{"id":2509,"date":"2015-10-06T09:18:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T16:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comic-con.org\/toucan\/?p=2509"},"modified":"2024-01-09T09:21:46","modified_gmt":"2024-01-09T17:21:46","slug":"maggies-world-033-boo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comic-con.org\/toucan\/maggies-world-033-boo\/","title":{"rendered":"Maggie’s World 033: BOO!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\n
\n

MAGGIE’S WORLD BY MAGGIE THOMPSON<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maggie’s World 033: BOO!<\/h1>\n\n\n
Maggie Thompson<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"HD<\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n


Did you see the recent Blood Moon?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you just buy the DVD of the first season of iZombie<\/em>, as the second season prepared to launch? Did you recently watch Fear the Walking Dead<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you just hear a creaking door?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t reach for the oilcan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s October: a time to consider scary stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the challenges in creating creepy comic books is that what\u2019s left to the imagination is often more scary than what is on display in a clear view of what the artist may believe to be most scary. Moreover, while revulsion is something pictures can evoke, there\u2019s a marketing question to be answered: If you effectively show something that revolts the reader, how likely is that reader to plunk down cash in order to see more such pictures every month?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the days before the Comics Code sent comic books back to the nursery, there was a spectrum of ways for comic books to unsettle their readers: They could suggest ghastly goings-on that would give the reader pause with an \u201cEek!\u201d They could show enough to make the reader react \u201cIk!\u201d Or they could go all out to induce nightmares for a week or more with a full-on gross-out \u201cYuck!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill Finger Award honoree John Stanley was a master of the suggested Eek!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

E.C.\u2019s Jack Davis was known for his memorable images of Ik!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I confess that I hadn\u2019t (until now) tried to analyze the grossest-out gross-out practitioners of Yuck!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gross<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Yuck! In pre-Code days, Harvey published many series designed to tap into the Yuck Factor with rotting bodies, horrendous damage to eyes, radiation effects, and more. When 1954\u2019s Code came along, the walking dead morphed into Casper<\/em>, and Satanic grossness evolved into Little Hot Stuff<\/em>. (Yeah, it wasn\u2019t until now that I considered that evolution. But to continue \u2026) In the early 1950s, in the hands of such artists as Lee Elias, Robert Powell, and Rudy Palais, many of the stories were pretty stomach-churning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Happily for fans of such over-the-top Yuck, PS Artbooks recently brought them back into print complete and in full color in its \u201cHarvey Horrors\u201d series. (The hardcover editions provide bonus background material, whereas the paperbacks just contain the vomitous variety that once appeared on newsstands.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Yuck! Without nauseating readers of this post by showing the most revolting samples of horror comics old and new, here are a couple of next-to-most-revolting images. The cover image from\u00a0Witches Tales<\/em>\u00a0#22 (December 1953) appeared on\u00a0Harvey Horrors Collected Works Witches Tales<\/em>\u00a0Volume 4\u00a0<\/em>\u00a9 PS Artbooks 2012. Similarly rotting bodies attracted readers to\u00a0The Walking Dead<\/em>,\u00a0Volume 1: Days Gone By<\/em>. \u00a9 2004 Robert Kirkman<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Heck, the art may be even better, with more revolting details, thanks to today\u2019s finer printing methods. A decade ago, Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore brought the ambulatory deceased to comics shops; not long after, Kirkman and Sean Phillips even told of an official super-heroic zombie universe in Marvel Zombies<\/em>, with accompanying visions of Marvel\u2019s superheroes transformed into rotting bodies. Kirkman\u2019s vision in his non-superhero view was popular enough that it received media approval via AMC\u2019s popular The Walking Dead<\/em>\u2014in turn, attractive enough to draw new customers into comics shops to look for its origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More recently, Vertigo\u2019s iZombie<\/em> by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred joined the world of televised postmortem grue via its own CW series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grisly<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Ik! Oddly, I found the E.C. titles a bit\u2014shall we say?\u2014more tasteful than the over-the-top tales typical of Harvey\u2019s output. Quite a bit of E.C.\u2019s storytelling left things to the imagination. Bill Gaines famously commented that the severed-head front cover of Crime SuspenStories<\/em> #22 (April-May 1954) wasn\u2019t in bad taste, because it didn\u2019t show the woman\u2019s severed neck with bones, muscles, and blood vessels on view. Harvey Comics would have been just fine with all that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to the incredible art and storytelling put together by E.C.\u2019s contributors, its universe fostered early fan devotion and its own fan club, years before mutual correspondence brought together a later bunch of enthusiasts in what has grown into today\u2019s comics community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to the quality of E.C.\u2019s output, its grisly horrors have been reprinted with upscale printing that reveals all the subtleties of the ichor-dripping images at which the poorer printing of the 1950s could only hint. In the years since MAD<\/em> became the only survivor of the E.C. line, readers have, in other words, been able to shudder at an assortment of ominous fates that await bad guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Ik! What would happen if all the rats in the world declared war on humanity?\u00a0Airboy Comics<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 5 #11 (December 1948) was a classic. \u00a9 1948 Hillman Periodicals, Inc. Or what if you reached out just past the edge of the bed, and something pulled you into the dark?\u00a0Through the Woods<\/em>\u00a0\u00a9 2014 Emily Carroll<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These days, horror stories online and off are attracting critical appreciation. The award-winning Locke & Key<\/em> series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez introduced a family trying to cope with (\u201cBode, could you close your head please?\u201d) a complex and terrifying world of fantasy. Emily Carroll\u2019s best-selling Through the Woods<\/em> won an Eisner Award this year for a variety of spooky short stories\u2014and another of her tales won an Eisner Award on its own. \u201cMy friend Janna used to speak to the dead.\u201d \u201cInside the wall was a pair of hands.\u201d \u201cShe told her of the man-shaped thing that lurked in the cellar of her childhood home.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grim<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

But, hey, we can also appreciate the insidious world of Eek!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My earliest comics reading included Dell\u2019s Raggedy Ann + Andy<\/em> series. Drawn by George Kerr and written by Gaylord DuBois, the Raggedys were all about candy hearts, cuddly animals, deeds of loving-kindness, and \u201cThe Raggedy Way.\u201d The series was a marvelous anthology of a variety of stand-alone tales, in one of which each issue, Ann and Andy would solve a problem, usually wrapping up with expressions of joyous affection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, their stories changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had no idea what was going on at the time. The credits on the stories remained the same: Johnny Gruelle. My parents and I didn\u2019t even know that Gruelle had died January 8, 1938, more than eight years before the 1946 debut of the comic-book series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All I knew was that, though the title remained Raggedy Ann + Andy<\/em>, the cover of the January 1949 issue featured a new, non-Gruelle character: Peterkin Pottle. And the nine-page interior story that did feature the Raggedys had dumped the dolls into a new environment in which unsettling concepts dominated. (The Raggedys died in one story; in another, they were trapped in the endless corridors of a castle inhabited only by an ancient man who had wandered, lost, in its halls since he was a boy.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t guess that the stories by Kerr and DuBois were now replaced by tales written and drawn by the equally anonymous John Stanley (who also wrote and drew Pottle\u2019s adventures).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were other spooky elements to \u201call ages\u201d comics in earlier days. Hey, there were invisible skeletons in \u201cThe Old Castle\u2019s Secret\u201d starring Donald Duck (Dell Four Color<\/em> #189, June 1948)! And, for a family audience, Will Eisner and his staff occasionally offered a Spirit<\/em> tale with a grim kick. In the October 19, 1941, story of \u201cThe Oldest Man in the World\u201d\u2014a man \u201csentenced to live forever \u2026 for a crime so great that the tiny fishes on the ocean floor recoiled with shame\u201d decides to destroy all children. Unsettling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Eek! John Stanley\u2019s \u201cThe Rocking Horse\u201d appeared in\u00a0Marge\u2019s Little Lulu<\/em>\u00a0#5, concluding \u201cOnly girls believe in ghosts!\u201d But. (September-October 1948). \u00a9 1948 Marjorie H. Buell. Judd Winick\u2019s\u00a0Hilo the Boy Who Crashed to Earth<\/em>\u00a0shows Hilo looking happy enough on the cover, but it\u2019s not all giggles in the tale itself. \u00a9 2015 Judd Winick<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re looking for Eek these days, I suggest you can add Jeff Smith\u2019s Bone<\/em> series to the current roster of more recent magnificently scary sagas. (\u201cHello, small mammal \u2026 Could you step in here for a moment?\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, unsettling tales for little kids continue to be produced. Judd Winick\u2019s delightful Hilo<\/em> begins with pursuit by a monster: an almost routine start in today\u2019s comics. [SPOILER ALERT!!!]<\/strong> But, by the end of the fifth chapter, a dismembered title character? Well, it\u2019s a stunner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go on!<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Wallow in shivers on whatever level you choose. Clearly, I\u2019ve only dipped a toe into the dark pool of septic storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Me? As a personal multi-media assignment, with the alternate worlds of Walking Dead<\/em> as background, I\u2019m settling down this month to compare and contrast the comic book and live-action worlds of iZombie<\/em>. When I\u2019m done, I just may leave the light on tonight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How about you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Maggie\u2019s World by Maggie Thompson appears the first Tuesday of every month here on <\/em>Toucan!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n

Written by<\/p>\n\n\n

Maggie Thompson<\/div>\n\n\n

Published<\/p>\n\n\n