The Haunt of Fear Volume 2

This second volume of The Haunt of Fear collects issues #7-12 and I think the first thing you should know about it is that every one of the 30 stories (I’m including the text-only stories that appeared once in every issue) was written by editor Al Feldstein. Plus I’m pretty sure he was writing “The Old Witch’s Niche” which was the mailbag feature. At the same time, even though I’d have to check this, I’d be pretty sure he was writing a lot of the stories for EC’s other titles, like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy, etc. So if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised? When EC was operating at its peak in the early 1950s Feldstein was an absolute engine.

But this isn’t to say he was a one-man show. EC’s stable of regular artists were becoming well known to a hungry fan base. Names like “Ghastly” Graham Ingels. Johnny Craig, Jack Davis (probably my favourite, though it’s close), and Jack Kamen. What’s more, Feldstein knew these guys were the real stars, and in the later comics collected here he started a regular feature profiling “The Artist of the Issue.”

The first two stories are representative of EC near its best and then near its worst. “Room for One More!” has a young man who wants to be buried next to his deceased parents in the family mausoleum. But there’s only one spot left in the crypt, so he has to kill off all his relatives and make sure their bodies are never found so he doesn’t lose his spot. As he puts it:

“No! I won’t be cheated out of my rightful place! After the last spot is filled, the rest of us are to be buried in the soil! Well, not me! I’m not going to be stripped of my flesh by crawling worms and rotting grave-mold! After I die, I want to be put in a silk-lined casket . . . and placed in the cool clean air of the Whitman crypt!”

He does a good job carrying out his plan, but of course his murdered relations come back from the grave and tear him to pieces and then take over the last spot for themselves.

It’s silly, but in the crazy EC manner, indulging their penchant for corpses coming back to life and meting out rough justice. The next story, “The Basket!”, is just derivative though. I think even the thickest EC readers will have twigged to the fact that the wicker basket Mr. Cabez always carries on his right shoulder disguises his second head, a wicked Siamese twin. So the big reveal, which so many EC stories build to, is a disappointment.

I’m sure Feldstein knew that story was a loser. He even spends a later story, “Ear Today . . . Gone Tomorrow!”, with the Crypt-Keeper playing a series of gags on the reader’s expectations. Sure you know where the fertilizer company situated right next to a graveyard is going to find a solution to their need for bone-meal, but do you know what’s going to happen next? And after that? I didn’t, even with the groaner of a title. But then I didn’t think a story called “The Irony of Death!” was going to be set in an iron foundry either.

Another thing Feldstein knew, without needing the results of the readers’ polls for their favourite stories presented in the next issue’s “Old Witch’s Niche,” was that people saw the “text” instalments (short stories without any accompanying art) as skippable filler. “Aw . . . go ahead!” the Witch says just before one. “Read it!” She’s begging you! (Unfortunately, that particular story is one of the worst.)

Mostly then this is just a fun mix of silliness and gore, with stories that usually show some greedy person getting their just desserts. Oddly enough, it’s in the story “Poetic Justice!” that this looked-for comeuppance most disappoints. More satisfying is a story where a guide lets his client get captured by headhunters and the shrunken head returns to pay him back in a manner that plays like a version of those stories about disembodied hands doing people in. Only this time the head has to roll around on the floor and trip the guide up before biting him to death. Because it’s only a head, you see. “The Gorilla’s Paw!” is another riff on the theme of being careful what you wish for. It’s all that sort of thing, familiar themes endlessly repeated, and yet it doesn’t get old.

What does wear a bit is the Old Witch, the Crypt-Keeper, and the Vault-Keeper constantly pestering readers to send away to get their copies of 5”x7” autographed photos of the three GhouLunatics “as we actually appear in the inhuman flesh.” Only 10 cents apiece or 25 cents for all three. I always wondered what these pictures actually were, and it was only from reading the EC history Foul Play! that I found out they were photos of artist Johnny Craig made up to look like the three different characters. I imagine if you have any of these original pictures now in decent condition they’re worth a lot of money.

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Batman: One Bad Day: Penguin

I’ve said before how hard a task it must be for any comic writer, or artist, to make something new and interesting out of Batman, a character who has been with us almost since comics began. But nearly as difficult now is doing the same for Batman’s line-up of famous adversaries. All the more credit then to the One Bad Day series for taking on this mission, and, from the couple I’ve read, doing such a good job.

One Bad Day: Penguin begins with the all-too familiar eponymous villain sitting on a park bench, a derelict, after having been run out of Gotham by a swaggering gangland upstart named Umbrella Man (a title that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his having an umbrella). Having hit rock bottom, there’s no place for Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot to go but back up and reclaim his criminal empire, which he does starting with only a gun and a single bullet.

As with the other Batman: One Bad Day books, Batman remains a secondary figure. He probably could stop Penguin, but as Penguin reminds him, things are actually worse in Gotham with Umbrella Man running things. Plus, wouldn’t Batman like to go back to the good ol’ days too? Which is an argument that Batman, surprisingly, buys.

As he goes along, Penguin picks up some muscle in the form of an all-girl gun gang and a really interesting sidekick named Lili. I think Lili may be a new character here, and I loved her. Basically she looks like a little girl with gigantic fists that she uses to beat down guys twice her size.

What Lili and another gang member who joins him share with Penguin is a memory of being a picked-on kid. This is a revenge tour for all of them in more ways than one, as they’re not just taking down Umbrella Man but hitting back at everyone who bullied them when they were growing up. It’s a way of making them more sympathetic as well as filling them out as characters, and while there have been no end of superhero and supervillain backstories like this (it’s something that, unfortunately, a lot of young people can relate to) I thought it worked here.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Penguin regains his perch atop the Gotham crime world, and ends up back running the Iceberg Lounge with his new team of sidekicks. Unlike the One Bad Day: Clayface volume this one feels more like it was meant to reboot the character and launch him into a new series of adventures with a new crew as back-up. I don’t know if that’s how it played out, but as a self-contained story I liked this well enough.

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MAD’s Don Martin Comes on Strong

There’s no way I can divorce my reading of these MAD paperbacks from the memories I have of them from fifty years ago, when I was just a little guy. They’re real trips down nostalgia lane, and on that score alone I can’t not enjoy them.

These stories by MAD regular Don Martin haven’t dated as much as a lot of the other vintage MAD books I’ve reviewed here. There’s less cultural and political stuff being sent up and more gags. What’s surprising though is how well Martin handles long-form comic storytelling, even if his punchline style of humour still comes out in the violent final panels that have guys being flattened by steamrollers or locomotives, or struck by lightning (“KAR-RACKK . . . ZAP!”). There’s even a couple of musicals thrown into the mix, with a take-off on A Star is Born and a chaotic opera that fittingly ends up with a pile of corpses on stage. And for the highbrow readers (of which I’m sure MAD had many) there’s no question that “Beauty from the Beast” was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s “The Progress of Beauty” (1719). I’m sure I didn’t get that when I was a kid, but I remember being reminded of it when I first read the poem later.

As a final note, I was surprised to find when I went looking for images of the cover for this one online that several of the stories had been uploaded in full to YouTube. That’s a platform that truly is eating everything!

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Something is Killing the Children Volume Three

This third volume of the Something is Killing the Children series collects issues #11-15 and even though it kept on after this (and may still be going, for all I know) things are brought to a conclusion here with the adventures of rogue agent Erica Slaughter in the Wisconsin town of Archer’s Peak. All the “big-toothed scary things” are killed and while the Order of St. George (not a team of heroes, it turns out) has suffered some uncomfortable exposure, they at least manage to find a fall-guy and hush things up.

Given how this volume ends I think I’ll take a break from the series. A break that may be permanent. I haven’t liked this comic much, and all the mumbo-jumbo mythology about the monsters and the familiars that the monster-killers carry with them didn’t interest me. I’m not into the story, or the characters, or the art.

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Batman: Off-World

Usually it’s a bad sign when familiar characters go off into space. In terms of horror franchises it didn’t work for Jason, Pinhead, or the Leprechaun, with each of those movies being clear indications that a shark had been jumped. So Batman in space wasn’t an idea I was keen on. “I have no business battling alien empires,” he reflects at one point. I could not agree more.

Given all that, I thought Jason Aaron did a decent job with this this six-part series. The set-up is, admittedly, crazy. Batman gets his butt kicked by some muscle that a Gotham gangster has brought in from way out of town. Specifically, he’s a goon from the Slag Galaxy. How he got to Earth I’m not sure, but I may have missed that part. Anyway, Batman figures that the only way he can beat the goon is to actually go to the Slag Galaxy himself and train against this new competition. So he gets on board an experimental rocket ship and off he goes.

The Slag Galaxy is a brutal place that’s run by the Blakksun Mining Company. The BMC have a mercenary force of War Stormers that go around enslaving the populations of various planets, resulting in mass orphanization. This of course gets Batman’s back up since he has a soft spot for orphans, not to mention injustice generally. So he decides to take on the BMC as part of his training, which proceeds with the assistance of the requisite sexy alien (a Stormchaser named Ione with lots of tattoos), a giant war wolf, and a Punch Bot that likes to get into fights (and lose them).

It’s pretty brutal stuff, as Batman works up the corporate ladder until finally taking on the co-CEOs of the BMC, a pair of baddies called the Blakksun Twins who rule the galaxy with “lawful omnipotence.” Wrath Blakksun is a tall dominatrix warrior woman while her brother Whisper is a nerdy-looking runt who makes people’s heads explode when he says something to them. They’re actually quite a creepy couple and I was only let down by how easily Batman manages to withstand Whisper’s dirty talk. It seems all you have to be is tough enough and you can take it. And we all know Batman is the toughest guy there is. Even if, as always, his code doesn’t allow him to kill any aliens. Which makes his taking out whole armies of mercenaries a bit hard to swallow, but at this point we just have to roll with it.

Then . . . back to Earth and a rematch with the goon he fought at the start. Who this time doesn’t stand a chance. It’s a tidy ending, and things are even set up for Ione to launch as she adopts the Batman mantle back in her galaxy (her sidekick, the Punch Bot. is now Bat-Bot for good measure). I think I can live without those adventures though, at least for a while.

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Batman: Europa

We begin with Batman going toe-to-toe with Killer Croc in some Gotham alley and the Dark Knight is really feeling it, but not in a good way. “Getting’ too old for this, Batman?” KC chides. And even though Batman finally puts the big guy down for the count, he has to admit that “it was harder than usual.” Is he getting old? In need of some testosterone replacement therapy? I mean, over the course of nearly a hundred years of crime-fighting he has taken quite a beating.

Alas, things are worse than that. It seems a secret canonical villain has infected Batman with a virus that will kill him in a week. This sends Batman hopping about Europe trying to find out who’s responsible. He’s first off to Berlin, then to Prague, Paris, and finally Rome (being sure to hit all the must-see tourist monuments like the Brandenburg Gate, Notre Dame, and the Coliseum). The twist is that he finds out early on that the Joker has been infected with the same virus, so they actually have to go on this little road trip together. It’s a team-up of unlikely partners, which turns out to be as much fun as you’d expect.

I didn’t care much for the story. The whole premise seemed like the flimsiest sort of excuse for throwing Batman and the Joker together. The problem I had with it is that I just couldn’t see how it made any sense, even on the level of the way the plots of most criminal masterminds in comic books are needlessly complicated and don’t add up. And then Batman’s trick at the end to take down the bad guy struck me as ridiculous.

But the plot isn’t the point anyway. What we’re really getting here is a gallery of striking artwork from different artists for each of the travel destinations. Now if all you want is art in the standard DC or Marvel comic book style then you may be put off by it. I found the Paris section by Diego Latorre to be particularly dark and sketchy, making a lot of the action hard to figure out. It reminded me a bit of Reptilian in that regard, for better and for worse. But most of the time I was really impressed.

Despite the interesting idea of pairing Batman and the Joker as buddies I really didn’t care for the script. What sells Europa is the art though, which is well worth a look.

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Simpsons Comics Jam-Packed Jamboree

The Simpsons have been with us for so long that a list of minor recurring characters from the show would likely be as long as the tax rolls in some small towns. And yet, even though it’s been years if not decades since I watched the show, I can identify all of them, or nearly all of them, as soon as they’re introduced. Examples showing up several times in this collection include Dr. Nick (catchphrase: “Hi everybody!”), Gil the worn-down salesman, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Hell, I even remember the Cletus song.

But I said I recognized nearly all of these guys because I had no recollection of Dr. Colossus. This sent me to the Internet to see if maybe he was introduced sometime after I stopped watching, but actually he’s been around since 1994.

I didn’t even notice Dr. C the first time he shows up in this collection, when he briefly appears with his mother before Judge Marge. But then it’s easy to miss things in these comics as they often have so many gags appearing even within a single cell that you have to squint and read the fine print to catch them. As usual, the stories are pure zaniness, giving you no idea where they’re heading aside from the fact that at the end normalcy (or what passes for normalcy in Springfield) will be re-established, with the Simpson family as indestructible as ever. Which makes you wonder at their evolution from what were, at the time, subversive roots, into something so conservative you could even think of them as an institution. Though after nearly fifty years that may be a natural progression.

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Batman: Under the Red Hood

Batman has always had a Robin problem. He’s never been that popular a character, doesn’t fit well with the Dark Knight’s grim persona, and the relationship between Bruce Wayne and his young ward probably seemed creepy at the time and ever since has become the stuff of comedy sketches. Even Robin’s costume looks campy and ridiculous, with elven slippers and shiny green speedo briefs under a shirt that might be a minidress. Fans even voted to have the Joker kill him off in the 1988 storyline “A Death in the Family.”

That particular iteration of Robin was Jason Todd, who was the second lad to step into the role after the departure of Dick Grayson (who went on to become Nightwing). In this story, however, Jason is back as a new crime-fighting crusader who goes by the name of Red Hood. Even though it’s more of a helmet than a hood. But whatever.

How Jason was resurrected is a tale too complicated for me to relate or, if I’m being honest, understand. Suffice to say that Jason as Red Hood is now taking out Gotham’s crime syndicates, which are being run by Black Mask. This should mean he’s one of the good guys, but his methods are quite brutal, which doesn’t sit well with Batman. It seems that when Jason came back from the dead he brought with him a taste for vengeance and rough justice, whether because of how he died or due to some infection from taking a dip in R’as al Ghul’s Lazarus Pool isn’t clear. So there’s a lot of blood in these comics, and bodies are soon piling up all over the place.

I thought it was a strong story, with good character development and conflict between the two leads. Jason/Red Hood has a grudge to settle with Batman, not for letting the Joker kill him but for not killing the Joker in revenge. And he has a case.

Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But why . . . why on God’s earth – ??! Is he still alive!!?? . . . Ignoring what he’s done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he’s filled. The thousands who have suffered . . . the friends he’s crippled . . . I thought . . . I thought killing me – that I’d be the last person you’d ever let him hurt. If it had been you that he beat to a bloody mass. If it had been you that he left in agony. If he had taken you from this world . . . I would have done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil, death-worshipping garbage . . . and sent him off to hell.

I think this is a question that a lot of Batman readers have probably asked over the years. But we just have to accept that the man has a code and that’s all there is to it.

The conflict between Bruce and Jason is the main one being explored throughout the series, and it culminates with lots of bone-crunching fisticuffs and blood splatter. There’s also some dark comedy, especially coming from Black Mask and his exasperation with his incompetent underlings. And I got a chuckle out of things like how the Batman symbol is printed on the soles of the Dark Knight’s combat boots.

Most of all, however, I think they finally made something out of Robin. I count myself as a die-hard Robin hater, and I’m not a fan of Nightwing either. Red Hood as the back-from-the-dead vigilante, however, is a character with some edge. There were a lot of improbabilities along the way and parts that I felt didn’t add up, but this was a solid comic all around.

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Batman: One Bad Day: Clayface

This is one of eight single-issue comics in the Batman: One Bad Day series, each by different writers and artists and each focusing on the tortured psyche of a famous Batman villain. Now in the case of One Bad Day: Clayface what we get isn’t an origin story so much as a reboot, since there have been a whole lot of Clayfaces over the years, which is what you might expect from such a Protean figure. What’s happened in this one is that Clayface, an actor named Basil Karlo, has left Gotham and is now working as a waiter in Hollywood, where he’s trying to break into the movie business. Things don’t go well, however, and soon “Clay” (his adopted name) is demonstrating that even if he’s not quite willing to die for his art he’s absolutely on board with killing for it. Which means literally working his way up the Hollywood food chain from fellow struggling actors to agents to directors to producers. They all get the mud bath treatment when they don’t share Clay’s creative vision.

I loved pretty much all of this. The story by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing (the Hivemind) is solidly constructed, even though initially a bit disorienting as we get introduced to all of Clay’s co-workers. Things keep escalating as Clayface works his way through the usual gang of movie-business jerks. And the punchline ending is both grim and funny. I don’t know if I’m a big fan of the art of Xermánico normally, but he really does a great job with Clayface here, giving pathos to his sad, pupil-less eyes. And finally I’ll call out the lettering by Tom Napolitano. Usually I rail against the speech of characters being presented in stylized ways where it’s distracting and not required. But here I thought it very effective. I liked how when Clay reverts to his Clayface form the speech bubbles become swirling, puddly forms and the lettering liquefies. I also thought the business of providing emphasis through the use of what looks like yellow highlighter was a gamble that paid off. It works with the way they present the text for the scene settings in screenplay format throughout (“Int./Ext. Sunset Chateau. Day.”)

Batman does show up at the end to put an end to Clayface’s theater of blood, or mud, which is done in a perfunctory way with a Ghostbusters-style trap and a quick moral lesson about truth and lies in the dream factory. But Clayface not only gets the last word, he’s also a far more complicated and compelling character. Sure he’s deluded about Hollywood, but he has the conviction of the true psycho, while also being sympathetic. I mean, who hasn’t wanted to throw mud at movie stars at some point? It’s just that Clayface is mud with teeth.

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Something is Killing the Children Volume Two

Volume Two of this series, collecting issues #6-10, and . . . things aren’t getting better. In terms of the story that means that all the little baby demons of the mother demon that Erica killed at the end of Volume One are now getting hungry and killing more of the children of Archer’s Peak. But what I really mean is that I’m not liking this comic any better as it goes along.

James, the kid who survived an attack by the mother demon, is laid up in the hospital most of the time here. So instead it’s Erica teaming up (sort of) with another demon hunter named Aaron sent out from the Order of St. George with instructions to clean up Erica’s mess. And that means more than just killing the demons. But Aaron turns out to be pretty useless. As do the police. And Tom Mahoney, the only other adult gifted with the ability to see the demons, isn’t much help either.

So actually very little happens. There are more references to obscure monster lore like the fact that the baby demons are “oscuratypes” who only exist in a shadow form until they start eating. Which is just a bit of mumbo-jumbo that’s introduced to keep the plot moving along (in order to kill them, Erica will need some live bait, you see). Erica and the demon hunters know all this stuff, and they’re impatient with all the normies they have to deal with who just don’t understand. This makes Erica irritating, but she’s not the least likeable character. To be honest, I don’t think I cared for any of these people.

Nor am I a big fan of Werther Dell’Edera’s art (though I love that name). Erica’s cyclopean look is certainly striking, but I found her oversized green eye to be distracting and even repellent. Meanwhile, some of the secondary characters are hard to distinguish, at least to my eye.

Well, maybe I’ll give the series a bit more rope. But so far things aren’t looking good. I’ll be surprised if I make it to the end, if there even is an end yet.

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