Tales from the Crypt Volume 2

In my notes on The Haunt of Fear Volume 2 I mentioned how EC editor Al Feldstein had written every one of the stories in the collection, as well as the “The Old Witch’s Niche” and the text-only shorts. I also mentioned how he was doing most of the writing for the other EC bi-monthly publications. At least he was for Tales from the Crypt, because he again gets sole writing credit for all 24 of the comics in this volume and probably wrote all the short stories as well, though these are uncredited.

“So,” as I said in that earlier review, “if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised?” You certainly shouldn’t be. And I wasn’t. There are a number of recurring EC horror archetypes. Reduced to its most basic elements a classic EC horror story features a murder for gain with the victim returning from the grave (sometimes after being buried alive) in order to exact a gruesome revenge on their killer.

I think that synopsis might describe two-thirds of all the horror stories EC published. Now Feldstein did his best to add little twists. Like the first story here being about a man coming back from the dead, except it’s told in the second person. But there are few real surprises. Riffing on a Poe story is to be expected, and that it’s the less well-known “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” doesn’t change things up much. Nor is it that big a twist when a developer disturbs an ancient Indian burial mound and the spirits thus released come back from the dead to scalp him.

If I wanted to be really critical I’d also focus in on the letters in “The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner.” I thought that very few, if any, of these were real. They read like plugs for the very comics you’re reading. And the constant pitching from the three GhouLunatics to buy their pictures got a little wearing.

These caveats in place, I still enjoyed all of this. I liked the in-jokes and odd bits of humour in the background (like the ship the honeymooners are on being the S. S. Pinafore), as well as all the contemporary historical details. I think having a television in your living room in 1951 meant you were pretty well off, for example. Or the Black Widow murderer having to buy seven funeral wreaths for a total of $14 and leaving the florist muttering “Fourteen dollars! The beast . . .” I looked it up and a basic funeral wreath today will run you around $200. I guess that’s inflation. And there was one language reference I had to look up, when a pair of cops examining the body of a murdered husband refer to him as a “poor old gink.” “Gink” isn’t a word that’s encountered much nowadays, but it does, or did, have the meaning of a foolish or unfortunate person. I’ve never heard it used before.

But my favourite story was the one with two medical students who need a dead body to study anatomy on, or else they’ll never be able to graduate! Corpses are expensive you see, and aren’t covered by their lab fees. So of course they decide to dig a freshly-buried one up. But they can’t dig it up themselves, even though they’ll both be present at the exhumation, so they have to enlist the help of Clem, “the rather stupid college handyman.” This leads to further problems, as you might expect, but I just laughed at the notion of the two students being unable to dig up a fresh grave by themselves and needing to pay a general labourer the whopping sum of five dollars to do it for them while they watch. I mean, Feldstein needed Clem to deliver the punchline at the end of the story but it’s still funny how useless the would-be doctors are.

So it’s another entertaining collection, though I wouldn’t recommend reading a lot of these all at once since EC horror was pretty much of a piece. Just dipping into them every now and then is the way to proceed.

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Trout: Bits & Bobs

A dream, or nightmare, set in some fantasy realm where a little boy or large baby named Trout is cared for by an old man named Giuseppe Lint, head of the Lint Brothers’ Turnip Works.  Trout doesn’t speak but in the first story he has a repressed memory that comes to life and starts eating up an entire town. In the second story a traveling puppet-show monster steals the souls of all the town’s children and turns them into tadpoles.

I didn’t know what to make of the story. It really wasn’t my thing. I did like the art though (Troy Nixey both wrote and illustrated, so he takes praise and blame). There’s a spiral motif worked throughout, from the long sleeves of Trout’s pyjamas to Giuseppe’s handlebar moustache. The faces and figures of people and monsters (there’s no clear dividing line between them) are quite original and there’s no denying the unique world Nixey has conjured up, but it all feels a bit like an elaborate doodle. I gather Nixey really had his heart set on making movies anyway. I’m not sure how many more Trout comics he did but while I could appreciate some of this, there was enough of it here for me.

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Absolute Batman Vol. 2: Abomination

The first part of the Absolute Batman series, The Zoo, ended with the Joker, reimagined as a psycho oligarch, calling in Bane to take care of Batman. So that’s what we’re all about here.

Just as a backgrounder, in this version of the Batman story Bruce Wayne isn’t a rich kid but a middle-class grinder with a penchant for working out, combat sports, and engineering. He has a set of childhood friends who he still plays poker with: Waylon Jones (Killer Croc), Eddie Nigma (the Riddler), Oswald Cobblepot (the Penguin), Harvey Dent (Two-Face), and Selina Kyle (Catwoman). None of them are bad guys (yet), or even much out of the ordinary, but this comic explains their transformation at the hands of Bane, who is himself an abomination. Specifically, Bane is a product of medical experimentation run by a bunch of secret Ark M labs headed by a Dr. Arkham, who is working under the Joker. He’s like the Bane we’re used to, but the Venom drug has made him super strong and given him crazy regenerative powers. Plus he’s big. Really big.

Even without his Venom power-ups I’d say he’s two or three times bigger than Batman (albeit with a pinhead because his noggin doesn’t grow along with the rest of his body). And as I said in my review of The Zoo, in this Absolute Batman universe Bruce Wayne is a total unit. How big is he? Well we get some precise measurements here when Batman is captured and Dr. Arkham and her staff start doing tests on him. He’s 6’9” and 421 pounds of pure muscle. Just for the sake of comparison, when he muscled up to play Jack Reacher the actor Alan Ritchson was 6’2” and 240 pounds. Those numbers are almost exactly the same as for Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was in his prime. So yeah, Bruce is way more muscularly developed than either of those guys. But Bane, when he goes into full Hulk mode, is ten times bigger than that. Seriously, he’s the size of a very large house. Which is also his weakness, because there’s only so much Venom a body can take.

The best thing about Abomination is that there are no more childhood flashbacks to Bruce and his superfriends. I hated those. What’s left is brutal action. This is a great comic but is it ever dark. For example, it kicks off with a nearly standalone episode where Batman fights Mr. Freeze. Or Victor Fries Jr. This was a good example of both the imaginative way Scott Snyder has rebuilt the pantheon and how disturbing the new bad guys are. You see, Victor Jr. was stricken with a fatal disease as a child so his scientist parents froze him until they could find a cure. This was not the pleasant cryo-sleep of science fiction though, but an endless agony.  “I felt everything. Every moment. And the pain . . . my god. Ice grinds and twists . . . The ice isn’t grace. It is fury. It’s reckoning.” So, with a new fetishization of pain and some other special powers Junior returns the favour on his parents by freezing them and a bunch of other Gotham luminaries in a kind of living death. He plans to freeze Bruce too, but Bruce escapes and turns into Batman so Fries thaws out his frozen zombies to fight for him. But Batman knocks them to pieces. Only they keep coming at him, “like they want” to be killed.

Put a pin in that, because later we encounter the grotesquely cruel experiments of Dr. Arkham at the secret Ark M sites. When Bruce gets loose from his cell in one of these he encounters some of the deformed monstrosities that have been created and they ask him to help them. When he says he doesn’t know how they ask him to “make it ssstop.” Help them escape? Make the experiments stop? Or put an end to their suffering by killing them? I think it’s the latter, because when when Waylon Jones, now transformed into Killer Croc, helps Batman escape, he asks Batman to “save” him by killing him, begging Batman to put him out of his misery. That’s just the kind of world we’re in here. And then there’s the final fate of Bane, which is more endless torture, pain and suffering. Dark.

I mentioned this is the volume where the childhood gang of friends become supervillains, which comes about due to their being captured by Bane. So Oswald Cobblepot has nearly every bone in his body broken without damaging any vital organs. If he lives, a doctor tells Bruce, he’ll be two feet shorter with deformed hands and feet. Enter the Penguin, eventually. Meanwhile, Harvey Dent has had half his face burned off and Edward Nigma has had his skull ripped open and Venom fed into it, turning him into a supergenius (but still not a bad guy yet). The only one of the gang who doesn’t get done in is Selena Kyle, who Bruce is hooking up with. He also calls her “Se” and I wasn’t sure when reading that how it was meant to be pronounced. She’s a supersexy bobblehead (even sexier in the variant covers) who, along with Killer Croc and the Riddler, helps Batman take down Bane.

I won’t give away how Bane is finally defeated because it was both surprising and a really good fit with the story, bringing together a bunch of different parts of the plot. Like I say, this is a great comic. But dark, even for the Dark Knight.

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Criminal 2: Lawless

This is the second volume in the Criminal series by Brubaker and Phillips and the action picks up sometime shortly after the events of Coward, with the main character here, Tracy Lawless, visiting Leo Patterson in prison at one point. Even though these are technically standalone comics, there is a larger story being told about the interactions of multiple generations of families involved in the criminal life of Center City, and with Lawless we see the web being drawn tighter.

Tracy Lawless is what’s known as a hard man, also known as a badass. He’s been in trouble with the law. He’s been in combat in Baghdad and Bosnia and “seen things he’d never imagined.” He’s a big guy and tough and has all sorts of skills when it comes to violence. He’s got burns on one side of his face, though this is something that doesn’t really register in Sean Phillips’s drawing. And he’s on a mission to avenge the murder of his little brother Ricky, which happened while Tracy was stuck in a military prison.

As with Coward, the plot itself is standard noir. There’s a heist that’s planned and things go off the rails because of double crosses and the like. There’s a femme fatale named Mallory. There’s a suitcase of stolen money that comes with more problems than it’s worth. And bubbling away underneath there’s the motivation of revenge. If not revenge, then all of these stories deal with some kind of payback, which is the real currency of Center City.

It’s all very readable, and looks good (though Phillips did turn in some lazy pages, I thought). I also liked the world building and the deft time management, the way the story slips ahead and then back in subtle ways. I don’t mean the flashbacks, which the series has a lot of and that are clearly signaled, but smaller shifts within the time present of the narrative. Given that this is all such familiar ground, that skill and professionalism in the storytelling makes a real difference.

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