bernie’s clever nod to the great Harvey Kurtzman (top left). Of course, working on a story starring genial genius Dr. Richard Feynman already gives you an edge, but Bernie was one of the few cartoonists who could breathe life into the drabbest of narratives. Non-fiction seems especially daunting for today’s cartoonists, for some reason.
For another facet of Mireault’s talent, and to highlight his peerless colouring chops, here’s my favourite of his too-few Dr. Robot stories, written, pencilled, inked, lettered *and* coloured by Mireault. To this day, insultingly cheap copies are plentiful. Less than the original cover price, for Pete’s sake.
Thanks, Bernie. I’m truly sorry things didn’t work out for you.
I was going to post something very brief this month, telling you what to expect from us in September, which is… nothing else. We’re busily preparing this year’s edition of our Hallowe’en Countdown — which will include some more Mireault, that’s all I can tell you for now. See you soon!
Who's Out There? 