Number 2121: Poor humanfly

Tomorrow is Halloween, so this is the last of my Halloween stories. I showed “Bug-a-Boo” by Doug Wildey first in 2007. It is time to bring it back again with new scans from my personal copy of Mysterious Adventures #17 (1953).

Wildey went on in his career to create Jonny Quest for Hanna-Barbera. But he had his apprenticeship doing comic book stories, as quoted in the Wikipedia page for Wildey, for “every publisher but EC, ‘the good one.’” His technique on this story is inspired by the look of EC.

As for the story, some soldiers and a scientist go into the unexplored part of the Amazon jungle for a secret project. As a horror story it uses the EC template of rough justice: a person does something awful, and a doom equivalent to his deed kills him.

Enjoy your Halloween!

Number 1980: Curse of the goat legs

Until the recent World Series win by the Chicago Cubs, the curse of the billy goat was used as a reason for the decades since they last played in the Series. You can read about this sports curse here. The World Series has been over for a few weeks now and the “curse” has been overcome. At least for the Chicago Cubs.

Our story today of a goat’s curse is set in a strange south-of-the-border land with swamps and medicinal herbs. It has a wronged drug company employee, Manuel, going to a voodoo man to lay on the curse of the goat. The confusing geography with a Haitian religion mixed in is not found on any map. But I wonder if the writer was familiar with the urban legend of the Chicago Cubs’ goat curse?

No artist or writer identified by the Grand Comics Database. The story is from Mysterious Adventures #10 (1952).

Number 1779: Origin of Doll Man: Let’s get teeny-tiny

Feature Comics, which had once been Feature Funnies and was composed mainly of comic strip reprints, went over to superheroes when that genre exploded, saleswise. Will Eisner created Doll Man for Feature Comics #27 (1939). He wrote it under the name William Erwin Maxwell, and it was drawn by him, probably with some help from his art shop employees.

Doll Man is a tiny man, and the story is a tiny story. Four pages. There is no portent of how popular the character would become. Doll Man appeared throughout the forties, through the superhero crash, into the fifties. DC bought up the Quality superheroes, including Doll Man, who did show up later in DC’s revivals of the Quality heroes.

Getting small is a really popular theme, used over and over again. In this horror story from Mysterious Adventures #2 (1951), becoming tiny is the horrible fate of a young couple. They do nothing to deserve their fate but be in the wrong place with the wrong villain. That is what makes it so horrible!

In 2012 I showed the origin of Doll Girl. Just click on the thumbnail.

Number 716


"Shadows, shadows..."


Back in the '80s when I sold comic books through Comics Buyer's Guide I photocopied some of them before sending them off to their new owner. It depended on the availability of a copy machine; I mostly used one at work and hoped I wouldn't get caught. While copying this violent comic I worried my boss would come in the door of the copy room and yell, "WHAT THE HELL KIND OF SICK SH*T IS THIS?!" I was lucky that time. I didn't get busted.

Here's some of the sick sh*t: vampires, werewolves, undead corpses, dismembered limbs, internal organs, domestic violence, hangings...even a hatchet to the side of a guy's head. All in noirish black and white. What's missing in black and white is red blood. When I looked at the photocopies I thought of a line from the John Prine song, "Lake Marie:" "You know what blood looks like in a black and white video? Shadows, shadows...that's exactly what it looks like."