"Eye Opener" (from Vampirella #20, October 1972)

art by Rafael Aura León ("Auraleon")

my grade: B



Plot synopsis: A salesman taking a long road trip stops at an old house, requesting a place to stay for the night. He is captivated by the young girl living there and haunted by the blind grandmother who lives with her. The grandmother claims to "see" through her deceased husband's eyeballs, which she keeps in a box. The salesman sleeps with the young girl, and the grandmother, claiming to have seen it all, curses him and demands that he leave. On the road once again, he is haunted both by the eyes and (more importantly) by what the eyes saw in him, and he becomes so distracted as to drive right into a truck, painfully dying before his eyes magically appear alongside the deceased husband's in the grandmother's box.


Whereas Moench has been given a different artist for every story up to this point, we're now seeing Auraleon do his pencils for the second story in a row (fourth, if you count the one page interior cover stories I'm not including in these reviews). They'll be teamed up again for a one pager next issue. Random luck? One requesting the other? Or perhaps it's the fact that Auraleon was now proving to be a steady and quality contributor, just as much as Moench had now been for a full year, and thus pairing the two made sense.


For the story, itself, Moench has clearly been trying to experiment with his approach to storytelling as of late, and I like what he arrives at here. In both I am Dead, Egypt, Dead and Won't Get Fooled Again, we saw Moench try to incorporate elements of crime noir into his horror writing with mixed results. This time, though, we have a noir protagonist, complete with jaded internal narration and a desire to use everyone he sees, become the victim in a more classic style of horror story. And, like the classic Atom-Age horror stories, the victim is karmically deserving of his fate. It's a well blended marriage of the genres.

And Moench incorporates a clever visual premise, as well, in which the supernatural element is an old blind woman who sees with the eyeballs of her husband, which she keeps in a box.



The visual concept becomes clever because, ultimately, not only can the eyes see into other rooms and across the house, but, in beaming images of the salesman into his head at the end, they cause the self-serving protagonist to metaphorically "see" himself for what he is before tragically crashing his car.

There might also be some subtle commentary about the fact that the man had left his wife (leaving her a letter that said, "Gloria, please drop dead. Love, Sollie"), contrasted against the grandmother still having a weird connection to her husband beyond the grave.

Art-wise, Auraleon does a nice job once again, employing some of the gothic tone Moench had been pushing so heavily earlier on, but also bringing a surprising warmth to his pencils, whether in the aura of an electric storm or the face of the young girl. It feels very life-like at times. The scan below doesn't quite do justice to it.



And yet, the panel arrangements are remarkably constrained and unimaginative; not at all in keeping with the breakdowns Moench had been providing to his artists prior to this point.



Two stories back, I assumed Esteban Maroto just wasn't following Moench's breakdowns when he did this on Cross of Blood, but maybe it's Moench who has changed, trying to downshift from the heavy atmospheric pieces in favor of new experimentation. Or maybe he'd stopped providing breakdowns at this point.

Just picked up $130 worth of early Moench stories at Motor City Comicon this weekend. I now have almost every story he wrote up through his first year at Marvel. Additionally, as my personal life is starting to become less complicated (fingers crossed it stays that way), I hope to be updating this thread A LOT more regularly and getting to some stories and titles that you non-Warren folk will know and enjoy. Stick with me

Already incorporated it all into my collection and lost track

Heh.

Well I can try to work from memory:

Nearly all the remaining Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella issues that Moench is in, a handful of early Marvel Moench issues (Ghost Rider #5, Creatures on the Loose #30, Fear #25 and 26, etc) and then a whole bunch of Avengers issues I still needed.

In short, my want list is very light at the current moment

"Bright Eyes!" (from Eerie #43, November 1972)

art by Richard Corben

my grade: A



Plot synopsis: The story is told from the point of view of a barely cognisant zombie working on a cotton plantation among many other zombies for a master it worships and affectionately refers to as "Bright Eyes." The master is a cruel profiteer, but something about the zombie enchantment causes the narrator to view him as a benevolent god, even when sent on an errand to murder the master's competitor. Complications arise when the narrator's long lost brother shows up from out of the blue, seeking him out and discovering what the master has done with him. The brother ultimately kills the master, causing all the zombies to decay into corpses, leaving the brother horrified.


This is, by far, my favorite story in this thread yet, and yet it absolutely does not feel like a Moench story. The final twist ending isn't much of a surprise, there's absolutely no visual premise (unless you count the master's bright eyes, I suppose), and it just doesn't feel like Moench's style at all, especially having the story narrated by a character with limited awareness. Moench's protagonists are almost always inordinately intelligent and verbose.



In fact, this story is far closer in tone and approach to the "Child" stories which Richard Corben will begin penciling about two years from now. Now, it's been my understanding all along that Moench is living in Chicago, Warren publishing is in N.Y., and Moench is working freelance. Thus, I've assumed that collaboration between writer and artists should be pretty well impossible in this kind of a situation, and Moench has confirmed that he rarely, if ever, communicated with his artists. But it sure seems like Corben might have had a hand in co-plotting this story.

On to the story itself, there's so much that's brilliant about it.

For one thing, I can't get enough of stories that are told from the perspective of a being with limited understanding and, at the same time, tremendous innocence. It's exactly why both one of Corben's Child stories and one of Steve Gerber's Simon Garth stories topped my list of all time favorite horror stories for the CCF Long Halloween list last year. This is very much on that same level of quality.



And yet, the story doesn't stop and rest on its laurels there. It goes so far as to draw a heavy allegory about slavery, in which one brother being made into a cotton picking zombie, contrasted against his successful and career-minded brother from the North, clearly has a deeper subtext. The most upsetting part of this allegory is that the zombie brother doesn't want anything more than he has; completely unable to comprehend that he can be any more than he is.



In the end, it isn't his tragedy; it's his successful brother's, forced to look upon this life that could have been his if not for his endless drive and tenacity because, as the story makes abundantly clear, though slavery is legally gone, it still exists economically in parts of the country (especially the South). Talk about true horror. This was only 1972, after all. Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington was a mere nine years in the past.






There are really only two things I don't adore about this story: the boring panel arrangements after the first page (Moench MUST have abandoned providing layouts at this point) and a single panel in which far too much tries to be explained, ultimately making no sense at all. We didn't need to know that the Northern brother ran away from home when he was only ten, but if you're going to throw that in to the story, and also explain that the zombie probably wouldn't recognize him because it's been that long, then we have to wonder how in the heck he immediately recognized his southern brother in a dark closet full of zombies.

Oh well. No script is perfect.

Or Corben came up w/ the story and Moench provided dialog. This is one of the few Corben Warren stories i don't think I've seen...

That's possible as well, and I was in the same boat as you until a few years ago when I read the big Creepy and Eerie Present Richard Corben hardcover which had all kinds of gems like this story.