Number 1311: Two Aces

Ace Horror is a blog in English which comes from Germany. It spotlights pre-Code horror comics from Ace. Ace is the comic book company from publisher A. A. Wyn who simultaneously published the fantastic and collectible Ace paperback books (including Ace Doubles, a special love of mine). Ace's comic books have grown on me over the years as I've seen more of them. The Ace Horror website is an invaluable resource for anyone studying Ace comics, or just interested in 1950s horror comics.

I’ve shown both of these stories before, and the Ace Horror website links to both of my original postings. If you check them out you can see the differences in my scans, then and now.

Both are from Web of Mystery #13 (1952). First up, a werewolf tale illustrated by Lou Cameron, from a time in his career when he was still finding his way artistically, and before he began signing his work. Next, Lin Streeter drew one of my favorite Ace horror tales, “Syr-Darya’s Death Song,” which is well illustrated, and contains one of my favorite single comic book panels. You can see it at the top of this page. As someone pointed out to me years ago when I created a privately printed postcard of the panel, "It's kinky without being real kinky, y'know? There’s a chick whipping a guy, calling him 'Dog' but they both have all their clothes on.” Ohhhh-kay. Sounds about right to me.

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Number 1033


The zombie death


With Halloween approaching I suppose I need to make at least a token attempt to have some sort of Halloween theme. I don't care to celebrate Halloween, especially by giving out candy to trick-or-treaters, lest my curmudgeon status with neighborhood children be endangered. That they shriek in terror and scatter when I approach them waving my walking stick and hollering, "Get off the sidewalk, you damn little monsters!" is enough Halloween celebration for me.

Today I have a zombie story from Adventures Into the Unknown #20, "The Zombie Death," with art by Lin Streeter. These zombies are the pre-George Romero zombies, back before the preferred method of getting rid of zombies was to shoot them so their heads explode like watermelons. As is usual with this ACG fare the story is not only illogical, it's awfully silly. I like those things when they come from ACG.

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Number 520


America's Joan of Arc


Years ago Mrs. Pappy had a paper due for a class and came to me for help. At the time I was working for a bookstore, cataloging a major Golden Age comics collection. I've mentioned before that she doesn't like comics, but I told her I could give her some information on comics and she could write the paper. She was OK with it, as only someone with a paper due in 24 hours can be.

I told her to write about patriotic heroes of World War II, which were the comics I was then cataloging. I listed patriotic heroes for her: The Shield, Captain America, Captain Freedom, Minute Man...on and on until the last name, Pat Patriot. When she got up in front of the class and read the paper she got to the name Pat Patriot and the place dissolved into laughter. She got an A on the paper, maybe because she was so entertaining.

OK, so here's Pat Patriot, "America's Joan of Arc." This appearance is from Charles Biro and Bob Wood's Daredevil #11, June 1942. Pat has a villain worthy of his name, The Mallet. He's a torturer, and we get some juicy panels with some bondage and torture. The Grand Comics Database claims Lin Streeter is the artist, and for scripter they give Bob Wood the question mark treatment, as Bob Wood? which means they're guessing.

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