"Hunger of the Slaughter-Sludge Beasts!" (from Psycho #16, January 1974)

art by Jesus Suso Rego ("Suso")

my grade: C-



plot synopsis: Two detectives are on the trail of a monster that takes the place of objects and then devours people. They die. So do a lot of other people.


Forgive the lackluster synopsis, but this is absolutely one of Moench's most ridiculous scripts to date. Keep in mind that the Skywald magazines (Psycho and Nightmare) were only given scripts by Moench that Warren had already rejected. Add to that the facts that this was published after Moench stopped writing freelance, that this was nine months since he was last sending Skywald a steady flow of work, and that the story over-uses a repetitive narrative style (characteristic of stories Moench was writing a year earlier), and it seems evident that this was sitting in a Skywald file cabinet somewhere for quite a while, not even good enough for the publisher of Moench's reject stories until they were desperate.

Don't get me wrong -- the initial mystery is a compelling one. How in the world is a man who just died bleached down to pure bone and with the bathtub he was bathing in missing? I was intrigued. But then the solution made no damned sense:



So they CAN devour and replace bathtubs, pools, ovens, and airplanes, but bone is too tough for them? Heck, one DOES devour and replace a housewife at the end of the story, so what the heck? And what's with the abandoned water theme? At first, each incident involved bodies of water, presumably because the monsters were the result of industrial pollution on a nearby river, but then the monsters are taking the form of ovens and airplanes by the close. Were they adapting? This makes no sense.

Even the ending wasn't an ending. A husband comes home to his wife...who is really a monster:



So what? Couldn't it at least have been the executive who was ordering the dumping in the river that created this thing?



At least give us a little karmic retribution by the close?


But no, this was a pointless B movie type horror story, lacking even in a coherent plot structure nor comprehensible and consistent rules for what the creatures are and how they operate. Silly fluff, and nothing more.

"Suso," on the other hand, does a bang-up job on the artwork. Why haven't I heard of this guy before? He also makes the interesting choice of presenting a bi-racial family in one sequence in the story:



That's some really progressive stuff for 1974.

Schreck: "Worms in the Mind!" (from Eerie #55, March 1974)

art by Vincente Alcazar

my grade: B-



Plot synopsis: After a brief recap covering the previous two chapters, we see Schreck turning into a "werewolf" and then quickly being cured by his rescuer, who he goes on to name "Bright Eyes." She has created a cure that kills half the patients it's used on, and cures/innoculates the other half. Her base of operations, housed in an old insane asylum, is then promptly infiltrated by "werewolves," including her husband, who now believes he is the god of the "werewolves," and Schreck's wife at his side. They appear to escape, leaving Schreck and Bright Eyes to realize they are beginning to fall in love.


While the first two chapters of this story were out of this world, there are a lot more problems in this one. Moench wrote Schreck brilliantly when he was solitary and frightened, but now accompanied by another and feeling more confident, he reverts to that jaded sarcastic protagonist trope Moench often defaults to. He lacks the fear and sense of tragedy that made us empathize with him in the beginning and now comes off as relatively unconflicted, even finding no trouble in seeing the love of his life, now as a "werewolf" (zombie), running around with some other werewolf dude, and so he decides to fall in love with his new female companion mere moments later.




Beyond that, while I'd really been looking forward to how Moench would handle Schreck as a werewolf, it proves to be quite a letdown. The narration forces a sense of mental insanity far too hard to the point that it doesn't feel convincing:



and it doesn't make sense either. All the werewolves we've seen thus far were relatively clear thinking, only now with an illogical craving for murder tacked on to their personalities. that isn't what Schreck experiences at all.

Finally, I'm a little lost as to what the current conflict is. Bright Eyes explains her plan as if it doesn't stand a chance of working



but it pretty much sounds like they've got the whole thing worked out. How convenient to have stumbled upon someone who has a magic cure for this thing! I truly don't understand what Moench still wants us to be worried about. Three chapters in, this story is lacking in conflicts both internal and external.


Still a fun story, as I am a sucker for post-apocalyptic zombie stuff, and some of Moench's ideas here are compelling, but this chapter is certainly not in the same class as the previous two.

Man I have to get these Schreck issues!

I started buying Eerie with #52 and bought every issue from then thru #90. Schreck was part of my orientation to Warren and b&w horror magazines in general. I remember liking Schreck but I didn't remember what it was about until these posts. The art technique with the white streaks instead of solid black was new to me, and I thought it worked really well here.

BTW, the likely reason that you hadn't heard of Suso is this: even though Warren and Skywald both worked with Spanish agency Selecciones Ilustradas, Warren didn't want artists who did jobs for Skywald in his magazines. So some SI artists were in Warren books and others were in Skywald.

DuBay was still editor at this time, yes. However, he was the one who pushed for "The Spook," who Moench will introduce in two more months at Du Bay's request, and who will keep getting shoved down the readers' throats long after Moench is done with him.

"How I Beat the Draft" (from Weird Trips Magazine #1, March 1974)

(text piece)

Special thanks to MDG for scanning and sending me this article fourteen months back when I first started this thread


my grade: C+




Synopsis: In this four page non-fiction piece, Moench tells about going before the draft board and desperately seeking ways to get out of the draft for the Vietnam War.


I'm not really sure where this one came from. The inside cover to this first issue explains that they are looking for submissions from readers about their own perverse stories, but all contributions in this volume appear to have been done by professional writers and, I assume, for pay. How Moench got drafted (pardon the terrible word choice) for this kind of work is beyond me. Clearly, he was doing his best to get his name out there and pick up whatever odd jobs he could to bring in more cash.

It's worth noting that this is nowhere near Moench's first text piece. He wrote many articles for the Chicago Sun and Midwest Magazine, as well as an array of men's magazines, but I have been unsuccessful in locating any of these articles for this thread. This one is easier to find because it was printed in a comic book and, thus, was not treated as a disposable medium.


Regarding the article itself, it's nothing particularly stunning in any respect. Moench says a few slightly shocking things at the start about hemorrhoids, recreational drug usage, interest in girls, and idea that his long hair makes people think he might be homosexual, but it's hardly the kind of shocking and perverse content you might seek in an underground comic. Even his irreverence for the United States Armed Forces and the Vietnam War is shockingly ambivalent. He doesn't want to get drafted; no real ideological drive beyond that.

The narration is overly verbose, suggesting this might be an older piece that had been sitting for a while before this first issue finally saw publication. Moench's narration has been a lot more fluid for the past year or so by this point, no longer forcing the $5 vocabulary words with such regularity.

Still, once Moench's surprisingly unfunny one-liners and aforementioned thick narration get out of the way, what ensues is actually quite funny, largely utilizing repetition to drive the laughter home.

For example, Moench's one hope for getting out of the draft is a spinal surgery he was given as a twelve year old, the name and purpose of which he does not recall at all, and he has been unable to reach the doctor who performed it on him so many years earlier:




When that gets him nowhere, he's sent in to see the psychiatrist, for whom he attempts to utilize a passage from Jospeh Heller's Catch-22:



Not effective. But when that guy needs to leave, and is replaced by another psychiatrist, he tries again:




In the end, though, what saves him is finally learning the comic delivery style of this surreal world he has entered:





Not laugh-out-loud funny, but quite amusing stuff, and while it isn't brilliantly poignant, it suggests something about the carelessness and arbitrary justice of the system attempting to recruit him and send him to then die or kill.

I also respect that Moench introduces George, a friend he meets at the Draft Board that sheds some really important information about what the military is doing in regard to race:



That Moench never once has to tell us George is black and yet manages to somehow convey that in his personality without resorting to stereotype throughout the rest of the story is, itself, quite impressive.

Sorry, I'm baffled on this one.