Number 775


Gothic Ghastly


Brrrrr. On a hot July day there's a chill running down my spine. It's from looking at the original "Ghastly" Graham Ingels artwork for "A Sucker For A Spider," published in Tales From the Crypt #29, 1952.

Yes, I know this is a formula EC Comics story, where the murderer is ironically dispatched the same way as his victim. But what lifts it above the ordinary plot is the art, which is deep in the gothic tradition of dark shadows, an old house, overgrown vegetation. It adds to the creepiness if you're afraid of spiders.

...and you are afraid of spiders, aren't you...?

I got these scans from Heritage Auctions, Original art shows close up how Ingels did his atmospheric work. Consider the large, scary spiders in several panels. Or page 5, panel 4, with a cinematic shadow cast through a doorway. On the last page white paint is used effectively to render the terrifying image of a man bound up by the web of a giant spider.

It's all just so...Ghastly.

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Number 176


Airboy Gets Ghastly!

When most Golden Age comics fans think of Graham Ingels they think of him as "Ghastly," a nickname earned during his time drawing some of the creepiest horror comics ever published for EC Comics. He well deserved that nickname. But Ingels was an artist who freelanced on various other genres of comics before he signed on at EC. This particular Airboy story, from Airboy Volume 5 Number 7, August 1948, although unsigned, is undoubtedly one of his.

Ingels, who was born in 1915, was about a decade older than his fellow EC artists. Ingels was a mature and polished cartoonist by the time he started his comics career. So it is with this Airboy story, a far-fetched story about criminals killing "bums," (now called "homeless persons"), secreting dope on their bodies and shipping them to their home cities where the dope can be claimed. The crime comics element is foremost in the story, and along with the later horror stories, was a milieu well suited to Ingels' style.

Airboy's dad shows up in this story. He isn't given a name, so is he Airdad?

The comic I scanned this from is from a copy reported unsold after it went off sale. The title strip had been razored off the cover, returned for credit to the distributor. The mutilated comic was then sold by an unscrupulous storeowner or news dealer, probably for 5¢. I used to see those sorts of displays in various stores in the early to mid-1950s. I think after a time they were shut down by local magazine distributors. My copy has tape holding the razored pages together through the first few pages of the story. I didn't do the taping, and I found this issue along with a couple of others in like condition. Fortunately, the tape's adhesive hasn't dried out, so the cellophane is still intact, not fallen off leaving a stained brown residue.

The cover, which I got off the Internet, is also by Ingels, and has a really nice graphic design. The coloring, and the silhouettes of the figures against the sunset make it stand out. It's likely influenced by Will Eisner, who had some very memorable Spirit splash panels set on piers like this.

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