MYTHCOMICS: "MOON MADNESS" (THE UNSEEN #7, 1952)

 "Searchers after myth haunt strange far places. They climb to the zenith of the sky in the sun-god's chariot; they descend to the depths of the sea to marvel at pearls the size of houses. They visit islands swarming with prehistoric beasts, or with beasts that walk like men. The shadows of the minarets of Araby conceal for them a thousand treasures. Yet for the true epicure of the mythopoeic, there is no better breeding-ground for the combinatory power of archetypal phantasms than the pages of the humble comic book."-- Happily Phony Lovecraft.

      Just like last year I'm only managing to get one horror-story myth-analyzed this month of Halloween. But IMO this one's a doozy. This forgotten gem from Nedor Publishing has no credited writer, so as I've done in the past, I will impute for simplicity's sake full authorship to the credited artist, Jack Katz, later famous for a multi-issue fantasy I've not yet read, name of THE FIRST KINGDOM. After reading this short horror tale, maybe I'll give his fantasy-domain a closer look.

Katz starts off MADNESS with a bang and barely slows up thereafter. Protagonist Emil Jankow, identified in the opening caption as belonging to the class of "vagrants and hobos," is attacked by a mad dog belonging to a "witch-like creature named Agnes." As Emil faints from his wounds, Agnes uses a pistol to kill the dog, sparing Emil's life. The reader alone hears Agnes ruminate that she won't tell the hobo that her dog was rabid, though in due time it will become apparent that the pooch didn't have garden-variety rabies. Aside from naming her watchdog after the Prince of Darkness and having some allegedly "magic" salves on hand, Agnes doesn't seem especially witchy until she warns the recovered Emil to "stay out of the light of the new moon." That Katz departs from the usual werewolf trope re: the full moon shows that the artist was playing fast and loose with lycanthropic mythology.

The next departure is that Emil's wounds from the dog don't heal in the approved Larry Talbot fashion but instead give him a sort of "Phantom of the Opera" disfigurement. This development makes panhandling a little easier, and so does the very non-rabies effect of his injuries: that all dogs become Emil's friends. This also sets him on a fatal course when he runs across wealthy girl June and her dog Duke, and he instantly charms the bite out of the former member of the K-9 corps. (June doesn't quite say that Duke suffered PTSD because his experiences in the war, but it's a fair extrapolation.) June perhaps tosses out too much information when she goes on about how a local named Kirk Lamarr has been June's personal dog-hating Mrs. Gulch. But it's info the reader needs to know, just like learning that, within a week, Emil falls in love with June and resents her boyfriend Jim.

   Now the experienced horror-reader will expect poor Emil-- who at this point has done nothing bad, only had bad thoughts-- will have an unhappy encounter of the lunar kind. And the transformation of the lycanthropic (caninthropic?) victim is marked by an accidental killing before beginning his own killing spree. But the victim's victim is not of another shape-changer as in THE WOLF MAN, but by a member of the canine species that seemed to recognize Emil as a "big dog" of the pack. Emil accidentally shoots Duke dead, and he decides to conceal the dog's death to avoid blowback. (Katz was careful to show that Duke was not June's only dog, so the K-9's passing doesn't mean Emil would have been terminated.) However, Emil then transforms into a were-creature and immediately pounces on the first "smooth white throat" he comes across. But is he transformed by the moon, or by committing a sin against dog-kind?

Even though Emil wasn't bitten by a wolf (except in the general sense of dogs having evolved from wolves), he thinks of himself as a lycanthrope once he's returned to his human (albeit disfigured) form. Emil learns that that local pain Kirk Lamarr believes that Duke killed Emil's victim, and Emil's attempt to cover up his killing of the dog implicates the dead canine in Emil's crimes of the next few days. (It's interesting that June refers to Duke as a "watchdog," the same term Agnes used for her rabid pooch Satan.) The aggrieved dog-trainer seeks to quell his animal rage by chaining himself in his quarters and tossing away the key. I guess he didn't toss it far enough, because June finds it and unlocks his chains, which practically begs Emil to unleash his demon and attack both June and Jim.

  Improbably, Jim is able to drive off Emil with a mere club. Maybe it works because Emil didn't really want to kill either Jim or June? The couple can't convince dog-hater Lamarr that they witnessed a werewolf, though strangely, within the course of one day, some unnamed professor is able to talk the rest of the town into crediting the reality of werewolves. Said prof even convinces the polity that they don't need silver bullets, just ordinary torches, to kill a werewolf. Did Katz have a thing for all the cinematic scenes where Frankenstein's Monster got repelled by torches? Emil's near the end of his run now, because he didn't transform back this time. He decides to seek another victim in the unguarded town.

And who's one of the few people who didn't join the posse, because he didn't believe in werewolves? Why, it's skeptical smarty-pants Lamarr, though strangely he's not home when Emil invades his house, forcing the were-dog to cool his heels a bit. I assume Katz did this so that Lamarr would arrive at his house just as the posse just happened to return to town. It's surprising that Katz spared the dog-hater's life-- certainly no one who read the story then or now would cared if Lamarr had died. Indeed, killing the enemy of the woman Emil still loved would have given the doomed man one last, slightly altruistic deed before dying. But Jim bursts in and destroys the monster with nothing but a thrown torch. In death Emil not only does not look burned by the torch, his "rabies" disfigurement goes away too. I note in closing that Katz does keep drawing the moon in the sky, though technically a new moon should only last about three days, and it sounds like Emil was "wolfing out" longer than that. But I don't think Katz really cared about the moon-schtick popularized by Universal movies. I think he had a genuinely original take on lycanthropy, portraying it as a curse activated less because of the lunar satellite than because of the cursed man's sublimated failings and/or hostilities. And while MADNESS is not a masterpiece like THE WOLF MAN, Katz's tale seems to be playing with some of the same mythic concepts.           

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT. 2

 I decided to supplement last year's WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES with further details, but realized that the original essay supplied only the rationale of distinguishing "weirdie" metaphenomenal fictions from the "worldie" type, as per the Brian Aldiss history mentioned, and then I jumped to a particular late manifestation of "weirdies at DC." So to bridge that gap, here's my essay from OUROBOROS DREAMS where I dealt with the importance of Carmine Infantino to my schema. ___________________________

DC jumped feet first into the supernatural/Gothic thing after having generally avoided that type of story for over 20 years, and it seems likely that Carmine Infantino was the biggest influence, as he himself claims in a JOURNAL interview:

I was trying to prepare for the inevitable. In my mind, “What if these things die? What if we’re back in the old days and suddenly superheroes drop off?” The reason I threw out a mess of different titles was, I wanted to sneak in The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets without people much realizing what was going on. Which I did. And also we had a chain of them out there, if you remember, and they were all successful before anyone at Marvel realized what was going on. So we had those going for us, and the superheroes going for us. Meanwhile I kept experimenting with different things.

So in Evanier's book KIRBY, ME claims, maybe a little dubiously, that when Kinney Corp bought DC in 1967, they thought they were getting the top company, only to become displeased when they learned that Marvel was such a strong second. (I think Roy Thomas claimed Marvel didn't obtain the majority market share until the early seventies though.) Still, that story isn't absolutely necessary to put across the notion that someone in management thought it was time for some changes. Infantino was made first art director and then editorial director in 1966 and 1967, and it looks like promoting horror and the Gothic was his major "experiment." Not only did he get rid of the superheroes in HOUSE OF MYSTERY in '67, he also debuted DEADMAN in the failing book STRANGE ADVENTURES. The Spectre had been revived earlier under the tutelage of Julie Schwartz, but the initial format was so rationalized that any "weirdie" appeal of the hero was nullified. Spectre also got his own title in 1967, and though it didn't last long it soon converted into spookier stories before it died. In the late sixties and early seventies, even some of the "mainstream" DC superheroes began exploiting Gothic/horror themes on their covers, such as (obviously) BATMAN but also less obvious types like FLASH and TEEN TITANS. 

One fan attributed the big change to the influence of DARK SHADOWS in '66, but I think it was more likely that DC saw that the Warren magazines had been doing well since 1964 (EERIE) and 1966 (CREEPY) respectively, and that they hired guys like EC stalwart Joe Orlando to cut into that action. That also probably led to the revival of The Phantom Stranger in 1969, as well as another fifties character, Doctor Thirteen. The intersection of the two seems to be the first regular convocation of two "weirdies" at DC Comics, in 1969's SHOWCASE #80-- though the good doctor was dropped from the Stranger's adventures pretty quickly.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "THE PROFESSOR AND THE PIXIE" (OUT OF THE NIGHT #17, 1954)

OUT OF THE NIGHT was an ACQ title that lasted 17 issues from 1952 to 1954. I'd mentioned in an earlier essay that I'd read very few of that company's offerings from the 1940s and 1950s, so I decided I'd finally sample NIGHT because it was a short run, and because it ended right before the Comics Code became a force for publishers to reckon with. Issue #17 is dated October 1954, which means that it was probably on newsstands two or three months previous, probably the summer before the Code was instituted in September of that year. What I found from this brief survey was that, in contrast to the ACG scripts of the 1960s, OUT OF THE NIGHT published a fair sampling of creepy stories (mostly written by head editor Richard Hughes), albeit including none of the gore favored by other pre-Code publishers. In contrast to the absolutely scare-less "horror" titles of DC Comics of the early 1950s, at least the OOTN stories allowed the monsters to win roughly half the time. Since the only two Hughes stories I'd reviewed on this site were in the nature of Thorne Smith romances, I wondered if Hughes had allowed himself to tap darker currents when he was providing most of the "straight" horror stories. What I found, though, was mostly adequate formula terror, with none of the deeper resonances that make a mythcomic, and in OOTN at least, the only story that qualified for my criteria was-- a Thorne Smith type of fantasy.                                           

    This story, which I'll abbreviate as "Pixie," is a good example of how a mythcomic can portray psychological symbolism even though none of the characters possess anything like a simulated personal psychology. We open at a girls' college, Smathers by name, as the pipe-smoking Professor Dobbins seeks to ignore the lovelorn glances of his students. Hughes wastes no time on whatever past interactions Dobbins may have had with the fair sex; all we know is that he doesn't want to truck with adoring females. Based on the cinematic screwball comedies that probably influenced Hughes, Dobbins is probably supposed to be a normal healthy male who's cut himself off from real romance like the Cary Grant character in BRINGING UP BABY. He does nothing to invite the attentions of yet another adoring female, this one a pixie from the spirit world, but the reader is from the first page ready to see Dobbins taken down a peg.                                                                                                              

The Pixie doesn't even specify that she was looking for Dobbins in particular when she got her boss, "The Sublime Creep," to send her to Earth hunting a mortal husband. She just has her "spirit beam" trained on Smathers College so that she can blend in with all the female students, because it goes without saying that an all-girl college is the perfect place to hunt for men. Since the Pixie never makes any attempt to play student, I suppose readers should assume that once she caught sight of Dobbins, love at first sight prevailed. Dobbins does not reciprocate and wants the Pixie to go away so that he can get back to the fascination of grading papers. Just as the dean is about to walk in on their tete-a-tete, the Pixie tells Dobbins how to banish her. The dean doesn't see the Pixie, but he does see the level-headed young man acting the fool.                                                         

    

For once, though, the stuffy character's embarrassment isn't the only reason to bring about a threat to his pecuniary fortunes. Apparently even though Dean Crabtree is the only one who sees Dobbins playing Napoleon, the dean's loose-mouthed enough that both the faculty and the student bodies all find out that he's become addle-pated-- though the primary reason for his dismissal is that Smathers College is out of money. Dobbins blames his ill fortune on the Pixie, and when her spirit beam manifests in his office that night, he becomes aggressive, planning to "hustle [the Pixie] right back to the Sublime Creep." The reader is spared from seeing him attempt to do this when a fanged demon, implicitly male, pops up and socks him.    

                                                     

Dobbins tries to escape via his upper-story window, but when the female students try to come to his rescue, he makes the odd decision to face the monster rather than create an "uproar." He returns just in time to see the Pixie show up and banish Fangface, claiming that his advent was just a mistake from the Sublime Creep's central dispatching.                                                                                            

The Pixie then confesses that she did have something to do with convincing the whole school that the prof was bonkers, purely to get him away from the temptation of other women. Dobbins still shows no sign of succumbing to her unearthly beauty, and he doesn't even look particularly sad when she vanishes again. However, he doesn't do himself any favors with the dean by telling him that he wasn't trying to jump out of the window to his death; he was just avoiding "a monster." Regardless, the female students hold a demonstration to keep Dobbins on staff, and it must be a slow news-day, since the place is "cluttered with reporters" covering this collegiate protest.                 

                   

On the third (consecutive?) night, Dobbins does seem to get a little concerned that if the Pixie doesn't join with him, she might get assigned to some other suitor. For her part, the angelic apparition shows up at the girls' dormitory, where a chance phrase from a student gives the Pixie an idea. She calls upon the Sublime Creep to send a bunch of spirits to the campus, which then possess (one assumes temporarily) the other glamorous student bodies, turning them all into ugly beasts. (This touch actually seems a better marker of feminine, rather than masculine, psychology.) Lickety-split, some news station decides to buy exclusive rights to the demonstration-story from the college, and Smathers is immediately saved from penury. The Pixie's more or less unselfish gesture causes the stuffy professor to fall for her, and their romantic coupling is ensured. I did find myself wondering less at any of the mythcomics' plot holes than at what kind of "defense job" a de-winged mythical entity thought she could seek in 1954. Now, if she had said she planned to get a job with the Comics Code Authority-- that would have made perfect sense.                                                                     

MYTHCOMICS: "BLACK MAGIC IN A SLINKY GOWN" (BAFFLING MYSTERIES #6, 1952)

I didn't remember to dedicate this month, the month of Halloween, to mythcomics in a horrific vein. However, in one sense Halloween is as much celebrated for all forms of fantasy, not just horror, and I've already suggested how the two super-genres are intrinsically tied together in this essay.  So my choice of a Mary Marvel story about "sky spirits" makes a good contrast to a tale centered on the specter of fear-- even though I've chosen another obscure story that even most Golden Age fans have forgotten. As I've done with many such stories with no definite credits, I'll assign total credit for the script to the artist whom fan-artists have tentatively identified as Mike Sekowsky.

Despite the title, neither anything magical nor any slinky gowns play a special role here, and GOWN isn't even explicitly about sexual enticement. However, I feel sure that when Sekowsky conceived the story in 1952, he would have been riffing on one of the most popular tropes seen during the horror-comics boom of 1948-1954. That trope is that of the conniving "black widow" murderess. No matter what form of phenomenality each story utilizes, the basic setup is always one in which a scheming woman marries a man, often older than she is, and then plots to murder him, usually with the help of a male lover, often younger than the intended murder victim. 

The story proper introduces the reader to slinky Leonore Black (complete with a telltale hourglass on her dress in the splash panel). Leonore has just married an older, richer man named Richard, but before so doing, she broke off an engagement with a more age-appropriate young man, Dan. Dan is not however Leonore's co-conspirator, and so his only function in the opening scene is to inform the reader that Richard happens to have a huge collection of dead spiders. Leonore coyly references her intention to knock off her new husband, but Dan doesn't pick up on the allusion.

Richard doesn't have long to enjoy his marriage to Leonore. He shows her his dead spider-collection-- the provenance of which is never explained-- and remarks that he fell in love with Leonore's arachnid-like allure. But Leonore is not swayed by flattery, for she carries out her next part of her plan by changing into a giant black widow spider, wrapping Richard in webbing, and giving him with a presumably poisonous bite. Leonore certainly wins no prizes for subtlety in her method of murder, but the police are duly stumped by a victim covered in webs, and no blame attaches to the newly-made widow. Her new status, though, gives her a cultural excuse to wear black all the time.

Leonore also isn't worried about social proprieties, for in a matter of days she's chatted up Dan and talked him into proposing to her. Apparently, even though she's soliloquized about using Richard's money to go after spider-killers everywhere, she harbors some idea of attempting a normal life with Handsome Dan. He takes her to visit a friend who runs a local aviary, and to Leonore's horror, the aviary guy likes to feed some of his birds with -- spiders. Leonore doesn't expose herself right away, but she does tell Dan an abridged "origin story." Young Leonore had an early fascination with spiders. Her paternal unit passed away, and her new stepfather tended to beat both Leonore and her mother. A black widow spider seemingly intervened, killing the stepfather. And after that, with no explanations related to either magic or super-science, Leonore simply manifests her "inner spider," and this gives her the power to change into a giant black widow.

Leonore of course has no intention of letting Dan's aviary friend off the hook, and he's her next target. The second murder makes even a dullard like Dan suspicious, so he invites his fiancee to his laboratory for a chat. Once there, Leonore, who perhaps is not the most attentive listener, learns that her intended is a zoologist, and that his lab is full of boxes conveniently labeled as containing toads, lizards, and wasps. Though Dan has not killed any spiders so far as the reader knows, Leonore picks up on his suspicions and decides that it's time for another extermination. Providentially, Dan has "giant wasps" in one of those boxes, and as soon as the insects are released, they attack the giant spider and sting it to death. Dead Leonore conveniently reverts to her original human form and Dan decides not to divulge her secret to the world.

 While male authors don't have a monopoly on the creation of female monsters, real or figurative, I can't avoid noting that nearly all the authors writing and drawing horror comics during this boom-period were men. That probably had some effect on the sheer quantity of "black widow murderess" stories. However, in GOWN, the monstrous female is barely motivated by killing for profit, given that her primary focus is the defense of the tiny arthropods with whom she's obsessed. The influence of her brutal stepfather makes Leonore more sympathetic than most cold-hearted vixens, even though her insanity is no less obvious. Real black widow spiders certainly are known for slaying the males who mate, or try to mate, with them, though at least one online source says that the lady arachnids are usually motivated purely by hunger. Leonore clearly doesn't eat her victims, though a few horror-publishers of the period might have been willing to go there. But the script does play around with one other spider-trait. In the course of the origin-story, Leonore mentions, seemingly to no point, that "I spend hours at the spinning wheel." The only symbolic reason to mention this, since it has no relevance to the plot, would be because Leonore wants to "spin" in some way analogous to the way (some) spiders spin webs. It's at least of passing interest that spinning wheels are dominantly associated with females, because in most tribal cultures, women weave and sew clothing for everyone. 

The monster-woman's last name of course references "black widow spider." Her first name, derived from "Eleanor," doesn't have any spidery connotations, but it does have a general horror-association, in that it sounds like the name of the deceased heroine from Poe's "The Raven."    

MYTHCOMICS: "DEATH BY WITCHCRAFT" (WITCHES TALES #4, 1951)

 Once more it's March, so it's time for another "Women's History Month" post-- though that doesn't necessarily mean finding only stories that would please feminists. Myths about negative aspects of femininity are as vital as those about positive aspects. As it happens, the horror story featured here accentuates the negative for both of the sexes.

As if so often the case with anthology horror stories of the Golden Age of Comics, there's no writer-attribution, though the artist has been identified as Rudy Palais, who was known in his time for an above-average ability to convey a creepy mood.

The story of Dora Mayberry, by her own account scarred with the lines and wrinkles of age, is book-ended on both sides by her relating her tale to an "inner circle" of evildoers made up of one traditional-looking witch, an equally traditional black cat, and several ghoulish-looking males. After showing her listeners the beauty she once possessed, she begins the story in what looks like the 1920s at latest. Dora receives visits from high-class Arnold Cavendish, but Dora's only interested in Arnold because he's rich-- or, more precisely, in the line to become rich when his sick, rich uncle goes to meet his maker. In fact, Arnold's just as greedy to get his inheritance as Dora is, and when the old boy has a heart attack, Arnold makes sure his uncle doesn't get a chance to recover.

However, once Arnold has all the money he'll ever need, he shows his true colors. He wants to live it up with every woman in town, and he refuses to marry Dora as promised. Dora alludes to the possibility of revealing some "secret" they hold in common, but once she's been well and truly spurned, the idea of revealing the secret never comes up again. Instead, Dora decides to sell her soul to Satan for the power to redress her injury, telling her tutor, "Some say women are weak-- but we CAN do evil!"

Up to this point the story has followed a fairly predictable course. However, the unknown writer takes a new turn by revealing that Arnold has a neurotic fear of growing old like his late uncle. He's so deranged on the subject that he makes a contract with two killers, saying that if they kill him painlessly in twenty years, he'll leave them a sum of money in his will. Clearly, Arnold wants to feel like he can burn the candle at both ends and then trust to someone else to keep him from getting old. (The possibility of self-execution apparently never occurs to him.)

Dora then studies the black arts for "long days and nights," which erode both her youth and her good looks. But she hasn't got in mind some mundane death-curse, as the story's title would suggest; she wants to use Arnold's own fears as the means of his undoing. Seven years later, she approaches Arnold, representing herself as his new housekeeper, and since she's no longer beautiful Arnold doesn't recognize her. The rich narcissist has lost none of his mania, complaining that elderly beggars are "people squeezed dry by time." (One might guess that he conflates advanced age with penury, since implicitly he wants to waste the family fortune and then perish before he has to live with the consequences of being a high-living grasshopper.)

Dora's gambit is to spook Arnold with the possibility that the thugs he hired are going to come early for their payoff and so deprive the rich wastrel of twenty years of self-indulgence. To sell Arnold on this possibility, Dora not only sends her victim minatory dreams, she seeks out the two thugs, arranges their deaths, and then turns them into her spectral henchmen. Not only does she panic the fool into committing suicide, she cons him into signing over all his wealth to his faithful housekeeper. Dora ends up becoming a rich old crone who then abets other wronged women into choosing a dark path to vengeance.

Arnold and Dora are practically living symbols of masculine and feminine negativity. Though horror stories harbor any number of male warlocks or magicians who use mystic powers for vengeance, there is in my opinion there is something uniquely feminine about the idea of a "sisterhood" of malefic witches (even though, as I admitted, most of the ghouls at the convocation are male). And although actual sex is not mentioned in "Death," the writer strongly implies that what Arnold wants, once he has money, is a life of "love 'em and leave 'em." Ironically, both of them would have been well suited to each other in terms of selfish greed, and Dora probably would have been an adequate match for Arnold if he didn't have his mania about "hoping he dies before he gets old," to misquote the song.

One half of Dora Mayberry's name sustains some symbolic interest. "Dora" is just a standard wish-fulfillment cognomen, usually translated as "God's gift." However, "mayberry" is one of many names attributed to the plant known as the "common hawthorn" (a specification necessary because various other plants are also called hawthorns). Hawthorn has strong witchy associations, being both used by actual witches in their rituals and employed by ordinary people to avert witchery.

NEAR-MYTHS: "IN THE GALLOWS OF THE GHOUL" (HANGMAN #8, 1943)

Many superhero comics of the Golden Age possess the extravagant and horrific elements of Gothic prose fiction, and a fair number of them use an expressionist style that's sometimes labeled "Gothic." The series I'm considering here, THE HANGMAN from MLJ, is one with such an artstyle.

The earliest prose Gothics, such as THE MONK and CASTLE OF OTRANTO, are noted for emphasizing a particular horror-element: that of incest. Despite the fulminations of comics-haters, most comics of all genres seem innocent of this particular element, in its sexual form.

In other essays I formulated an umbrella-term, "clansgression," to include all literary effects that even suggested incestuous activity or feelings, even if actual sexual transgression did not transpire. One form that did occasionally appear was the form of violence-clansgression. This usually took the form of madness-- fathers killed daughters, or brothers sisters-- but no sexual activity was suggested; such events were mainly melodramatic excess.

On the surface, "In the Gallows of the Ghoul" seems one of these. A madman, Jed Jennings, strangles his sister Mary, and on the next page throws his nephew out a high window. But Mary's plight has come to the attention of the heroic Hangman, and he saves the boy, though he can't prevent Jed's escape. So far, just "ordinary madness."

Hangman then tells his girlfriend the tale Mary told the hero (in his other identity)-- and then the story takes an unusual turn. Jed had been the sole support of his "widowed half sister." But when Mary conceives a child-- presumably from the late, unnamed father-- Jed becomes tormented with worry about being able to provide for both of them. As rendered by artist Bob Fujitani, the uncredited writer shows Jed spiraling down into madness, feeling himself mocked by the outside world-- though it's hard to say why the impoverished fellow would think the world would mock him for being poor. Then Hangman concludes his story, speaking of a "secret" revealed to him by Mary-- only to have the last narration cut off by the madman's appearance. Jed claims that his "secret" is that he suffered from a "brain disease" that made him feel persecuted. The villain kayos the hero, and threatens to strangle the hero's girlfriend the same way Jed strangled his sister. Hangman rises. Jed runs at him with a weapon, Hangman dodges, and Jed takes the same high dive out a window that he bestowed on his nephew, but with fatal results.

Yet the unknown writer created some odd discordances in the narrative, possibly even strange enough to make young readers think twice. The first picture those readers would've got with regard to Jed during the backstory was that when his half-sister was delivering her child, he was pacing the hospital floor "as though he were her husband, instead of her half brother." Then his first words to the doctor express his wish that the child will be born dead. In adult melodrama, these two elements lead to one conclusion: Jed *is* the child's father, but he's so ashamed of his sexual congress with his half sister that he wants all evidence of the act expunged.

Possibly the writer actually played around with using this raw idea-- man wants to murder his sister and sister's child-- but the writer realized he couldn't get away with such adult material in a kid's comic, even a gory one. Thus the script claims that Jed's concern is about having enough money to feed another mouth in addition to that of his half sister. And since worries over money were not enough to motivate a murder-- particularly since Jed could have just picked up and left Mary and her son to their fate-- the writer has to add in the excuse of a "brain disease."

Admittedly neither Mary nor her kid, due to their brief appearances, provide any support for this view. But I find it odd that the writer specified that Jed and Mary were half-siblings. It would make more sense if the two had been raised together, so that Jed felt a responsibility to take care of a full sister. But if they're half-siblings, the reader has no expectation about their having been raised together. Indeed, if they were not raised together, one might expect that sexual inhibitions would not have been naturalized by the so-called "Westermarck effect,"

Is it clear that literal sexual incest occurs in "Ghoul, as it does in Matthew Lewis's MONK. No. But Jed's extreme antipathy for his sister's son would have been a trope that many adults of the period would have recognized within the framework of an adult melodrama, enough to at least suspect some forbidden hanky-panky. The kids reading HANGMAN COMICS probably did not think twice about the matter, and probably accepted the explanation given. But the writer of the story was certainly an adult in the early forties, and one can't presume that he was at all innocent of the tropes used by adult melodramas. Even calling a man a "ghoul" is suggestive, not of a victim of psychological guilt and/or brain disease, but of a being that transgresses against society. And rather that transgressing by eating the flesh of corpses, Jed Jennings seems to commit murder to cover up a very different "sin of the flesh."

MYTHCOMICS: "THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS" (THE THING #17, 1954)

Even hardcore fans of old horror comics probably don't think much about Charlton's 17-issue title THE THING except insofar as Steve Ditko contributed both stories and cover art, such as the one seen above. And I'd have to say that most of the offerings were ordinary creep-tales without the gore that aroused the ire of parents and eradicated almost everything in the genre, aside from even blander work like DC's HOUSE OF MYSTERY. 

One of the gimmicks the editors used in THE THING were spoofs of famous fairy tales, which may have been an imitation of a similar concept seen in some of EC's horror comics. And in the last issue one such story, "Through the Looking Glass," managed a stronger symbolic discourse based on Lewis Carroll's ALICE books. The art was signed "Kirk," while GCD speculates that the writer may have been long-time Charlton workhorse Joe Gill. Comics fans know him best for collaborating on such sixties superheroes as Captain Atom and Peacemaker, though IMO his best credited work was on a tough detective, Sarge Steel.

In my review of the two, I pointed out that Carroll's Alice showed a certain amount of egotism and illogicality not always seen in film adaptations. "Glass" goes further, making the little blonde cherub (apparently a 1950s version) a holy terror. Whatever ambivalence Original Alice had as to her seven-year-old status, Cruel Alice hates children's books with a passion.

I'm not sure why Gill chose to have this Alice read THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, since like almost everyone else, he doesn't stick to adapting that book, or to ALICE IN WONDERLAND, but just jumbles together elements from both novels. She falls into a dream, and then falls literally, as down a rabbit-hole, and ends up in a "pool of tears," which has no context since this Alice never grows giant-size and sheds giant-sized tears.Instead of meeting a bunch of woodland creatures, Cruel Alice beholds a group of grisly ghouls who immediately announce their intention to eat her, which is a simplified version of the Carroll-theme I termed "omniphagia." Cruel Alice doesn't seem fazed by the threat. If anything, she decides right away that all these weird things mean that she's dreaming (which never occurs to Original Alice) and that now "I can be as cruel as I want."

Compared to what she does to the ghouls, Cruel Alice is almost merciful to the Cheshire Were-Cat. She meets the Mad Hatter and March Hare at their Mad Tea Party (as well as a background character who looks a bit like The Carpenter). The partygoers show Alice that they have no mercy to their Wonderland kind, offering her to snack on the dead body of the Dormouse before they dine on her. A handy beehive full of "killer bees" solves that problem, and then she meets the King and Queen of Hearts playing croquet (though not with flamingos). They claim to be civilized cards and they even show her their lovely dam.

The dam (not in Carroll) is just a setup for another drowning-death, as Cruel Alice shows the cards how to play poker, introducing them to a "royal flush." Her next two encounters are with the scions of the Looking-Glass World rather than Wonderland, the talking flowers and Humpty Dumpty, both of whom she happily expunges, albeit only after they provoke her.

Whereas Original Alice finds her occasional egotism dwarfed by the selfish and quarrelsome nature of the natives of her dream-lands, Cruel Alice absolutely outdoes her perpetually hungry dream-folk in unrelenting cruelty. In fact, when the remaining "citizens of Wonderland" beseige her, she apparently dreams up growth pills, ducks into a rat-hole (substitute for a rabbit-hole?) and makes herself a colossus so she can stomp everyone else to death. But whereas Original Alice escapes Wonderland in part by Getting Tall, for Cruel Alice getting too big for her britches proves a crushing experience-- because, for some damn reason the author can't trouble to explain, the homicidal child isn't dreaming.

"Glass" may not be a great story, even for Golden Age comics. But it's closer to the mythic meaning of Lewis Carroll than the majority of film adaptations, much less ungodly messes like THE OZ-WONDERLAND WAR. 

Though I've reprinted the whole story here, it's probably easier to read here.

NULL-MYTHS: "SPIDERMAN AND HIS WEB OF DOOM" (THE THING #7, 1953)

I probably wouldn't bother mentioning this minor story from Charlton's generally pedestrian horror-comic THE THING if it didn't happen to use the name "Spiderman" for its ghoul star, and if Steve Ditko didn't happen to be an occasional contributor to the title. But I'm not implying any influence, given that there's a very well-documented narrative as to how Jack Kirby brought the name "Spider-Man" to the attention of Stan Lee, who in turn teamed with Ditko on the resulting superhero. So this time the coincidence between "a title Steve Ditko worked on" and the name "Spiderman" seems to be nugatory, particularly because Ditko did not contribute to this issue and probably never read the comic except to check his own works.

An additional odd detail is that GCD attributes the story to Walter "The Shadow" Gibson, but if his other scare-stories are this lame, that explains why no one regards him as a horror-tale writer. An ordinary couple rents an old house from a creepy old fellow with the name of "Nemo" (though the name-use doesn't resonate with either Homer or Jules Verne). But Nemo tells the couple that no one should venture into the attic. He later tells the reader he knows no woman can resist opening a forbidden room, and sure enough, the wife does so. After a few false starts, Nemo, transformed into "Spiderman," attacks her, but only sucks her blood and lets her walk around the house like a zombie. The husband twigs to the plans of the arachnid menace and sets the house on fire, consigning Spiderman to burn up with his "web of doom."

MYTHCOMICS: "LEGEND OF THE LONG THIRD FINGER," (THE BEYOND #3, 1951)

I doubt that over the years, since starting the mythcomics project, I've done many celebrations of "Halloween Month." Nevertheless, at least for this October I'll shoot for doing more mythcomics, or near-myths, on a horror theme.

I've devoted a lot more mythcomics posts on the Archive to heroic adventure than to horror. This could be the result of my simply having read more of the former than the latter. However, on my film/TV review-blog, I doubt that there's as much of a disparity, though I'm not likely to do a statistical calculation any time soon. 

Anyway, my first October surprise comes from the horror-anthology THE BEYOND, published by Ace Magazines. A few of Ace's publications were trashed in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, but otherwise, the company's most notable publications from a modern POV are probably the superhero features "Magno" and "Lash Lightning" and the teen humor series "Hap Hazard." The company, which closed its doors in 1956, also published pulp magazines about such heroes as "The Moon Man" and "Secret Agent X." The story I've chosen bears no writer-credit, so as I've done in past, I'll treat GCD's attributed artist, Louis Zansky, as the sole creator, purely for narrative convenience.

One of the most interesting things about "Finger" is that it's a werewolf story in which the werewolf doesn't eventuate from a bite, a witch's curse, or a Satanic conjuration-- but from a moral imbalance in a "family romance."

In a story that appears to take place in early 20th-century France (going by the fashions and automobiles), the action opens on a deathbed curse. The caption tells us that the harridan in the bed is Marie, who was divorced years ago from the well-dressed, forty-something man, Aristide Chauvet. (The name sounds a bit like "aristocratic cavalier," even though the caption tells us he's a self-made man.) After Aristide cut himself loose from drunken shrew Marie, his fortunes improved as he built a successful business, married a second wife, and sired other children. However, on the occasion of her death Marie has invited her ex to her room just to place a curse on him before she passes, claiming that Aristide's first born should be his heir, and any other heir will die horribly.

The next two panels clarify the other figures in the room. The guy in the sailor-outfit is Jean, an aide to Aristide. The sinister-looking boy, whose real name is never spoken, is Aristide's first born, and on the next page Jean claims that the the kid's extra-long ring finger means that he's a born werewolf.

The kid's apparently been filled with resentment of his absent father by his late mother, as he hurls a dart at Aristide's face and rants about wanting to kill him. Aristide, though presented as a generally good guy, doesn't exactly win any good parenting awards with his next move: he won't take the boy into his own home, to imperil his new family, but he makes clear that he will pay Jean to be the child's guardian. Zansky implies that this state of affairs takes place over the next twenty years, for we never see Jean again or hear anything about the raising of the first-born Chauvet.

A panel or two later, Zansky relates with admirable celerity that by the time Aristide's two children have grown to adulthood, the rich man's fortunes have become more mixed. Though his daughter Denise is a generous, refined soul, his wife and grown son Jules exist merely to waste the money Aristide worked to accumulate. (It's almost as if Aristide is "destined" to have one bad wife and one bad son.) While Aristide and Denise discuss their family problems, the reader sees a werewolf break into Aristide's barn and ravage his livestock.

While Aristide and his servants organize a hunt for the strange intruder, possibly a madman rather than an animal, Zansky introduces the reader to Eduardo Valin, who's been engaged to live at the estate while teaching music to Denise. However, once all the men have left the house, the werewolf invades the house and kills Madame Chauvet. The surprisingly talkative beast-man explains his intent to knock off anyone in line for the Chauvet fortune, and even indulges in a little irony, observing that the older woman's cries will be "smothered in these garments you admired so much." (To be sure, she isn't smothered, as the next page testified that Madame's throat was torn out.)

By page 5 Zansky is all but stating outright the true identity of Valin (whose name comes from a Germanic word for "stranger.") Aristide keeps thinking he recognizes Valin somewhere, and Valin even gives him a photograph to jog his memory. Spendthrift Jules has returned for his mother's funeral but is anxious to be off again on his wastrel endeavors, and Valin even taunts Jules with the possibility of werewolves. Later, as they ride together in a car, Valin transforms "on-camera" and slaughters his second rival for Aristide's money.

Page 7 then delivers the quick wrapup. The clue of the overlong finger finally bears fruit, for that's one of the ways Aristide figures out Valin's true ID (though technically, he first realizes that Valin bears the same features as Marie). But the long finger has one more role to play. Valin has driven Denise off to a lonely area and transforms again. He apparently stalks his half-sister a while to "prolong the agony, " but this allows the local constables to overtake the malefactor with their "vicious hounds." No silver-bullet rule here; the hounds treat the wolf-man as he treated his victims, and a French cop observes that Denise "missed death by a finger-- a third finger!" (I've heard of missing something by a hair, or a whisker, but-- a finger? I think Zansky made up the expression for the sake of his ending.) And so Aristide's good relative lives and all his bad ones die-- though it's interesting that even though the rich man refused to let his first-born be part of his family, evidently Valin and Denise share a genetic patrimony. The one thing that links them is musical talent, though in this world, music has no power to soothe the savage breast-- or beast, for that matter.