Number 101


Frankenstein Friday: Steve Ditko's Mountain Monster


This is a Frankenstein story that at first glance looks traditional. It has the traditional look, the European setting, and it has the big monster. But without giving away the plot, I can say this story has two surprises: what the monster is, and what he becomes. Other than that, you're just going to have to read it.

The story came as one of two new stories in a book with two reprints, Fantastic Giants #1, September, 1966, published by Charlton Comics. It was an all-Ditko issue, reprinting two of his early '60s books, Konga #1, and Gorgo #1. I bought the original issues of those titles off the stands when they came out. At the time I was familiar with Ditko from the Charlton science fiction and mystery comics, and also from his short stories, back-ups for Jack Kirby's lead stories in the Atlas monster comics. I had even figured out that the name "Kodti," with which some Charlton stories and covers were signed, was an anagram of his name. Duh. That didn't take much brainpower, because Steve Ditko's work looks like no one else's. He never tried to draw in any other style but his.

The cover of this comic is especially enjoyable because of the unique caricature Ditko did of himself, plopped into the middle of the picture.


Even if this seems like heresy to some, I liked Ditko's work much better in the mystery and science fiction comics than I did as a super-hero artist. There wasn't anything wrong with his super-heroes, but it was in the anthology comics, the endless number of five-to-eight pagers he drew that I grew to appreciate him. Nowadays that's where my main interest is in Ditko's work.

Number 100


Wally Wood's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde


As you can see from the number above, this is Pappy's 100th posting!

For this occasion I wanted to bring you something special. I'm showing you a very early comic by Wally Wood and Harry Harrison, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
This comic has an interesting publishing history. I scanned it from my copy of Charlton's This Is Suspense #23, dated February, 1955, the last pre-code issue of that title.

Click on pictures for full-size images.
  The story was reprinted a couple of years earlier, in 1952 by Star Comics as Startling Terror Tales #10, with a cover by L. B. Cole. But the original printing was in 1950 by Fox Publishing in A Star Presentation #3. I don't know of any other one-shot comic book reprinted three times by three different publishers in less than five years.In the 1980s it was reprinted as The 3-D Zone #1, with a 3-D process job by Ray Zone.

Those are the only printings I know of, so this may be its first presentation in cyberspace, the fifth time it has been presented in 56 years.

 

This is a very fast moving adaptation of the famous Robert Louis Stevenson classic, an examination of the two sides of good and evil. It is a very rushed-looking job, but probably because of the Harrison inking. Harrison bragged once about how fast he could ink with a #7 sable brush, and this appears to be something he did using that big brush. Wood later did work on The Spirit for Will Eisner, and there are some Eisnerish characters and layouts spotted throughout the story. It's far from the best thing Wood or Harrison ever did, but based on the careers they both had later — Harrison as a famous science fiction author and Wood as one of the most revered comic book artists of all — it has a great historical interest.

I haven't read the original Stevenson version of the story for decades, but I remember enough of it to advise you kids, do not use this comic book version as the basis for a book report in your English class.

Number 99


EC Comics: Adultery Is For Adults!


EC Comics' Shock Suspenstories #11 was the first non-Mad EC Comic I ever read. I was too young to read EC's when they were originally available, and I was buying them blind via mail-order from Bill Thailing of Cleveland, Ohio. Bill sold most EC's for about 50¢ each in 1960 and '61.

Click on pictures for full-size images.

I remember being disappointed by the cover; a guy and girl (even if the girl was in a bikini) on a sailboat, another guy getting knocked out. It didn't look like what I thought of as a horror comic. When I looked inside I was additionally puzzled. There was a splash panel with a pretty girl carrying a basket, a man behind a tree, and big letters, THE TRYST. I thought, "What's a tryst?"

Well, at age 12 I wasn't really expected to know, which was a problem with EC Comics. They were written for older readers, but a lot of kids read them, too. I'm sure that if parents were looking over their young boys' shoulders in 1953 when this comic came out, they had their eyes widened by that word. A tryst is a lover's rendezvous. And in the case of this story, refers to one character's perception of the tryst as an adulterous one.

When I read the story I didn't know the older man hiring the young girl wanted to protect her virginity from other men because he wanted her for himself.

Virginity was also a word I didn't know. You may think I was naïve when I was 12, and you'd be right. It's hell when you have to get your sex education from EC Comics.

The panel where the new wife asks her older husband, who has stashed her away on an estate to keep her away from other males, if she could have a baby, got my attention. I knew a bit about babies and where they came from, but I was a bit weak on the mechanics of the process. I sure did like the picture that artist Johnny Craig drew of the young blonde babe, though.

In the story the old man suspects his young wife is having an affair with another man, so he kills that man.

I knew about jealousy, but sexual jealousy of this sort was beyond my comprehension at the time. Actually, it still is. I'm aware of the crimes people commit when under its influence.

The capper is when the husband follows his young wife into the woods, thinking she's having a tryst with a lover. Craig, writer as well as artist, loads up the captions with information about her buttoning her blouse, or blowing kisses, which would lead a reader to suspect she's up to no good.

So the husband does the ultimate act: he shoots into the woods, killing the person he thinks is his wife's lover.

The "lover" that the young wife was meeting was an orphan boy named Tommy, who lived behind the estate in an orphanage. The last panel shows a dead boy near a pond. Then as now, victims in fiction are objects, not "real" victims, like we find in life.

The fact that the orphanage hadn't been mentioned before didn't bother me at the time, but now I realize that it's good to plant that information in the story somewhere so the reader doesn't feel the denouement has come out of left field. Which is exactly what this ending did. We know the young woman wants companionship, but the husband's jealous mind has turned her actions into cheating, when she's innocent of nothing more than making friends with a young boy. What we don't know ahead of time is that there is anything like an orphanage nearby.

Well, that's comics for you! They don't have a lot of room for information, so sometimes this sort of thing is left out, and it weakens the ending. Still, when I read this story the first time I wondered why the husband would have a problem with his wife meeting a young boy. Wow, was I dumb, missing the whole point of the story because of my unfamiliarity with the ways of sex, love and lust.

Three of the stories in Shock Suspenstories #11 deal with adultery. Only the second story, "In Gratitude," doesn't deal with a triangle love affair.

I bet most of the readers of Shock Suspenstories were probably in the 13-to-16 year age group, almost all of them male. In that more innocent time this issue should have set off alarm bells somewhere with somebody's parents, but maybe the excesses found in the horror comics trumped this comic. I think parents were probably more upset by walking dead than jealous husbands.

In my personal opinion, showing a dead child, murdered as a result of mistaken sexual jealousy, seems over the line. By that time in EC's history I'm sure it was just another snap ending to another story. In retrospect it seems more powerful and disturbing.