Welcome back to the Forgotten Library; as always, I’m Nikki Gee. Today, are heading to the massive comics well and drawing up a bucket of genre comics.
We’ve covered the history of comics in more detail before, and there’s a refresher in the beginning of Episode 17, Atomic War, but basically, we are looking at the Golden Age, once again - specifically 1951-1955 - for Baffling Mysteries, published by Ace Comics.
Baffling Mysteries is considered a horror and suspense title, despite the name. It begins with volume #5, as the first 4 of the run were titled Indian Braves, a Western comic. As I discussed in a previous episode, this was pretty common; titles had a tendency to change frequently in the comics world, and a new title would incur a new permit, but if the numbering was kept sequential, they usually could skirt the Post Office and keep costs down. Sometimes a comic book could change its name (and genre!) three or four times during the length of its publication.
Horror in comics began to crop up in the 1940s, starting as motifs in superhero stories, or illustrated adaptations of literary horror fiction, such as Edgar Allen Poe stories. The first long-running horror series was Adventures into the Unknown, which started publication in 1948 and would continue for twenty years. Of course, the most famous was Tales from the Crypt, from EC comics, which began its run in 1950. Some of EC’s other horror titles would eventually come to the notice of Dr. Wertham, who started the furor about suggestive comics and the negative influence of our 4-color friends in general; this is what helped usher in the era of the Comics Code, where everything was sanitized to hell and many companies folded because of it.
Alright, so let’s see what Baffling Mysteries have in store. It’s good to be back!
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So, even before we get into issue #5, this is definitely a product of a bygone era by the advertisement for US Savings Bonds, where a woman is extolling the virtues of using them to put a down payment on their house.
The first story up is Volcano of Vengeance. Tod Sloane, who is a field man for the North American Museum, is in an unnamed Central American country, staying near a dormant volcano called Mount Pataxo (or perhaps, puh-ta-sho, if they’re cribbing names from Brazil). One night he is awakened by something in his room, which we can see looks like a goat-man hybrid; the goatman tells him to go back to sleep, but he fumbles to put the light on and see the goatman as he flees out the window. Of course, by the time Tod gets to the window, the goatman is gone; and this inn is set up pretty high on a sheer rockface, so he can’t have jumped. He also notices that the volcano appears to be smoldering.
Turning back to his room, he finds a chunk of lava bearing the imprint of a goatman’s body, and apparently, this is what he had been sent to this country to investigate and possibly obtain. The innkeeper, Pedro, smashes into the room before he can take a closer look, calls him a Yankee dog, and says that now all of them are going to die, thanks to him, unless he can destroy the lava block, which he does, by pulverizing it to bits. It’s a gravestone, Pedro says, and if the goatman delivers it to a nonbeliever, the other goatman become angry and cause the volcano to erupt. So now they must appease the goatmen and save the town from boiling lava . . . by using a human sacrifice.
Of course, they decide to sacrifice Tod, so Pedro knocks him out cold and they hogtie him to a pole to transport him up the mountain. Once there, they call on the gods to be appeased by this sacrifice, but all Tod notices is a woman standing there among the dancing flames and wondering if he’s hallucinating before his untimely death. He’s thrown into the flames, then wakes up in some sort of underground cavern, where there are more goatmen and a woman on a throne who answers to the name Queen Arni. Tod doesn’t understand how he is still alive, but the Queen says that the goatpeople saved him. But . . . YOU don’t look like one of them, Tod says, so she dismisses her subjects and tells him that she knows all about him and that she wanted to give him the lava block to take back with him and ask a favor in return, but his awakening spooked the goat-messenger and he never was able to tell him what the Queen requested. She was a sacrifice from the village many years ago, and she is tired of the villagers throwing people into the flames. It needs to stop! The lava blocks are headstones; it’s a funeral rite, nothing else. There is nothing evil or angry about it. She shows him the latest one, as they both walk through the literal fire wall and he doesn’t get burned, because it’s like, magic down here. Once their impression is done, the goatman is reborn as a mountain goat on the hillsides outside of the mountain. This one was Jan the Wise, and he had one broken horn, which apparently some of the others used to tease him about.
Anyway, she shows him the way out, and of course, he thinks to himself that he can come back some day and explore the cave, but once he’s outside again, it disappears from view. He heads back to the inn, where Pedro thinks he’s a ghost, because he KNOWS he threw him into the volcano. But he convinces them he’s still alive, and reiterates Queen Arni’s message to the villagers, and they vow to stop sacrificing people to the mountain.
Hours later, he’s trying to rest in his room and he sees the shadow of another goatman on the wall; he calls out but it leaves through the window. All that’s left is the lava block impression, and this time, it has a broken horn.
Next up, the Phantom Snow Queen. Irma is practicing a big ski jump for the winter carnival at the lodge. It’s called the Torchlight Death Leap and she is nervous as she approaches the top of the jump, when she notices a figure skiing down the slope, holding torches aloft, just like her performance. She is afraid some fool guest is attempting this, but the figure turns its head and she gets a glimpse of a death’s head, which she presumes is a mask. The figure makes the jump, good form but then suddenly falls out into the landing with an awkward scream. Irma skis quickly over to see if she can help, but when she gets there, the figure is gone . . . and the snow does not show any trace of anyone having fallen. She convinces herself that she really saw this, but only the torches are left behind. She gets a sense of foreboding that this is a sign that she shouldn’t do this jump, and she’s going to tell Ray, her husband, that she can’t do it.
He doesn’t understand why she wants to cancel, and of course, she doesn’t tell him the full story and begs him not to ask her anymore questions. She can’t sleep (and note that she wakes up in a single bed, in a room where an unidentified person sleeps in a secondary bed, separated by a nightstand; it does not look like her husband did in the previous panel, so either this is a bad drawing or she’s sleeping VERY separately from her husband). She decides to go to New York (she’s in New Hampshire) to see her uncle, who is a psychiatrist; she doesn’t want to wake Ray, so leaves him a note, which conveniently catches up in a draft and goes into the fire.
Ray is very worried the next morning when he can’t find Irma, but the workers try to reassure him that she will definitely be back for the jump. He’s about to make the announcement in front of the assembled crowd, when suddenly, it looks like Irma has set up at the top of the jump. Ray knew she wouldn’t miss it, and there is a moment where he thought she wouldn’t make the jump so he concedes to himself that maybe she’s right that it’s too dangerous. Jump completed, he calls to her but the figure runs away, into a grove of trees away from the lodge. Ray figures that she was embarrassed about last night, and she’ll come back to the lodge when she is ready. Hours go by, and she doesn’t return. One of the groundskeepers bursts in and says that he went to clear off the ski-run and there are no tracks, like Irma was never even there! Ray tells the groundskeeper that someone is playing a prank or his eyes are like, really bad. He doesn’t sleep, still concerned about where his wife is, but notice that he doesn’t send anyone else out to look for her. This seems weird to me, but whatever.
That night, the same thing happens: he’s ready to call it off, and here she is, at the last minute. Except this time, Ray sees a death’s-head inside the cowl; he’s convinced that he is seeing things. This time, the jump is not successful; the figure falls at the landing. She’s unconscious, and they bring her inside to wait for the ambulance; Ray tries to talk to her to bring her around, but it’s no use. He goes inside the other room for a moment to talk to the assembled folks and when he goes back to the room, Irma is gone. The windows are shut and there was only one doorway, which he had been standing in so . . . where did she go?? There is a note on the bed, and it’s a hospital note; it reads, in part, that Irma Monroe fell from a hotel elevator shaft and was brought in unconscious, and has been in a coma for over 24 hours. Ray calls the hospital, which confirms that she is there as a patient, so he goes to New York.
The nurse looks at him like he is missing a few marbles when he says that she was in New Hampshire making the ski jumps. Because she was here, in this bed, and had round the clock care. Irma wakes up when she hears Ray’s voice, and asks him how he liked her ski jumps, then suddenly is very disoriented and doesn’t remember what she said. But now that her man is here, her life is obviously saved. As for the jumps, well, that’s something that mere man cannot possibly explain!
The Lady was a Tiger. Stuart and Bonita Jackson are big game hunters, bringing home animals for zoos and circuses. Classy. There were some bizarre occurrences during their last expedition, when they were hunting tigers in India. Bonnie gets shot and they find a Dr. Zander to treat her, a mysterious man who lives hermit-like in the middle of nowhere. The story begins with Inga, the nurse, saying that Bonnie’s face is changing and that the doctor needs to do something; he slaps her for being hysterical (also classy), but then Stuart says that her eyes are changing, and her teeth are growing, and worse yet, her skin is become striped!
Dr. Zander merely states that this is “remarkable,” while Stuart is freaking out that it must’ve been something in the transfusion the good doctor just gave his wife. Zander explains this away as just the heat of the jungle and that it’s a normal reaction around these parts . . . yeah, I don’t think you’re fooling anyone, bub. He sends Stuart out the door for a few hours, and Stuart is basically like, Doi, gee, I guess you know what you’re doing. As he leaves the house, though, he wonders if he should just leave his wife there, but there isn’t another doctor in a hundred miles.
Suddenly, there is a roar nearby, and Stuart and some unnamed man recognize that as a tiger; then they hear a scream, and rush back to the house to see a tiger leaping out of the window. People try to bring it down, but guns don’t seem to have any effect.
The doctor is on the floor as Stuart rushes in, asking where Bonnie is and if she escaped the tiger. The doctor claims that Bonnie had an attack of “jungle mania,” and attacked him, then just disappeared. They’re like, Bullshit, it was the tiger, and Zander pretends that he has no knowledge of a tiger. Sure, Jan. Zander calls them superstitious, yells at them to get out, then immediately apologizes in the next panel and blames the “natives” for filling Stuart’s head with nonsense. Racist. Stuart wants to go look for his wife, right now! Zander says with the tiger roaming about, they’ll surely be killed, so Stuart sets off alone. Inga, the nurse, is hiding in the brush, and she calls out to Stuart to tell him that the transfusion Zander used on Bonnie was full of . . . tiger’s blood. He’s been experimenting with this for years, trying to turn humans into beasts, and Bonnie was his first real test subject.
Stuart can’t quite believe this, even though he also saw his wife transforming into something much like a tiger before he was shooed out of the room by the doctor; and that tiger leaping from the window might not have been a coincidence . . . He keeps walking, seeing a tiger on a tree branch. He tries to shoot at it but the gun jams, and the tiger escapes before he can reload. He goes to get a drink of water, foolishly not watching his back. A lion leaps out of nowhere and pins him down, and he loses consciousness, only to come to with a tiger resting at his side, and the lion dead before him.
The villagers come to get the tiger, so it rushes off into the jungle; Stuart tries to tell them about what happened, but they don’t believe him. A tiger can’t kill a lion, you weird white guy! Which, I don’t see why not – it was a one to one fight and both are very large, powerful cats. Also, this panel makes sure to have the villagers speak in broken English and it’s very racist and ridiculous.
Suddenly, a shout – the doctor is doing something to poor Inga, the nurse! Stuart runs up to the house and the villagers tell him that they’re going to burn down the house if the doctor doesn’t free Inga – which, he’s not leaving, so you will essentially kill her, too. And how did she get back to the house? Did he actually leave, even though he said he wouldn’t, and kidnap her? Did he bribe a villager to find her and carry her back? Stuart volunteers to go in and rescue Inga – yeah, the guy whose gun jammed super easily and was nearly felled by a lion about thirty minutes ago.
He bursts into the secret lair, and Inga is strapped down to the table, and Zander is looming over her with a vial in his hand. Stuart is all like, What are you up to? Gee, bro, what do you think? He yells at Stuart to get out, and he says, Not until you tell me what kind of stuff you’re up to! Zander pulls a pistol out of nowhere and says that soon EVERYONE will know what he’s been up to. Bonnie was the first subject – and he used specially treated whole blood a newly killed tiger cub. So, how have you been experimenting this long and only just found a human subject . . .unless you were using some of the Indian folks and they don’t count because they’re brown? Hmm?
Stuart is like, you can’t continue to do this work! Who is going to stop him? Didn’t you say this village was like, in the middle of nowhere? But once the doctor turns Inga into a tigress too, he will be rich and famous! Okay, famous I’ll give you . . . but rich? How would one make money off of this? Unless he’s writing a book – How to turn Yourself into a Tiger for Fun and Profit? Did he predict the lioness lady, the one who had so much plastic surgery done to her face it was distorted, by a couple of decades? Except went beyond that to actual tiger . . .
Anyway, a tiger suddenly springs through the window, kills the doctor with one blow, and then destroys the vials of blood on shelves in the laboratory, then hops back out the window. A bunch of villagers try to shoot at it, but it runs into the jungle. They find it a little distance from the house; it’s dead, and next to it is Bonnie, back in her human form. The villagers are astounded by the tiger body, as it has no wounds or bullet holes, so how did it die? Which raises another question – if no one had shot her, would she be a tiger forever? She is woozy and wonders if it’s all a dream, and her husband tells her it was a weird nightmare and to just forget all about it. Way to gaslight your wife, dude. She recovers completely and they go back home; that was their last expedition, but even now, when he hears an alley cat at night, he wonders if it’s really just a cat. So, do we know if the tiger blood permanently affected her and will come back sometime down the line? Maybe she will have a tiger cub if she has kids . . .the sequel!!
The next three are short, so we won’t go into too much detail. A prank is played on a ferryman across the Danube on Halloween. Two men disguised as ghosts get on board, claim to be death, and the ferry is never seen again. Okay, if they all disappeared, how does anyone know about this tale?
Underwater Mystery is a text-only story, and it’s rather confusing. Something about a shipwreck and people nearly drowning, but having interactions with some creature that is trying to strangle them? But then they are rescued and the creature is actually dead, supposedly grasping at anything in its death throes.
Finally, a guy strolling the beach in Florida finds buried treasure, imagines he sees Captain Kidd, and threatens him with a sword; only to find out, after the authorities get there, that there is no treasure, and the man actually murdered some poor dude walking along the beach. He goes to prison, but somehow has a handful of pieces of eight that no one can explain how he got.
The last one in this issue is called Terror in the Mines, and it’s a pretty straightforward, baffling mystery. A nurse is driving at night when she stops for a man in front of her car. He leads her to a mine shaft, where some men need medical attention. She helps them as best she can, and then one of the men gives her a letter to take to his son, Walter, leaving the mine to him. She barely escapes the mine when there’s an explosion behind her. She finds Walter and tells him about the deed, willing the mine to him. The man there trying to persuade Walter to sign the mine over says that that’s impossible; Walter’s father died ten years ago in a cave-in in that very mine, along with all the other guys that were there. But the note really does appear to be from this father, the woman sees a message in the glass for them to try to break through via a different tunnel, and it all works out.
Issue #6 begins with Macabre Ritual in Witches’ Glen. Tom and Vicki are driving through a foggy night in New England (a region in the Northern United States, if you’re not from this country), and Vicki is concerned about some people on the side of the road carrying torches. Tom says it’s a witch hunt. Vicki scoffs and says that witches don’t really exist, merely the products of ignorance and superstition. Tom, pipe still clamped firmly between his teeth, says, basically, Vicki, I love you, but you are an ignorant dame. Shit like this happens here all the time, you big dumb dummy! Even though I’ve never actually seen them myself . . . but I KNOW!
A woman steps out into the road to warn them that it’s feared the witches will be holding a conclave tonight, so turn back! Tom says that they have to press on, so the lady in the street says that he needs to guard his woman well. Tonight the witches will seek human form, and their prey of choice is a young beautiful girl. Gee, you seem to know an awful lot about it.
Once again, Vicki scoffs as they head onto the bridge, and Tom says they’re just going to try to get out of there as quickly as possible. As they head closer to the area with the supposed witches’ glen, Tom realizes that he no longer has control of the car, and they crash into the ditch. Tom blacks out for a bit, and when he comes to, he crawls out of the car and doesn’t see Vicki anywhere.
Deep in the glen, he sees light from the fire. Vicki is laying on the ground unconscious, and of course, here’s a coven of witches. They’re all crones, of course, and look very masculine in the drawings. They explain everything they’re going to do, like they haven’t done this before. Isn’t this a standard ritual, supposedly? They’re going to stab Vicki through the heart (she’s not a vampire, y’all), and then the witch will switch her soul with the nubile Vicki. I thought witches didn’t have souls . . . in the lore, anyway. There’s also a cauldron involved, of course, for the elixir of life.
So Tom barters for her life; the crone says that she made the car crash because she wants both of them, actually. If Tom can trick another, more beautiful woman to the woods and watch the crone murder her, then both his and Vicki’s lives will be spared. Tom agrees. The woman in question is the one that warned the couple away from the path. She’s essentially the Van Helsing of this story, I guess, hunting down the witches as her family has done for generations before.
The witch tells Tom again to watch Vanna Helsing die or he’ll never see Vicki alive again. The crone stabs the woman and makes Tom do the dirty work of carrying her back to the rest of the coven. The exchange begins, there’s a bunch of smoke and fog, and then the body in Tom’s arms comes back to life and it’s the witch, in the body of the fair young woman. No one will ever know . . . except TOM. So now he must die. He promises never to tell, but before they can do anything, the dawn is starting to break, so the witches must go. Crone Reborn threatens Tom that she will find him, no matter where he tries to go. He grabs Vicki’s body, and carries her back to the car, where he collapses.
He comes to, again, in the hospital. Apparently, Vicki came to, found him knocked out and got help. The doctor says he just has a mild concussion, but he’s been going on and on about witches for the last hour. Tom swears it’s real, even though he knows they won’t believe him.
Later, a nurse comes with a sedative for him. And . . . it’s the witch! There’s a bit of a struggle and she ends up flying out of the window, shattering glass as she goes, and gets impaled on a fence post. The doctor heads outside to see if she is still alive, and after they pronounce her dead, her face and body begin to turn back into the crone’s. Tom says, Ya see? I told you!!!!
Next up, a one-page about a real ghost town from the early days of the American West. Then, Fatal Rendezvous, which is a decent story about a man who goes in for surgery to remove a brain tumor, is clinically dead (and there’s no tumor), then wakes up to say that he will be back in five years, and suddenly can predict the future, which obviously begins to take its toll rather quickly. People don’t believe him and he can’t prevent anything; the only thing he can control is his final date with death, for real this time. His surgery is unsuccessful, as he tells the surgeon just before the anesthesia takes hold.
There’s another one-page about a French painter named Pierre Paitel, who knew when his long-lost lover had died when his painting showed her face briefly in the clouds. Pierre Paitel was a real person, and a painter, but there’s not much information online about him, so I surmise this story was made up out of whole cloth.
Speaking of artists, a really bizarre (or baffling? Ahaha) story is up next – Horror on Canvas. The main baffling bit is how poorly this is drawn. I am not a professional connoisseur of comics or anything, but it is just . . . not up to the same level of the rest of the pages. Blake Roberts, a young, promising artist is driving in a rainstorm, when he loses control of his car and crashes into a tree. The police at the scene make comments about how much of a mess his face was due to the crash, and that he’s much better off dead.
Of course, he’s not dead; he comes to in the morgue and tries to escape. Some guy in the corridor tries to stop him and then spins him around and screams when he sees Blake’s face. Blake catches his reflection, which doesn’t make logical sense, even from his horrific accident, and he is so enraged by his monstrous appearance that he turns to murder. (Seriously, his eyes are now twice their size somehow, and his upper lip is gone, while his cheeks are hollowed out.
Blake’s fiancée, Joan, is sobbing over him, when suddenly there is a call. Ted, a friend? A guy who is suddenly taking advantage of the void that Blake left behind? Answers the phone for her, as she is too distraught. He learns that Blake’s body has disappeared from the morgue, and possibly unrelated, some attendant was found murdered.
At the morgue, they have no answers for Joan or Ted, other than that he body is gone, and as far as they know, Blake is dead.
Six months later, Blake is holed up in some forgotten garret, painting. No longer having the heart for beauty, because he is ugly now, you understand, he can only paint horrific things on his canvases! Joan and Ted are getting married – called it! And they are also going to put on a retrospective of Blake’s work at the museum, so Blake is planning a little surprise for everyone with Blake’s new paintings!
In this panel, he looks different from the last time we saw him. Like Skeletor and a monkey skull together with broken teeth. It’s disconcerting, but mainly because, again, it doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Anyway, the guard at the museum tries to bar Blake from entering. This proves to be the guard’s undoing. Blake puts his paintings up and destroys his old work. This also resolves him that he will now murder all of the beauty he sees, so he becomes a serial killer, of course, without using that term, as it did not exist in the 1940s. As we move on through these murders, his face looks more and more like a cartoon ape, and I’m not sure what to think of this.
The self-portrait of himself in his new ugly form talks to him to tell him what to do next. And that is to kill Joan and Ted. It’s their wedding anniversary and they are happy, and Joan is beautiful. And beautiful things should not be allowed to live!
So Blake goes to their house; she recognizes him before he attacks her. He tries to kill Ted too, but Ted grabs a knife and stabs Blake, who pushes past him to get to the painting. The painting beckons him inside the canvas, for this is his soul. And so he dies.
When Ted and the police get to the room, there is only a skull and crumpled clothes on the floor, and a canvas on the easel. Joan, who didn’t die, begs to be taken home. All of the images are too horrible to contemplate, but she thinks to herself that she knew it was Blake who attacked her and she will never tell.
Finally in this issue, Black Magic in a Slinky Gown. It’s a literal Black Widow, y’all. Leonore Black – how on-the-nose is that name, by the way? – marries Richard Delloy, who is a millionaire and collects dead specimens of spiders. She tells her former beau, Dan, that she might be a widow sooner than anyone expects.
That night, Richard shows her his collection of spiders and as he’s bringing her a drink, he says that she reminds him of a spider, especially the all-black clothes she wears. What’s that sound? It sounds like spinning. Oh, no, he’s been caught in a web! Help! It’s a life-sized black widow spider. That’s right, it’s Leonore. She hates people who collect spiders – her folk are too weak to fight back, but not her! And now she has what she really needs – money!
I . . . have some questions. Did she get bitten by a spider to become this way? How is money going to help her? For high-powered lawyers when the bodies start piling up? I feel like she needs to get together with the tiger-blood dude from the other issue, Dr. Zander.
The police ask Leonore if she saw anything, but of course, she didn’t. The investigator says it looks like a giant spider killed him, and these webs! This doesn’t add up, boss!
A few days later, Dan is surprised that Leonore doesn’t seem too broken up by her husband’s death, but she says he’s a fool and she loves only HIM. Then someone stomps on a spider and Leonore tries to stab him. Even Dan is like, chill, it’s just a spider. Just a spider, Dan? How dare you?
She asks Dan to take her to his friend, Ben. Ben introduces her as the girl he’s going to marry. That was fast. Despite her callousness about him, Richard’s body is barely cold. Ben has an aviary, and he’s feeding the birds. What are they eating? Spiders, of course. Leonore is freaking the fuck out so Dan takes her out of there and asks what the deal is about the spiders. She says that she feels sorry for them, constantly being the prey of birds and toads and humans.
It all goes back to her stepfather, who was shitty and beat her and her mother. Then one day a black widow spider bit him and he died. She was so happy. The spiders are her friends! Dan is like, Honey, you need to go home. The grief is making you lose your marbles.
Later, he opines to Ben that his dame is having some mental health issues but she won’t let him help her. Ben says, her husband just died. Just give her some time, and now go away – I’m waiting for a hummingbird to hatch! After Dan leaves, Leonore comes in through the window, hypnotizes Ben with her eyes, then turns into a spider again and kills him.
The police come and basically say, Again? Didn’t we just go through this? Dan is there, too, presumably because of his friend being dead, and he can smell Leonore’s perfume, so she had to be here around the same time. He calls her and she says that the last time she saw Ben was in the afternoon; Dan says that he wants to see her at his lab the next day.
Leonore is surprised when she arrives, as she thought he was a doctor. No, Dan is a zoologist. But never mind that, Ben died in a very strange way. Leonore says, Yeah, he never got to see the hummingbird hatch, and Dan realizes that she was there. Yup, and now she’s going to show him HOW Ben died. She says that she can’t help it. She has to kill everyone who tries to destroy her species. She tries to wrap Dan in the web, and as they struggle, he butts up again a box of giant wasps (but not human-sized, you understand). He releases them and they instantly go into attack mode, weakening and then killed Leonore, who, in death, resumes her human form. Dan promises her lifeless body that he will keep her terrible secret.
But really, who would believe you anyway?
Before we continue, a bit of a content warning for this next issue – there are a few stories here that reference suicide and hanging as a form of torture.
Issue 7 begins with A Game with Lucifer. A young chess champion is given weeks to live, due to a heart condition. He finds a rare book, written by one of Hungary’s greatest chess masters about his match against, presumably, Satan. Barry, our brash American, reads the book about the game, and is confident that he could beat Satan, unlike Master Skalna, who was a fool. He ends up going to Skalna’s old house, despite everyone warning him not to go, as it is the anniversary of Skalna’s death, and strange things are afoot; he sees Skalna having to play the infamous chess game again, and lose, dying all over again. This, however, does not deter Barry from challenging the devil himself to a game for his literal life.
The devil shows up a few evenings later while Barry is practicing before his next tourney and Barry beats him. Of course, no one else can see the demon, so it just looks like Barry is playing against himself. Anyway, the next night, Barry is heading to the next stop on the tour when suddenly the train crashes spectacularly and wonder of wonders, he is the sole survivor of the wreck. As he walks away, we see the devil with a thought bubble: that he won ONE match, and there was his ONE chance at life. A few weeks later, back in New York, he attends an invitational on the exact day when his doctors predicted he would die. Barry is confident that he has cheated death, because of the wreck, you see. He plays brilliantly, and with his last checkmate, he collapses at the table, dead. After he is gone, they notice the chess piece that was in Barry’s hand when he died – it has a devil’s head on it! Dun dun DUN!
Then, a one-page story about an artist who sees a beautiful woman wandering the gardens and then she disappears into the fountain. When he tells the people he’s visiting who he saw and then sketches her, they realize it’s the ghost of their dead daughter, Elaine. They had forbade her to marry someone years before, and she drowned herself in the fountain. In fact, tonight is the tenth anniversary of her death. Pretty standard fare here, which sets up the next wild story, Scourge of Kentucky Hills!
We open with a wolf being hung from a gallows, while an angry mob chant praises for the hangman. The introductory panel tells us that this Kentucky town has been plagued by a grey timber wolf for some time, attacking livestock and small children, until it was captured and they decided to put it to death by hanging. That seems unnecessary, but whatever. Dr. Vincent watches out the window while the mob goes home and informs us that the wolf isn’t really dead, just unconscious. I love when the villain tells the plot out loud to themselves. Nemo, the hangman, thinks that it was so easy to fool the crowd and merely sedate the wolf.
Later, Dr. Vincent and Nemo meet up to grab the corpse of the dead dog they have waiting, in order to do a bait and switch with the wolf’s body, so that they can proceed with the operation. Oh, no, not this shit again. Nemo doesn’t like this whole idea, but the good doctor has done him so many favors and pays him so well that he doesn’t feel he has a choice.
Dr. Vincent has a bad heart (go figure) and he only has a few weeks to live. But with this beast’s heart, he can get a new lease on life. He would have preferred a human heart, of course, but he doesn’t want to add murder to his rap sheet! The executioner is going to help him and perform the surgery under the doctor’s instructions. So he’s only under a local anesthesia? These comics trip me out with how they just make up whatever shit they want.
The operation is a success, but Dr. Vincent feels pretty woozy so he asks Nemo to leave him for the night so he can rest. Um, you’re a doctor? Wouldn’t you agree having someone to keep an eye on you after a MAJOR SURGERY would be a better idea? Anyway, the doctor’s sleep is poor, having visions of people telling him that he is no longer a man, but a murderous beast! In the morning, though, he feels so much better and realizes that now, he can get married to his fiancé, Louise. She is a bit surprised by how he looks, but he assures her that he’s never felt better – however, she’s confused by how suddenly long and greyish his hair has become. He says it’s his new “heart medicine,” which isn’t wrong, I guess? But he seems annoyed she’s mentioned it at all, so she attempts to placate him by saying she doesn’t mind how it looks.
So, much like the Santa Clause movie, he trims and colors his hair to no avail, it just grows out thick and grey-tinged again. Almost like a . . . wolf’s fur. That night is a full moon and he decides not to go outside; Nemo arrives and is astounded at the site of him. Now his ARMS are covered in fur!! And he can’t see the mirror – Nemo says that he has become a werewolf. Okay, but werewolves don’t have issues with their reflections; that’s vampires. Anyway, Nemo says he has to warn the town before Vincent kills someone and unfortunately, that makes him the first victim of the doctor’s beastly rage.
The citizens run across Nemo’s dead body during the day, which convinces them that there is another wolf afoot, and they round up a posse to kill the beast. Dr. Vincent is convinced that he is smarter than they are, and can’t possibly be caught, so he follows behind them, then attacks one of the townsfolk who was hunting around unaccompanied. But, ruh roh, he’s been caught in a trap! The posse finds him at daybreak, when he looks human again, and the doctor who treats his wounds, Bruce, is a bit suspicious of his story of trying to hunt down the wolf himself, considering he doesn’t have any weapons on him.
Vincent, spooked by this line of questioning, decides to lock himself into his room, and later, Louise comes to the door, begging to be let in. She can hear growling and snarling in there; he tells her to Go Away. [from Thriller?] Instead, Louise (and Bruce) climb in the house through a back window, and are of course, appalled by what they see. Vincent says he has to kill Bruce so he won’t tell anyone about him. Louise goes to get help, even though Vincent says he won’t hurt her and he’ll always be himself in the morning. Yeah, cause that helps. Bruce takes this opportunity to break free from Vincent and escape.
The mob is crying for his blood, and Vincent realizes that he’s going to have to hide out in the hills. He manages to do so, and once again, pats himself on the back for being smarter than the average wolf-man, I guess? Anyway, a week goes by, and two of the villagers are out hunting and mention that Louise and Bruce are getting married – what in the what? Remember the painting story, with Ted, the guy who comforted the surviving fiancé? At least they waited six months. What are the writers of these stories saying about women here? Anyway, Vincent overhears this and he comes out from his hiding place, determined to stop the wedding, even if he has to murder them both. A week later, on the night of the wedding, he jumps into the middle of the ceremony, and they kill him with arrows dipped in moonwater. Bruce comforts his new wife that Vincent is better off now, but she still sheds a tear for her poor ex-lover.
The rest of these stories were just okay – a one-pager about a woman who identified her murder through a medium she used to use in her waking life; and Terror of the Tides, which is rather similar to the goat-man story from the first issue covered in this episode, except they are seaweed-monsters? Or something? And they want to make this woman their queen.
I think we’ve seen enough, don’t you?
I feel as if the writers used a dartboard or slips of paper or something to come up with some of these stories; many have similar beats, just the monster-of-the-week has changed. The only women who have agency are the villains of the piece – such as the witches and crones, or the spider woman – and the rest end up marrying the next guy who comforts them. It’s ridiculous.
There really isn’t any scholarship on the mystery and suspense comics specifically, unlike some of the other genre comics, so I guess I’ll just say . . . That’s the show. Please like, subscribe, all that good stuff. The Forgotten Library has a Facebook page as well as Twitter – and I do try my best to update both! Transcripts, as always, are on the website. And if you enjoy what I do and would like to show a little appreciation, you can Buy Me a Coffee. Think of it as a tip jar that takes Stripe.
Until next time, I’m Nikki Gee, your intrepid library haunter.