The Hound of the Baskervilles

When it comes to graphic novel versions of the classics, artists are in a tough spot. They’re rarely free to go their own way and the text, of which there is usually a lot, can be quite an anchor. Nevertheless, the right combination of an artist’s visual style with a classic author’s sensibility can have magical results.

This adaptation of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles falls somewhere in the middle range. It’s very faithful to the text, not just incorporating a lot of the original dialogue but even keeping the novel’s chapter breaks and titles. Luckily, Doyle’s story isn’t that long so it’s a manageable job. And the art by I. N. J. Culbard isn’t generic. He does have his own style, as perhaps best seen in his signature way of drawing faces with a curved vertical slash that descends from the middle of the forehead to past the end of the nose. I have to say this really puzzled me as it shows up on every face and I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to correspond to. A cheekbone? Ritual scarring?

Was Culbard’s style a good fit though? I think so, at least for a version aimed at younger people. The violence is softened, with the bruises and welts on Beryl’s body, for example, turning into the faintest of shadowing. And I’m afraid the hound itself, in its climactic appearance, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Slimer from Ghostbusters. But then the hound, whether in illustrated versions of the story or appearing on screen, is almost always a disappointment, going on over a century now.

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Foul Play! The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E. C. Comics!

One of the most remarkable things about the immediate cultural impact and subsequent legacy of E. C. Comics is that their glory days only lasted for about five years, from 1950 and the beginning of their “New Trend” in (mostly horror) comics, to 1955 and the implementation of the Comics Code. They weren’t DC or Marvel, comic-book brands that are not only still with us but bigger now than ever. Even MAD, an E. C. spin-off that became an American institution for several decades, is today mostly defunct. Nothing of E. C. lasted in a business sense, even though they were always ahead of the game and the comics and magazines they published are now widely acknowledged to have been among the finest examples of the form ever. Meanwhile, we’re drowning in MCU and DCU slop. There’s a depressing lesson in there about how it doesn’t pay to be too good at what you do.

Foul Play! by Grant Geissman is an oversize coffee-table book taking the form of a gallery of pocket bios of the artists who made E. C.’s New Trend such a comics phenomenon. Presented in this way, it led me to a deeper appreciation of names like Johnny Craig, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, and Wally Wood. To be sure, E. C. did have a house style, but taking the time for a closer look you become more aware of their individual qualities. Also included for each of the main artists is a full story pulled from their time at E. C. Not reproduced in the remastered format fans will know from the reprint editions recently put out by Dark Horse, but in all their original, faded and yellowed glory.

Along the way a lot of interesting tidbits come up. I liked hearing about the Leroy lettering system (not mechanical, but hand-drawn using a template), which was used by Wroten Lettering to do all the comics here. That outfit must have stayed busy. Having always been curious about the ads to send away for photos of the GhouLunatics – were they actual photos, or illustrations made to look like photos? – I was delighted to see reproductions. And yes, they were actual photos, with Johnny Craig made up to look like the Vault-Keeper, the Crypt-Keeper, and the Old Witch. It was interesting to find out that at a convention in 1972, the story “Horror We? How’s Bayou?” was voted the fan favourite as Best E. C. Horror Story, with Graham Ingels (who did the art) being voted “Favorite E. C. Horror Artist.” That story is included in full here. “Ghastly” stuff indeed, and its popularity tells you something about what readers wanted more of.

I’ve called this a coffee-table book, and I hope it’s clear that I don’t mean the label in a disparaging way. There are great books of this kind, and Foul Play! (a terrible title, by the way) is one of them. If you’re a collector of E. C. comics, or have any interest at all in the comics of the time, it’s well worth a look.

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Amazing Fantasy Omnibus

The comics collected in this omnibus edition cover a Marvel title that was in flux for most of its short life: from Amazing Adventures to Amazing Adult Fantasy, to simply Amazing Fantasy (the first issue of which contained the debut of Spider-Man). The numbering remained constant though, so Spidey’s first appearance was in Amazing Fantasy #15, even though that was the first in the serie to be so titled.

Anyway, Marvel was spinning its wheels a bit here trying to find its core programming, not yet having landed on superhero fare as its bread and butter. Titles like Fantastic Four and The Hulk were just starting at the same time and in the recurring adventures of Doctor Droom in Amazing Adventures we can see an obvious precursor to Doctor Strange. Instead of superheroes, Amazing Adventures was mainly about monsters, while Amazing Adult Fantasy (“The magazine that respects your intelligence!”) was more like a comic version of The Twilight Zone.

It’s always nice to read an honest critical introduction. In his intro to the Amazing Adventures section Stephen Bissette makes the point that, well, these weren’t great comics. Nowhere close to being up to the level of EC ten years earlier (admittedly pre-Code), they’re only juvenile and silly, culminating in the giant Ssergo being yoinked from the surface of the Earth by a “large sky-hook from Jupiter.” That wouldn’t have impressed six-year-old me.

“Truth be told,” Bissette admits, “what Amazing Adventures became remains far more interesting than what it was.” And what it most immediately became was Amazing Adult Fantasy. It was an unfortunate title even when it debuted in 1961. As Stan Lee tried to explain in a mailbag, “the only reason we put the word ADULT on the cover, is to distinguish our carefully-edited, and literately-written mag from the usual crop of comics which seem to be slanted for the average 6 year old with a 3 year old mentality! Anybody with brains enough to appreciate AMAZING ADULT FANTASY is our type of reader.” Remember, this is the magazine that respects your intelligence! And to their credit, the short stories in AAF (mostly written by Stan Lee’s brother Larry) are all pretty interesting in the Twilight Zone style I mentioned, with lots of last-panel plot twists. “The Terror of Tim Boo Ba!” which graces the cover of issue #9 as well as this omnibus edition is a great example. And there are even a couple of stories that riff on the classic Twilight Zone “To Serve Man” episode. But whether I’d call this stuff brainy is another question. The stories rely pretty heavily on simplistic caricatures, like the guy who builds a fallout shelter in his backyard and says things like this as he locks himself away:

“Goodbye, you poor fools! I don’t care what happens to all of you! But I shall live safely in my shelter and laugh at you when the bombs fall! Nothing can harm me here – nothing! Not even a direct hit by a nuclear bomb! I’ve enough provisions and oxygen to last five years! No matter what happens to the others, I shall survive! And if any of them try to get in to share my safety with me, I’ll laugh at them! I paid for this shelter . . . it is mine alone! . . . Nothing can harm me! No one can hurt me! Ha ha ha . . . let the rest of mankind perish! Who cares?!! I’ll be the last man alive on Earth!”

I don’t have to tell you that things don’t work out quite as he expected.

Still, as corny as it all is these stories are a lot of fun, and Steve Ditko’s art gives them an extra jolt. There’s a thing throughout of placing all-red figures against all-yellow backgrounds that has an electric effect. It’s all about heightening the impact, the visual correlative of the all-caps, all-exclamation mark speech bubbles that were the fashion at the time. I mean, when you have a character introduce himself matter-of-factly by saying “My name is Henry Burke! I’m a scientist!” then you know there’s nothing that isn’t going to feel like it’s being yelled or screamed in your face.

But in our own age of eye-ball grabbing headlines and click-bait thumbnails I think we have to smile. You do what you have to do to get attention in the media economy, and if that means always being dialed up to 11 then so be it.

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