shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Dec 8, 2015 10:30:29 GMT -5
I don't know why--the first color story, I believe, was drawn by Esteban Maroto, so may have originally been printed in Europe in color, though Corben got the color spot pretty regularly after that. Was Warren reprinting works the Spanish artists did overseas? First I've heard of this. Yes. Skywald was already two years old, but the Marvel/Curtis mags were just getting started.
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Post by MDG on Dec 8, 2015 12:52:36 GMT -5
Was Warren reprinting works the Spanish artists did overseas? First I've heard of this. I think their one-shot Dracula was all euro reprints.
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Post by Rob Allen on Dec 8, 2015 16:18:49 GMT -5
"The Low Spark of High Heeled Noise!" (from Creepy #57, November 1973) And what's with the title? Titles are rarely Moench's strong suit, but I'm utterly lost on this one. I bought this issue off the stands, and I didn't understand the title at the time either. I wasn't very hip. I'm not sure if Moench's poetry matches the meter of the song.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Dec 9, 2015 5:35:48 GMT -5
"The Low Spark of High Heeled Noise!" (from Creepy #57, November 1973) And what's with the title? Titles are rarely Moench's strong suit, but I'm utterly lost on this one. I bought this issue off the stands, and I didn't understand the title at the time either. I wasn't very hip. Ah, that makes so much more sense! Thanks for this. I just checked it out, and no. Not at all.
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Post by Rob Allen on Dec 9, 2015 13:14:57 GMT -5
BTW, this past Sunday, the 6th, was Ramon Torrents' birthday. He's 78.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Dec 22, 2015 12:28:44 GMT -5
Oops. Somehow, I missed this one a LONG while back, so I'm reviewing it now, a full year behind when it was actually published! "Buried Pleasure" (from Creepy #49, November 1972) art by: Esteban Maroto my grade: B- Plot synopsis:
A pirate captain and crew stumble upon a dazed man who wants to hire them to dig up something important. Presuming he means treasure, they take him aboard, planning to kill him once the treasure is found. Throughout the voyage to his mysterious destination, crew members keep being killed by some shadowy culprit. We finally learn it's the captain, killing off his men so that the treasure is split in fewer pieces. In the end, it's just him and the dazed man, but the treasure they unearth isn't gold -- it's the dazed man's vampiric mistress, who promptly bites the captain on the neck.There are a few things to like about this story, which was clearly inspired by yet another of Moench's horror movie rerun viewings. The repeated mysterious deaths aboard the pirate ship was likely inspired by a viewing of Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula film (you know, the famous Bela Lugosi one?) or perhaps the earlier 1922 F.W. Murnau Nosferatu. Either way, that sequence was eerily familiar, even if Moench tried to take it in a different direction. And the mysterious passenger with a secret that will yield karmic retribution for his abusers, well that's right out of the Atom Age horror stories Moench grew up upon. But you put them together, and the final story we're given doesn't have a whole lot of plausibility, even for a campy horror tale. I mean, these pirates have to have SOME sense, right? Surely betting EVERYTHING on a dazed passenger who just might be out of his mind was a pretty foolish idea. Captain, kill your crew AFTER you've verified the treasure exists! And besides, what if the treasure isn't all that big? Recruiting a good crew -- that's priceless and difficult to replace. Beyond all that, Esteban Maroto's involvement in this story ensures, as always, that any visual concepts Moench had in mind for this story are not realized. Moench has gone on record singling out Maroto as being his least favorite artist to work with because he never followed Moench's directions. So there are some interesting aspects to this story, and it's cool to see Moench venturing out into the pirate horror sub-genre for once, but the tale ultimately falters.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 18, 2016 8:27:32 GMT -5
"The Red Badge of Terror" (from Creepy #57, November 1973) art by: Jose Bea my grade: B- Plot Synopsis: During the Civil War, Norther soldiers pursue a Southern courier possessing General Sherman's plans to a home where they encounter a vampire who turns them; the three then lie in wait for more soldiers.The Civil War meets vampires. There's really nothing more to the story than that, though I admit it's kind of fun, and Jose Bea's art always dresses up a Moench story nicely. From the very first submission Moench contributed to Warren as a regular freelancer, we'd seen evidence that he was interested in mixing genres in his stories, and, more recently with "Just A Shot Away", we even saw him writing outside of the horror genre entirely with a war story, either because he was growing bored with it or because he was trying to solicit more work from non-horror publishers. So here war rears its head again.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 18, 2016 9:05:43 GMT -5
"Sense of Violence" (from Creepy #57, November 1973) art by: Isidro Monés ("Munes") my grade: A Plot Synopsis: A man walking down a dark street fears for his safety, is approached by another man and assumes he is about to be mugged. Instead, we watch a horrific stabbing and see the shadowy figure flee for his life, ultimately running to the cops and revealing it's the man from the beginning, and he stabbed a detective checking to see why he was out so late at night.This definitely makes my top five Moench horror stories of all time, beginning with a pretty impressive essay about violence in our culture: and then transitioning into the introduction of our protagonist, so burdened by these reflections on violence in our culture that Moench provides an unending torrent of internal narration that is delightfully saturated with fear of violence: Moench could have stopped at any point prior to this and, even without a plot, I would have been awed. But he then has our fearful protagonist approached by a stranger, and that's where Munes' art takes the reigns: Whereas Moench often experienced frustration with Spanish artists not following his art instructions, Muno seems to "get it" perfectly. The dynamic panel arrangements feel in-keeping with what we saw earlier on when Moench was still providing breakdowns to his artists, and (more importantly) Muno does an excellent job of conveying the misdirection this story so dearly depends upon. In the end, even if you could tell that Moench was going for the same twist ending he pulled back with "The Thrill of The Hunt", you respect the clever trickery being employed. My only regret is that the ending, in which everything gets explained, drags on for an entire tedious page. I feel like it could have been done with less words in a single panel ("He thought he was the victim, but he was really the killer!"). But overall...wow.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 18, 2016 12:21:01 GMT -5
"Not So Loud--I'm Blind!" (from House of Secrets #113, November 1973) art by: Mike Sekwoski (pencils) and Nick Cardy (inks) my grade: C+ Plot Synopsis: A swamp monster is killing anything that makes sounds because he is sensitive to them, including a cat that three young boys venture into the swamp to find. When they find the dead cat, the other two boys tease the cat's owner for being too sensitive. We then get a brief backstory on the monster (a blind man that a rogue scientist tried to cure and turn into the ultimate survivor, but this turned him into a blind monster instead). The two teasing boys then run into the monster and are killed.When Moench stories first began popping up in DC anthology titles, I wondered if he was writing specifically to get work published in those titles or if DC was purchasing scripts Warren had rejected. The answer seems clear with this story, which has very little Moench in it, but a whole lot of DC tropes instead. For one thing, the ten page length feels excessive here -- Moench would typically do a story like this in 7 pages -- but the extra length gives more time to humanize the boys and build tension for these innocents being in such a situation (the kind of stunt DC horror titles loved to pull, but Moench would never normally use kids in his stories unless the surprise would end up being that they were the truly evil ones). But really, the most disappointing part of this story is the concept itself. This is a bad rip off of both Marvel's Man-Thing and DC's Swamp Thing, which were, in turn, rip-offs of The Heap. The only real difference being that, instead of Man-Thing's sensitivity to emotions, this swamp monster has a sensitivity to sounds. But Moench doesn't do the internal narration the kind of justice that Steve Gerber does on Man-Thing, or even Len Wein does on Swamp Thing. This approach just isn't very Moench, even when we get to the climactic irony of the story: So Moench made a few more bucks and came a little closer to getting his foot in the door at DC (who knows? Maybe he would have gone on to be a regular contributor to House of Mystery and House of Secrets had Marvel not made him an offer around this time), but there's absolutely nothing worthwhile about this tale otherwise.
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Post by MDG on Jan 18, 2016 12:47:22 GMT -5
...but there's absolutely nothing worthwhile about this tale otherwise. Sekowsky + Cardy? Sign me up!
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 18, 2016 12:53:08 GMT -5
...but there's absolutely nothing worthwhile about this tale otherwise. Sekowsky + Cardy? Sign me up! Really, the art wasn't anything special this time around.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jan 18, 2016 13:46:52 GMT -5
I probably need that Pirate story.
And Sekowsky + Cardy looks pretty cool to me.
Also, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing were in development at the same time... All parties involved in their creation swear that Swampy didn't influence Manny. (Or vice versa.)
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 18, 2016 18:26:42 GMT -5
Also, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing were in development at the same time... All parties involved in their creation swear that Swampy didn't influence Manny. (Or vice versa.) I could be completely misremembering this, but wasn't Wein sharing an apartment with someone who worked at Marvel at the time (maybe Roy Thomas)? I think I recall someone making a convincing case here that the two might have subconsciously stolen from each other when the idea came up in casual conversation or something. Either way, I stand corrected.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jan 18, 2016 18:35:18 GMT -5
Also, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing were in development at the same time... All parties involved in their creation swear that Swampy didn't influence Manny. (Or vice versa.) I could be completely misremembering this, but wasn't Wein sharing an apartment with someone who worked at Marvel at the time (maybe Roy Thomas)? I think I recall someone making a convincing case here that the two might have subconsciously stolen from each other when the idea came up in casual conversation or something. Either way, I stand corrected. Yeah, it was something like that. I don't think Wein and Thomas were roomies, but (probably Wein) and (someone @ Marvel.)
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Post by MDG on Jan 19, 2016 11:51:25 GMT -5
I could be completely misremembering this, but wasn't Wein sharing an apartment with someone who worked at Marvel at the time (maybe Roy Thomas)? I think I recall someone making a convincing case here that the two might have subconsciously stolen from each other when the idea came up in casual conversation or something. Either way, I stand corrected. Yeah, it was something like that. I don't think Wein and Thomas were roomies, but (probably Wein) and (someone @ Marvel.) Possibly Marv Wolfman. But I'm pretty sure everyone's gone on the record that there was no intentional stealing.
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