Number 2501: Stolen tombstones

The unlucky “Guest of the Ghouls” is a man (a bad man, because this is a horror comic) who steals tombstones. Tombstones! What would someone do with a tombstone? I know about collectors, especially comic book collectors, but I’ll be in the ground with dirt being shoveled over me and still not understand what one would do with another person's tombstone. They get very bulky, and heavy.

Oh, yeah...I did say it is a horror comic, and logic flies — in bat shapes perhaps? — out the window  in a horror comic. The walking dead also have evil deeds of their own, but they get after Javitt Rodman, because as one of the ghouls says, “You have robbed the dead of their only identity after death, their tombstones!”

Saying something positive about the story, artist Sid Check, using his best Wallace Wood imitation, does a good, creepy job with the corpses. It is from Beware #7 (1954). (Mr Karswell showed the story in 2009, so it is time to show it again. I swear I did not steal his scans.)

 A couple of my favorite Sid Check stories here. Just click on the thumbnail.

 

 

Number 2141: Check this out: “The Kissing Bandit”

Edna Murray was known as “the Kissing Bandit” for a kiss she gave a victim of a robbery she committed. She was an all around public enemy, whose associations were with criminals, as she is portrayed in this story from Avon’s Gangsters and Gun Molls #2 (1951).

Like most “true” crime comic book stories, there is a mix of some fact and some fiction. Some names are changed, but Edna’s is not. I have wondered in this blog if changing the names of criminals in crime comics was a way to avoid being sued by that person if they were still alive when the comic was published. But Edna lived until 1966, and she is named, so I guess my theory is still just that. Edna was involved with the infamous Barker-Karpis gang in that late Wild West era of the early 1930s. She went to prison. She was involved with Volney Davis (re-named “Owney” Davis in the story), who went to Alcatraz, and was eventually released. He died in 1979, not in a shootout with the police in front of Edna, as portrayed in the story.

The story is drawn in a striking Wallace Wood style by artist Sid Check (his name is on a teller’s window in the splash panel). Despite appropriating the style of someone else, Check was a talented artist about whom not much has been published. Alex Jay of the Tenth Letter of the Alphabet blog, has done an outstanding job of collecting what is known of Check in the public record. Check left comics about 1958. His comic book career began about 1950, and he was part of that talented group of comic book men, including Wood. Check was born in 1930, and died just short of his 72nd birthday in 2002.

Number 1702: “Fish nibbling at my flesh...”

“The Thing From the Sea” looks a lot like an EC story of the same era. But it is from Avon Comics’ Eerie #2 (1951). The plot of a dead person coming back to wreak revenge on his murderer is a cliché, but the art treatment here is first class. Wallace Wood’s distinctive style distinguishes this story, beginning with the striking inside front cover, deftly illustrated on coquille board.

Jim Vadenboncoeur Jr gives credit for the inside cover to Wood and Sid Check, and for the story to Wood, Joe Orlando and Check.

Number 945


Check and double-Check


Compared to many of the journeymen comic book artists I feature in Pappy's, Sid Check did relatively few stories during his career. He did a reasonable imitation of the better known Wally Wood, some stories looking better than others. He even found his way into EC comics as a freelancer with a couple of memorable stories.

Here are two stories of Check's that I have on file: "The Werewolf's Victims" I showed long ago, but I have re-scanned it so the pages are actually readable. It's from Atlas Comics' Mystic #31, 1954. "Death Sentence" is a story I have both in the printed version from Harvey's Tomb Of Terror #14, also from 1954, and these scans of the original art I took a few years ago from the Heritage Auctions site. It's the originals I've chosen to show you today.

More Check stories can be found, posted by Mr. Door Tree in his Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog, here.

Number 43


The Werewolf's Victims


What's Halloween without a werewolf story? I'm partial to werewolves. They get to run around and bite people. Baaahahaha!< This story is from Atlas Comics' Mystic #31, June 1954. It's by an artist of the Wally Wood school, Sid Check. I only know of a few Sid Check comic book stories from the Golden Age. He must've hung out with the EC gang, though, because some of the stories were published by them.

Doing a search of Sid Check's name came up with this page from Lambiek.net, but no biographical information, birth date, etc.

The Werewolf's Victims would have been right at home in Creepy or Eerie magazines a decade later. The stories they ran in their earliest issues had stories and endings that were very similar. And the story is both creepy and eerie! The idea of a bunch of men held captive in a cave, being killed off one-by-one by a werewolf is pretty scary...unless you're the werewolf.