Halloween Countdown: Turner's Treasure!

One of the things I love about DC's Showcase Presents volumes that reprint their mystery and horror stories is how good a lot of the art looks in black and white. This is especially true for the stories drawn by the great Alex Toth, whose heavy line, minimalist style really shines without color.

And these series like House of Mystery and House of Secrets get a bad rap for being watered down by the Comics Code, but occasionally a genuinely creepy story snuck through, which is the case with "Turner's Treasure" from House of Mystery 184 (Jan.-Feb. 1970; reprinted in Showcase Presents: House of Mystery vol. 1), written by Jack Oleck and drawn by Toth.



The story itself is not terribly out of the ordinary for the DC mystery titles. A college Philosophy professor, Paul Turner, has discovered clues that could lead him to a secret Egyptian treasure. He quits his job, possibly because conducting an archaeological expedition will not get him tenure in the Philosophy department. Also, he realizes that spending the last 20 years lecturing to students has been a waste of his life, which just makes me sad.

Turner takes his wife with him on the expedition, and he quickly discovers the secret treasure.

This panel in particular demonstrates Toth's skill with shadow and light, so while the dialogue may be cliched, the image itself is effectively creepy.

The treasure, of course, turns out to be cursed, and some Egyptian demon possesses Paul and forces him to kill his wife, which, despite the fact that it occurs off-panel, is a surprisingly disturbing turn for this story.

Paul proceeds to try and sell his treasure, but the demon manages to kill every person that comes in contact with it, including, in the end, Paul.

Throughout much of the story, Toth uses wide, horizontal panels that stretch across the page in a way that may be common in contemporary "widescreen" comics but seemed to stand out at the time.


It's in a panel like this where you can really see Toth's influence on artists like Jordi Bernet and Eduardo Risso.

Toward the end of the story, as the police are closing in on Paul, Toth gives us this nice four-panel sequence that serves as a textbook example for how to build suspense on the comic page.


Throughout this Halloween Countdown, I'm going to feature some of my favorite artists from these Showcase Presents collections and highlight some real gems hidden therein.

Dr. K Reviews: Blazing Combat!

Holy crap, this book is awesome!

In 1965, Warren Publshing sought to build on the success of their horror comic magazine Creepy. Since Creepy was modeled after the the EC horror comics of the previous decade, the decision was made to duplicate another famous EC genre: war comics. The result was Blazing Combat, written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by some of the greatest artists in comics history, including Wally Wood, Alex Toth, Joe Orlando, Gene Colon, Reed Crandall, John Severin, and Russ Heath.

The series, unfortunately, only ran for 4 issues, and the book spends some time explaining the series's downfall through interviews with publisher James Warren and writer Archie Goodwin. In brief, Goodwin took a critical, realistic approach to war stories, including stories about the Vietnam War, which was then in the early days of American involvement. These Vietnam stories, which anticipated the country's antiwar sentiment, raised the ire of the US military and the American Legion. The military stopped the sale of the comic on all military bases and the American Legion encouraged wholesalers to keep it from newstands. Thus, after only a few issues, Warren had to pull the plug.

What made it into these four issues, however, are some of the greatest war comics ever made. In reading this collection, I was struck not only the progressive attitude toward war that these stories present, but also the breadth of stories told here. Each issue includes stories ranging from the American Civil War to Vietnam, and, with the exception of World War II, rarely is a historical period repeated in an issue. Each issue contained 7-8 short stories. When these stories are presented collectively like this, Archie Goodwin's accomplishment here can be seen as on par with Harvey Kurtzman's work on the EC war books.

I was also amazed at how well these stories hold up after more than 40 years. Warren published its comics as magazines in order to circumvent the censorship of the Comics Code, so while the level of violence depicted here may be higher than that acceptible in mainstream comics of the time, it is by no means gratuitous. The Vietnam stories are probably the most remarkable. The opening story of the series, "Viet-Cong" (with art by Joe Orlando, who draws most of the Vietnam stories) features an American soldier advising the South Vietnamese army and witnessing the murder of civilians and the torture of enemy soldiers (including waterboarding).

If anything unifies these stories, other than the focus on war, it is a dominant sense of irony. Stories of military heroism are rare, and when they do occur, they are often balanced by this irony--in one Revolutionary War story, the heroism of an unnamed general is celebrated, and we only find out at the end that it's Benedict Arnold.

Among my favorite stories are those involving fighter pilots in various wars, especially those stories drawn by Alex Toth and Wally Wood. Toth drew what is probably my all-time favorite war comic story--"F-86 Sabre Jet!" in EC's Frontline Combat 12. Toth's "Lone Hawk" and "The Edge!" are easily on par with that earlier story, and "The Edge!" itself forms a perfect companion piece, where Toth uses a deceptively minimalist style to tell a gripping story of Korean War fighter combat. Wally Wood did two amazing fighter pilot stories: "The Battle of Britain!" (which he wrote--the only story in the collection not written by Goodwin) and "ME-262!" The latter story is especially remarkable because it tells of the frustration of a German pilot in WWII who knows that the new Messerschmitts should be used as fighters, while Hitler keeps insisting on making them bombers.

Probably my favorite story in the collection, however, is "Give and Take," with art by Russ Heath. Heath has always been one of the greatest war comics artists, but this story goes well beyond any of the work he did in DC and Atlas's war comics. The art is almost photo-realistic here, especially in the use of shadows and evocative facial expressions.

In all, this is an essential collection, featuring truly important stories from an unfortunately brief period of incredible creativity on the part of Archie Goodwin and a stable of some of comics' greatest artists. Fantagraphics has been knocking out a lot of great archival collections lately, including Paul Karasik's rediscovery of Fletcher Hanks's work, Craig Yoe's collection of bizarre Boody Rodgers stories, Greg Sadowski's Supermen anthology, and the complete, essential collection of Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug series (not to mention the work they are doing on comic strip archives).