EC - The Pyramid (Krigstein)

The Pyramid
art by Bernard Krigstein, story by Otto Binder
Valor #3 (1955)

Rather odd little twist ending on this story about a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt who is pushing his slaves to complete a task on the pyramid, certain that death will come by sundown. As the day goes on, he begins to show compassion for his slaves, offering them food and water and gold, getting them to work faster, and then almost dies himself trying to avoid a slave child.

The twist, which ended up requiring some pretty strained language in the early bits of the story, is that the task he's set the slaves to isn't building the pyramid, it's demolishing the pyramid to free his son, who fell in the pyramid and would have run out of air by sundown. Well, at least you couldn't have seen it coming. A lesser bit from the New Direction era, though some of the details Krigstein brings to the setting are well done.

EC - Abe Lincoln (Davis)

Abe Lincoln
art by Jack Davis, story by Harvey Kurtzman
Frontline Combat #9 (1952)

This story opens up the first of what Kurtzman had planned as seven issues chronicling the US Civil War, only three of which were actually published before Kurtzman left the war books to concentrate on MAD. To launch, he has an old man telling some anecdotes about Lincoln, starting with how his father Tom Lincoln was almost killed in an Indian attack, then some tales of Lincoln's childhood. Most visually entertaining is the story of Lincoln doing some wrassling...

The story ends with Lincoln's inauguration and then the attack on Fort Sumter, with the old man pleading to the lord for peace and for the life of Lincoln.

Great Davis artwork in this story, which captures the larger-than-life image of Lincoln that the script is trying to project. Some of the actual anecdotes chosen are kind of goofy (ruining his clean suit by pulling a pig out of the mud), but overall it's a good start to the unfinished series that tried to tell some entertaining and human stories about the war rather than just a dry history of battles and dates.

EC - Enemies of the Colony (Wood)

Enemies of the Colony
by Wallace Wood
Weird Fantasy #8 (1951)

Aw, look at that cute little alien with the big eyes and bent antenna. Just precious. It couldn't possibly to a threat to the colonists, could it?

If you said no, you haven't read many EC stories, have you?

Anyway, this is one of the handful of stories that Wallace Wood wrote as well as drew in his EC days. Some new arrivals finish their years long voyage to a colony on an alien planet, and find it well settled. There are these cute little native critters, the mokos, that were almost wiped out when the original colonists arrived, being hunted by the large monstrous hydra-files. The human children start to keep the mokos as pets and breed them, which only seems to make the hydra-files more upset, as they attack any large number of mokos. The humans react as you'd expect, and wipe out the hydra-files in any area they've colonized. The mokos population grows, and the humans then discover that when they're in large numbers the mokos are godless killing machines who wipe out anything in their path, hence the hydra-files agitation at humans breeding them.

So let that be a lesson to all future space colonists. Wipe out every indigenous life form you find, no matter how cute. Wait, that can't be right...

Gorgeous Wallace Wood artwork and some good, if morally questionable, writing.

Hoka Hoka Hey

Not that I'm updating my existing weblogs enough to justify starting another, but some itches needs scratching.

About a million years ago, give or take, I put together a few issues of the second volume of an online newsletter called Gunk'l'dunk, devoted to all things related to Larry Marder's excellent comic book experience TALES OF THE BEANWORLD. It fell by the wayside some time ago, not the least because there was exceedingly little to report on with Beanworld publishing being mostly absent then, and unfortunately that continues now. However, for various reasons I decided now was a good time to revive it as Gunk'l'dunk v03, now in weblog form. I've got slightly spiffed up versions of my own issues of v02, a link to where you can read v01 (edited by founder Jeremy York) and other stuff and a few posts on the two major themes I plan to explore to start, Marder artwork in various obscure places and Beanworld characters appearing in artwork by other artists. More will probably follow. Since Marder isn't the most prolific of artists I won't be updating too frequently, so as to keep it going for a while, but I'll try to get up something every week.

-Link- Complete Pogo Announced

It's been announced that Walt Kelly's Pogo strip (daily and sundays) will be reprinted starting this October by Fantagraphics, two years per book, twelve books total. Long overdue, I'm definitely looking forward to it. Wonder if they'll look into reprinting the comic book stories as well.

Big Frankie

Are you my little tragic 19th century allegory for the dangers of playing god? Yes you are!

Classics Illustrated #3 [1990] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Classics Illustrated #3 [1990]

First Comics CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED revival lasted less than two years and only 27 issues, and probably hastened the demise of the company with the resources they spent on trying to break into the elusive "bookstore market", but there were quite a few gems along the way. Any line of books which gives you well produced books with art by the likes of Rick Geary, Gahan Wilson, Pat Boyette, Dan Spiegle, Michael Ploog, Gary Gianni and others has something going for it.

Kyle Baker was among the artists in the line-up, doing two books. The second was CYRANO DE BERGERAC (CI#21), and the first was the one under consideration here, Lewis Carroll's THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. Baker's adaptation was similar to the style he's used in a number of his original books, with the dialogue appearing below or beside the panels, which are mostly small and dense, which makes the occasional half or full page illustration (often accompanying the poems and songs) look all the bigger. The original book is short enough that he's able to preserve almost all of the dialogue, which is a big part of Carroll's appeal.

Meanwhile he uses the art to bring the scenes to life, highlighting some of the little bits of humour from the original that would get lost with only the dialogue and not Carroll's descriptions. Overall it works surprisingly well, not a substitution for the original of course, but a nice addition to it. The characters are all well designed (though I have to say I thought the choice to present Alice with those creepy blank eyes in most panels was sometimes distracting), and it captures the odd dream-like transitions that mark the original work. I thought the Red Queen's race section was really well done, as well as the whole Humpty Dumpty chapter.