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Friday, June 12, 2009


Number 539


Powell's Bad Bad Girls


Last Friday I showed you the original art from two stories by Bob Powell of good girls who are tempted into being bad. Here are two stories about girls who are just bad. Witches. And I don't mean that euphemistically.

"Cavern of the Doomed," from Tomb Of Terror #3, 1952, is a tale of a witch who gets her comeuppance. If I'd seen this story and its vision of Hell when I was a kid it might have straightened me out.

"The Spell of the Black Gloves" is a tale that shows us that genes mean a lot. With her ancestor a witch, impoverished Abegail has no choice but revenge and evil. It's from, appropriately enough, Witches Tales #5, 1951.

Both of these stories are courtesy of Heritage Auctions, where I ::evil cackle:: swiped 'em.


















3 comments:

Chuck Wells said...

Ooh, ooh, these are alot of fun and don't sweat it, Pappy.

These are the best kinda swipes to make.

Tamfos said...

More of my beloved Powell, and even a couple of "caption panels" (sorry, it's an obsession with me)! I could go on for hours about Powell's drawing and storytelling chops, about his sexy, sultry women, but I won't. Just wanted to mention some of the writing. When you read lines like "Softer than the hair of a ghost" and "The sun should have been black this morning," it makes you wonder a bit about the frustrated poet who was trying to "eek" (sic) out a living writing comics.

Pappy said...

Tamfos, what I'm starting to find as I delve more and more into the history of comics is how many well-known writers from other fields provided scripts. Mickey Spillane, Patricia Highsmith, Manly Wade Wellman, Edmond Hamilton are some that come to mind, but I'm sure there were many more. They did it because comics were in constant need of material and they could pick up a paycheck, but also because they could do it anonymously.

Nowadays writers are big stars in comics but in those day no one thought much about it except for the editors who needed pages to hand to the artists.

A lot of research has gone into artists and their styles but trying to track writers is much tougher. You might be the first person to ever bring up the subject in this blog, and I like your description of the anonymous Harvey writer as a frustrated poet. You can imagine a guy sitting around Greenwich Village coffee houses and then telling his fellow poets, "Gotta get home. I need an 8-pager for Chamber of Chills by morning."