When did a plot to scare people away from the scene of the crime succeed? By that I mean having the crime scene look like something supernatural is happening? I believe such a scene would attract more of the curious, as well as lawmen. Tutankamen (as “Tutankiem”), is the culprit. According to the story, there is a curse on Tutankiem’s tomb, and his mummy is “a thousand years old.” That is at least a couple of thousand years off the real history and death of Tutankamen.
Any given image of an Ægyptian mummy in popular fiction is most likely to be based primarily on other images in popular fiction. Especially influential, of course, are the horror movies from Universal Studios in the '40s. Real Ægyptian mummies and mummies more generally tend to look decrepit and fragile. (The 1932 film was very restrained in how much it showed of Imhotep in bandages, and otherwise depicted him as stiff, desiccated, and disintegrating. Kharis, the Mummy of the later films, was physically formidable, sometimes fast-moving, and always shown bandaged except in flashback.)
ReplyDeleteMy impression is that there have been many comic-book stories featuring archæologists or museum officials disguising themselves as mummies to commit crimes. And it's quite clear that blow-guns are wildly over-represented amongst weapons in comic books.
I guess that it wasn't until “The Confession”, in Shock SuspenStories #4 (Aug/Sep '52), that a comic book featured a story of an innocent man beaten into making a confession. Yet I have to wonder about people so stupid or willfully blind that they imagine either that the innocent will not be broken by torture or (still more absurdly) that only the guilty will be tortured in the first place.
Hmmm. I wrote a mummy story in THE CREEPS recently. You'd like the art.
ReplyDeleteDarkmark, congrats on your story. I have seen Creeps, and think it is a terrific homage to the original Creepy I loved back in the mid-'60s.
ReplyDeleteDaniel, so many mummies! So few daddies!
ReplyDeleteI agree that the images of mummies we see in the comics are inspired (or swiped) from the Universal Pictures movies. Even though I enjoy all the original Universal monsters, when watching them on TV in the late '50s the mummy was the least frightening to me. The mummy usually moved too slow; I figured that even as slow as I was, if the mummy was chasing me I could keep out of its way.