Pound that putrid pedal to the metal, it's time now for some hot rod horror from the March - April 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries #11! Okay, I'm not exactly sure if Hollingsworth was the best choice for the art duties here, but he still deliver's a pretty solid, fast paced, rip roarin' creeper-- and that wonderfully witchy splash is pretty fantastic too! One more story to go from this wild issue, stay vroooomed...
7 comments:
The art.....certainly could be better, for example it could've avoided Clyde's had growing to double its size between panels top of Page 4, but nobody can say Clyde wasn't asking for it. I mean, at every stage he went out to make himself the target of vengeance. Using the steel for the car was the stupidest. Didn't he ever read a pre code comic book?!?
As you mentioned, the splash page is top notch work. I could see this type of image appearing in Creepy or Eerie, too bad the rest of the faces in this comic are typical of Hollingsworth's uncanny valley style.
Hollingsworth's work is similar to some fanzine or underground comix art, imperfect but it just sort of works in a bizarre, weird, dreamlike way.
As always, thanks for the posts of horror comics of days gone by.
I think I could pick on Hollingsworth (page 4, panel 2 is especially bizarre) but ... it works here. I mean, it has that gruesome kind of otherworldly deeply shadowed people, if everybody lives in some kind of weird swamp. Is that bad for a horror story? No!
I love the witch just constantly popping up and checking up on things. Sometimes even holding down a border!
I like Clyde as a villain. I like the guys in horror comics who seem to do everything they can to claim their punishment. These people are like guys that play jenga by always going for blocks on the bottom. He is just absolutely asking for it.
I wonder how the car turning back into Forbes would have been handled by a different artist? That's one place where it falls down a bit, but is still effective.
Felix says this one is extra scary 🙈
I will definitely try to dig up more tales of car horror (carror?!) for Felix then! Haha
Even though it's no copy of this one, it reminds me of a story in Creepy # 61 called "The Blood-Colored Motorbike," drawn by Jose Bea (who could make anything spooky, let alone real horror images).
One big difference in that one is that the killing is a crime of passion. So the character is partly the opposite of Clyde, who does EVERYTHING to be awful, just as Bill the Butcher says.
yeah, no. Hollingsworth isn't responsible for most of this Frankenstory. The second panel on page four? Come on. Clearly, at some point, editorial whim took the scissors to this mess. Pasting faces into every page*, changing dialog, altering frame shapes. I don't really believe I can imagine what happened to the panel at the bottom of page four (what is that? tiny door and huge doorway?), but that second panel is a facial trace of Rod from panel beside it, probably enlarged via photostat, and pasted over whatever was originally in that place. And then, when--surprise surprise--that didn't look right, somebody thought they could get away with "recreating" the rest of the man's figure around the paste with a scratchy little pen. Just look at the original Holligsworth crosshatching in the background, how it doesn't match up, how it's supposed to fit around the original dialog balloons. That panel's been totally effed. I mean, um, edited.
I like the splash too. But after making a bit of a forensic study of this cadaver, I have to say that everything has become suspect. Where is that witch's right hand? Surely that wasn't left out on purpose? She was moved over is why. Or something.
*The worst paste job is on page two, in which the invasive host is crammed in over Rod's figure--but then they didn't even bother change the dialog balloon, so it seems like she's the one talking!
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