The Warren Report Issue 46: September-November 1973

The Critical Guide to 

the Warren Illustrated Magazines

1964-1983

by Uncle Jack

& Cousin Peter

Sanjulian

Eerie #51 (September 1973)

"A Stranger in Hell"

(Reprinted from Eerie #38)

"Pity the Grave Digger!"

(Reprinted from Eerie #40)

"The Caterpillars"

(Reprinted from Eerie #41)

"Evil Spirits!"

(Reprinted from Eerie #16)

"Head Shop"

(Reprinted from Eerie #39)

"Vision of Evil"

(Reprinted from Eerie #2)

"The Curse of Kali!"

(Reprinted from Eerie #6)

Jack: A great rendition of Cousin Eerie on the cover leads to an odd mix of reprints inside, with three Goodwin stories from 1966 and 1968 and four more recent tales from 1972. The three older selections feature art by Johnny Craig, Alex Toth, and Angelo Torres, while the newer ones showcase the Spanish artists, including fine work by Auraleon and Bea. It's not a bad collection, but I think that reprinting stories just a year old in a bi-monthly magazine is a bit soon.

Enrich

Vampirella #28 (October 1973)

"Vampirella and the Curse of the MacDaemons!"★★

Story by Flaxman Loew (Mike Butterworth)

Art by Jose Gonzalez

"The Clash of Leviathans!"★★

Story by Doug Moench

Art by Ramon Torrents

"Blind Man's Guide"★★1/2

Story and Art by Fernando Fernandez

"The Power and the Gory!"★★1/2

Story by W. Eaton

Art by Rafael Auraleon

"Eye Don't Want to Die!"★★1/2

Story by Doug Moench

Art by Ramon Torrents

"The Other Side of Heaven"★★1/2

Story and Art by Jose Bea

"Old Texas Road"★★

Story by Bruce Bezaire

Art by Isidro Mones

In Scotland, at Castle Grayve, Alastair MacDaemon gets an unexpected gift for his twenty-first birthday: his father shows him the horrible family secret and then blows his brains out. Two years pass, and Pendragon receives a surprise inheritance of $3000 and tells Vampirella that they'll spend it on a trip to Scotland, where they make the best booze. No sooner do the duo arrive on the shores of Loch Eerie than Vampi is knocked out and awakens in Castle Grayve. Overcome by her beauty, Alastair immediately declares his love for the gal from Drakulon and she reciprocates and, after a day of bliss, Alastair tells his new love the family secret.

Jose Gonzalez, is this the best you can do?

Two hundred years ago, a beautiful woman was tricked into marrying the ugly old Laird of the castle. She was taken down to the shore of the Loch and tied up, completely naked. A lake monster impregnated her and, nine months later, she gave birth to its child, a girl, that has been kept locked in the castle ever since, kept alive by human sacrifices. Vampi makes the mistake of telling Alistair that she needs time to think about their whirlwind romance, so he drugs her and chains her to a wall to await the arrival of the hungry beast.

The beast instead turns her anger on Alistair and kills him; Vampi turns into a bat to escape her chains and kills the monster by sucking its blood. Outside, the creature's father rises from the Loch, none too happy at the death of its offspring.

"Vampirella and the Curse of the MacDaemons!" is the first story credited to Flaxman Loew, which (according to another blog) was a pen name used by Mike Butterworth. The story is terrible and Jose Gonzalez can only do so much to redeem it. It's absurd that Vampi and Pendragon would jet off to Scotland in the first place, and the crazy plot twists only get worse from there. Alistair proclaims his love for our heroine and she's fine with that, falling head over spiked heels for him in the blink of an eye. Perhaps worst of all is Gonzalez's depiction of the monster that lives in the castle. You know it's bad when I thought it looked like the work of our old friends Fraccio and Tallarico.

"The Clash of the Leviathans!"

"The Clash of Leviathans!" occurs in the Mesozoic Age, when a T-Rex named Tarn battles and eats a crocodile, looks hungrily at a Brontosaurus, and munches on a Stegosaurus. Suddenly, a spaceship lands, bearing a trio of big, scary aliens who want to colonize Earth. One makes the mistake of trying to subdue Tarn, but after the T-Rex kills and eats the alien, the other two get back in their ship and head off. Unfortunately, the alien's body contained bacteria that kills Tarn and leads to the eradication of the dinosaurs.

"Blind Man's Guide"

Doug Moench gives us lucky readers a dull treatise on dinosaurs before bringing in aliens for one of the oldest twist endings in the sci-fi handbook. Ramon Torrents does a fine job of illustrating the beasts, and his aliens aren't bad, either, but it's a pretty tedious nine pages.

A blind boy trudges through the snow, guided by his trusty dog. He recalls working as a "Blind Man's Guide" for an orator who traveled from town to town, reciting classic poetry and prose in exchange for a few coins. When the boy grows tired of being beaten by his master, he attacks him and leaves him to be killed by wolves. As the man dies, he curses the boy, who runs back to the town to report his master's death. In his haste, he does not see a carriage and is run over; doctors save him but he is left blind. Unfortunately, he soon learns that his trusty guide dog is really another hungry wolf.

I'm very impressed by Fernando Fernandez's art on this tale. The writing is fairly good, though the end is predictable. Still, it's nice to see someone write and draw his own story and do a good job of it. It makes me think of Johnny Craig or, more recently, Richard Corben. I'm looking forward to more by Fernandez.

"The Power and the Gory!"

British colonial governor Roscoe Strang's son Murdock is a problem: the young creep first kills local pets and then moves on to killing beautiful local women. His father promises to punish him if he's caught, so when Murdock murders Anne Franklin, the constable's daughter, and dumps her body in a pond, Roscoe sentences him to be put in the stocks for eight hours. He doesn't specify where the stocks should be, though, so the constable puts Murdock in the stocks at the bottom of the pond. When Roscoe has him fished out, the corpse of Anne Franklin emerges as well, its hands clasped around Murdock's neck.

"The Power and the Gory!" meanders here and there but features terrific art by Auraleon and a final panel that recalls at least one EC story--by Johnny Craig, if memory serves. Can anyone help me identify the story I'm trying to recall? Also, has anyone else noticed that Auraleon's beautiful, dark-haired girl always seems to be the same girl?

"Eye Don't Want to Die!"

London's East End in the early 1900s is a sordid place, where the residents of a boarding house speculate about an old man who sews clothes for a living. They think he's a miser, hiding piles of money in his room. He also has a disturbing glass eye. One night, a beautiful woman who also lives in the boarding house murders the old man for his money, planning to sail to America the next day. But that night, as she sleeps, a shadowy figure does something and, the next day, she finds herself followed mercilessly by the dead man's glass eye. She finally goes mad and her heart stops without her ever noticing that the eye is connected to the hem of her dress by a carefully-stitched thread.

In spite of Doug Moench's usual overblown prose ("A sorrow evident in a cheek-sliding tear welling from one eye only..."), "Eye Don't Want to Die!" is pretty good, partly because it's a blatant ripoff of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and partly because of the lovely art by Ramon Torrents. So far, this issue of Vampirella features impressive art and less than impressive stories, from that stunning cover to this fourth tale. It makes up for a lot of weak writing.

"The Other Side of Heaven!"

On the island of Menorca, Thomas the Fisherman comes across a squid-like creature that communicates with him, explaining that it is God and that it created all life. It explains that it is dying and it wants to make him its replacement. It absorbs part of Thomas's body and now he walks around, part man and part creature, creating new planets and inhabiting "The Other Side of Heaven!"

Jose Bea joins Fernando Fernandez in this issue by writing and illustrating this strange story, which has elements of horror but which is told with an almost religious awe. I kept waiting for a surprise or a twist ending but it never came. Instead, Bea's tale plods along from start to finish, as if expecting the reader to buy that the squid-like creature actually is God and that it has melded with Thomas the Fisherman. Not bad, just strange.

Out for a late-night drive with his girlfriend on the "Old Texas Road," Bernie Kendall runs out of gas and has to set off on foot for fuel. Before he leaves, he scares his girlfriend by telling her all of the horrible things that could happen to her. As she sits alone in the car, she hears scratching and tapping sounds on the roof that cause her to grow terrified and eventually pass out from exhaustion and fear. Next morning, cops wake her up and take her away. She never saw Bernie, hanging wounded in tree branches above the car, scratching for help on the roof until his blood dripped all the life out of him.

"Old Texas Road"

A silly story with mediocre art by Munes, this is essentially a shaggy-dog tale that is a seven-page setup for the final shock. How did Bernie get in the tree? What happened to him? Who (or what) put him there? We are given no clues, and thus the story is not satisfying. Overall, not a bad issue of Vampirella. Some fun, lots of good art, and the usual run of the mill writing.-Jack

Peter- Gotta say, I was anything but nuts about "Vampirella and the Curse of the Macadamias." Very little of this story made sense. Our girl talks about being in love with Alastair but she’s "never been able to give myself completely…" as if she’s been with the guy for years rather than hours. I’m not sure why the elder MacDaemon’s surprised his wife ends up with a monster’s bun in the oven when he puts her out there on the edge of the Loch and tells her to get ready for anything. What did he expect to happen? This is just plain dumb.

From Vampirella #28

Doug Moench’s florid prose ("There are no buildings to obstruct the horizon. No foul contaminants to mute the crimson flush of dawn.") seeks to provide a barricade for what lies behind it: a simple and silly story that, without all the high-falutin’ analogies, is fairly clever and entertaining. Unfortunately, part of the process is to read all those metaphor-stuffed boxes. The same could be said for Doug’s other horror story this issue, "Eye Don’t Want to Die," but the twist is such a winner I can excuse the verbosity. Some great Torrents work here as well. 

There’s not much substance to either "Blind Man’s Guide" or "The Power and the Gory." Both have climaxes that sputter out rather than satisfy, but at least "Power" has the best use of color, outside of Corben, we’ve yet seen in a Warren mag. "Blind Man" sees the debut of writer/artist Fernando Fernandez, who’ll become a regular in Vampirella for the next three years but, oddly, contribute nothing to the other titles. 

"Old Texas Road" is more like one of those fireside scare fables than an honest-to-gosh script, but the reveal is a hoot. The actual climax, however, is too abrupt. Not everything in Jose Bea’s "The Other Side of Heaven" works and it’s a page or two too long, but give the guy some extra credit for reaching for the eccentric and delivering something unique. I kept waiting for the "peanut butter monster" to be revealed as the protagonist’s missing wife but, thankfully, Bea didn’t settle for that old standby. A real oddball tale, easily the best thing to be found in this issue.

Sanjulian

Creepy #57 (November 1973)

"The Destructive Image" ★1/2

Story by Don McGregor

Art by Ramon Torrents

"The Hope of the Future" ★1/2

Story by Doug Moench

Art by Jaime Brocal

"The Bloodlock Museum" ★

Story by Jack Butterworth

Art by Martin Salvador

"The Low Spark of High Heeled Noise!" ★★★

Story by Doug Moench

Art by Richard Corben

"The Red Badge of Terror" ★★

Story by Doug Moench

Art by Jose Bea

"Sense of Violence" ★

Story by Doug Moench

Art by Isidro Mones

"The Destructive Image"

Herb Walters finally gets his TV set back from the repair man and he and his significant other, Edith (!), kick back to watch their usual Saturday night fare. Herb realizes something's up really quick when a character from the show he's watching turns up at the door as an electrical repairman. He advises Herb there's something that needs fixing down in the basement and promptly disappears. In short order, Herb is attacked by a lunatic, nearly drowned in a huge wave, and then nearly eaten by the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms before salvation, in the form of the network's "Conalrad (sic)"

"The Destructive Image" is one gigantic head-scratcher, from panel one all the way up through its final, pretentious message. First of all, why does Mr. McGregor feel the need to introduce the possibility that Herb's television set was monkeyed with by some unknown force ("just a few spare parts that none of the personnel at Harvey's repair shop realize have been subjected to intense radioactive exposure") and then leave that hypothesis dangling immediately thereafter? Does anyone outside of Herb's house know something's going on? I mean it is strange that the giant monster bursts through the roof but no one calls the cops. I guess the other neighbors are as hypnotized by Carol Burnett as Herb and Edith (was the wife's name a nod to All in the Family?) and don't even notice there's a flood going on next door (the wave, I assume, is the opening shot of Hawaii Five-O). No use spending too much time with a dissection of the silly stuff. It's obvious what Donny Mac was trying to tell us: TV is rotting your brain, buy Warren comic books instead--much better. Torrents's art isn't too bad, except for the fact that Edith never quite looks the same from panel to panel, morphing from Barbara Steele to Ali McGraw to something akin to an Italian Norma Desmond. 

I do have to own up to the fact that, as an impressionable young lad more than a quarter century ago, I picked "The Destructive Image" as one of the best of the Creepy stories for an article I wrote for the final issue of The Scream Factory. Yep, I wrote something to the effect of: Don McGregor’s cautionary tale about the evils of television addiction may seem preachy at times (and we could have done without the explanation of the "radioactive TV"), but still packs a punch. I have no idea what I thought the punch was all those years ago but at least I didn't proclaim Don a genius. Even I can change my mind now and then. If you want to read about "the evils of TV" in an entertaining and thought-provoking style, skip this one and buy Harlan Ellison's Glass Teat books.

"The Hope of the Future"

Nigel was once a "vaunted lecturer, assiduous expert on the occult, the arcane, the mystic" until a strange mist arrives from space, a vapor that, twelve years later, kills all children on Earth. Mankind doomed, the catastrophe gives one more kick to humanity's groin when all the dead children rise from the grave to burn their parents at the stake. Now, Nigel does nothing but sit in his upstairs window and watch as the children gather in his yard and get closer to the time when they'll light him up as well. 

So, I Am Legend by way of Midwich Cuckoos? "The Hope of the Future" doesn't contain much that can be labeled original. Doug makes the most of his thesaurus once again, bombarding us with so many adjectives that I had to Google some of them. Thus, I'm not sure if we have Doug or the letterer to thank for "runneling pain." Again, with Doug Moench, the night is not only dark but it's filled with an ebony so black it borders on coal, Nigel can barely stand the "shrieking cacaphony of his rushing mind...," and the demon kid has "lambently burning eyes..." The list goes on and on, until you wish someone would have reminded Moench this wasn't the pulps and Warren payed by the page, not by the phrase. Those of you who have an intolerance for Doug Moench might want to put Creepy #57 down (maybe in the trash?) now as we're in for a four-scooper this issue.

"The Bloodlock Museum"

The mercifully-short "The Bloodlock Museum" is an inane trip through a museum of dead bodies. Mr. and Mrs. Bloodlock have gathered up all the people who were ever mean to their son, Jimmy (or anyone who looked sideways at him, apparently), and murdered them in appropriate ways. A land salesman who blocks an emergency call on a party line is buried alive; a finance company agent is folded, spindled, and mutilated, etc. etc. etc. The wheelchair-bound man who's getting the grand tour is revealed to be Jimmy's military recruiter and the final panel shows him strapped on a wheel, set to be stabbed, shot, and burned at the same time. An exercise in tedium and stupidity at the same time, "The Bloodlock Museum" almost seems like an edited version of something that might have been a bit longer and, oh, I don't know, provided a little more detail and characterization. What's left is laughably bad. The thought going through my mind when I see the corpse of the photographer who was "snooping around the museum" and now resides in a giant replica of a camera is that these elderly farmers sure have a lot of disposable income on hand. If given the choice, I'd rather take a "Dreadlock Holiday" than visit the "Bloodlock Museum."

After his car breaks down, traveling salesman Don Gray has no choice but to climb the hill to the spooky old mansion in the rain. A kooky couple, Harry and Mona, answer the door and Don is able to talk his way into staying overnight. Later, while Don is lying in bed, he swears he hears the "tap tap" of high heels and a figure enters his room with a meat cleaver high above its head. The figure disappears before it cleaves Don in half and the puzzled man is left sweaty and scared for his life.

Grabbing the revolver he carries with him for protection, Gray heads out into the hallway and overhears the owners of the house arguing over the recent murder of Harry's wife. Suddenly, smelling a reward if he hands these two over to the cops, Don heads into the kitchen just as Harry brains Mona with a candlestick. Just as Harry decides to kill two in one evening, Don unloads the contents of his pistol into the man and drinks Harry's beer as a celebration. Bad move. Mona was fixing on killing Harry before she got brained and the beer is laced with poison. As Harry lays dying, a naked specter with a cleaved head and a blood red cleaver enters the room. The ghost of Harry's wife!

That ending is pretty random and there's no reason (other than titillation) why the corpse walks around nekkid but for a pair of Dolce & Gabbana stilettos but, overall, I have to hand it to Doug this one time (so far). "The Low Spark of High Heeled Noise!" is an entertaining and goofy horror story, highlighted by rhythmic prose that actually works for once. The poem doesn't seem forced at all (but, I must admit, as much as I tried I could not sing it to the melody of Doug's inspiration) and actually complements the images. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Rich Corben used himself as a model for Don Gray. The color just gets better and better with each issue.

"The Red Badge of Terror"

Two Yankees chase a Reb bearing important papers into a spooky ghost town. When they find the man's horse, parked in front of a huge estate, they enter the building and discover a coffin in the hallway. The casket is empty but for some dirt, so the soldiers begin searching the rest of the home. They find the Reb, his throat torn out, and one of the men remarks it looks like the work of a vampire. Sure enough, out pops Christopher Lee (at least, Lee by way of Bea), who puts the bite on the Yanks. The next night, the four vampires await fresh prey. You won't burn too many brain cells reading through "The Red Badge of Terror" (I assume poor Doug couldn't find an appropriate Civil War-themed Emerson, Lake and Palmer song title to rip off, so he went with classic literature instead), but it's harmless enough and just goofy enough to entertain. Looking at Jose's art here makes we want to go back through all his previous work to see if he ever drew a character who had decent teeth. Nah, never mind.

"Sense of Violence"

His mind is workin' overtime like a flickerin' horror show of every cardiac arrest nightmare he's ever had... switchblades etching tic-tac-toe on his cheeks ripping his belly, spilling guts and blood, goo, the blood... thick and stark, crimson and floods of it glaring so brightly, so sharp the blade, and cold and slicing maiming... pain, excruciating agony... his life sluicing from tender vulnerable wrists, the veins light blue, ruptured... protruding from the skin tendons severed, ragged flecks of chopped muscle all covered with such red, red goo...

And that's just one caption box. Imagine having to read dozens of those. I'll excuse you for skipping "Sense of Violence," the final story this issue. I sure wanted to. This is the obligatory "Doug Moench tells us just what's wrong with society" tale this issue. And Doug had been doing so well so far. Here, Moench reminds us that the world is shit, a hopeless, hopeless place where blacks kill whites and vice versa. Hippies hate the pigs and vice versa. If I wanted to relax to these bits of info, I'd turn on Cronkite rather than plunking down three quarters for this pretentious tripe. The plot (what there is) has something to do with a paranoid man wandering through the back alleys of this godforsaken city, seeing crime and hate around every corner. He murders a man he believes to be a mugger but, we later discover, is actually a detective. This is really dreadful stuff, made even worse by Doug Moench's disdain for proper punctuation. If Jack allowed it, there'd be a big fat "0" up there instead of a star-Peter

Jack-We don't usually disagree this completely, but I gave "The Bloodlock Museum" four stars! It's a great story with art to match and--for once--a Warren story seems like it could fit comfortably in an EC comic. The end is a bit heavy-handed, true, but the art reminded me of Reed Crandall's work and the series of tortures just seemed like the sort of thing the EC gang would've done.

The rest of the issue is terrible, from the pompous "The Destructive Image," with Don McGregor overwriting a boring criticism of TV (I looked up Conalrad, by the way, and it really was a thing), to the foursome of Doug Moench tales that really took a lot of effort to plod through. The "Low Spark" title is yet another example of Doug showing how hip he is, with his understanding of rock music, while the story and the rhyming captions were almost unreadable. Corben's color is superb but why do his people always look like their skin is made of rubber? "The Red Badge of Terror" made me wish John Severin had drawn it; Jose Bea is good at weird stories but something more realistic like this Civil War tale doesn't fit his set of skills.

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