Here's a Satanic bacchanale attended by many monsters--"ghosts, zombies, vampires and werewolves." The plot of this 1951 story in ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN #25 was probably borrowed from the more famous 1950 EC story, "Horror Beneath the Streets." In the earlier story EC's three horror-hosts pass into the real world and harangue the EC editors into giving the hosts their own books. The writer of this story, probably editor Richard E Hughes (who had a rep for writing many ACG tales under diverse pen names), asserts that Satan resents ACG writer Alan Hartwood for having given mortals such good instructions on how to dispel supernatural evils. After conveniently overhearing that Satan has designs on Hartwood's life, the aggrieved writer spends most of the story fending off werewolves and vampires but then gets spirited away (sorry) to Hell by some ghosts. And yet there's a happy ending, because for some reason Satan then allows Hartwood to continue sending stories to ACG as their new "ghost writer." Wasn't the whole point of the persecution to KEEP Hartwood from writing new stories?
I used the word "Hell" generically, but the script only claims, on page 3, that Satan's minions are "denizens of the Unknown." This would have to be one of the first times that Hughes or one of his writers used that placename as a synonym for some domain that was two parts "afterlife" and one part "collective subconscious." Sixties comics-readers often saw "The Unknown" cited as the stomping ground of the ghostly hero Nemesis.
No comments:
Post a Comment