Both “Yawning Graves!” and the other story, “Within the Tomb,” are drawn by Kenneth Landau. Landau had a long career as an artist, with only a few years as a comic book artist. But if he showed anything in comics, he showed he could draw decomposing corpses as well as anybody in the business. Ken Landau signed his work. Yay! Not every artist was proud to put his or her name on horror comics art. He wanted people to know who drew it. Beyond that, I think Kenneth Landau is underrated for his comic art.
The Grand Comics Database has no listing for “Within the Tomb.” With the inclusion of a horror host (top panel, page one), it eliminates thought it could be from an ACG publication. It is loosely inspired by “The Premature Burial” by Poe, although the story is modernized, and takes a scientific approach: people can appear dead and still be alive with an anesthesia invented by Chauncey Joad. Chauncey has a scheme to use the appearance of death for a criminal act. It is a horror story, so you can probably guess what happens next.
There is, of course, a problem with the logic of the second story. The conspirators didn't know the effect of a second injection of the anæsthetic, but Juan would know the effect of an injection of something such as potassium chloride.
ReplyDeleteACG wasn't fully defunct before the '80s, so I doubt that Morse appropriated their property without license. But in 1969 their pre-code horror stories might have been imagined to have relatively little value, so that Iger might have fully transferred the rights for relatively little money, or licensed a one-time use for even less.
Really gorgeous work on the art. I've seen both these before, but they are, IMHO, a bit better in stark B&W.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to be of two (undead) minds with the second story. The wall to wall text isn't bad at all, but it's always a nitpick when there's so much text in a comic story.
Two nice pieces. Eerie pubs could have used the competition, I loved them, but they were also pretty slapdash at times.
Daniel, I hadn't thought of this until now, but Morse might have gotten the black and white proofs from some publisher outside of the U.S. who had the rights to print them in that form.
ReplyDeleteSince ACG went out of business in '67 Morse might have supposed (and probably, rightly so) there was no one to sue him.
Brian, I believe Eerie Pubs might have suffered from the editor, Carl Burgos, who, when he was at Atlas/Marvel, had a tendency to make changes in other artists' work. I never cared for the sloppy look of the Eerie magazines...I knew they were going for a different look than the other black and whites on the stands (Warren, Skywald, etc), but I hated the blobby blood inked over the original art just to make them gorier.
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