Number 945


Check and double-Check


Compared to many of the journeymen comic book artists I feature in Pappy's, Sid Check did relatively few stories during his career. He did a reasonable imitation of the better known Wally Wood, some stories looking better than others. He even found his way into EC comics as a freelancer with a couple of memorable stories.

Here are two stories of Check's that I have on file: "The Werewolf's Victims" I showed long ago, but I have re-scanned it so the pages are actually readable. It's from Atlas Comics' Mystic #31, 1954. "Death Sentence" is a story I have both in the printed version from Harvey's Tomb Of Terror #14, also from 1954, and these scans of the original art I took a few years ago from the Heritage Auctions site. It's the originals I've chosen to show you today.

More Check stories can be found, posted by Mr. Door Tree in his Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog, here.

More about →

Number 43


The Werewolf's Victims


What's Halloween without a werewolf story? I'm partial to werewolves. They get to run around and bite people. Baaahahaha!

This story is from Atlas Comics' Mystic #31, June 1954. It's by an artist of the Wally Wood school, Sid Check. I only know of a few Sid Check comic book stories from the Golden Age. He must've hung out with the EC gang, though, because some of the stories were published by them.

Doing a search of Sid Check's name came up with this page from Lambiek.net, but no biographical information, birth date, etc.

The Werewolf's Victims would have been right at home in Creepy or Eerie magazines a decade later. The stories they ran in their earliest issues had stories and endings that were very similar. And the story is both creepy and eerie! The idea of a bunch of men held captive in a cave, being killed off one-by-one by a werewolf is pretty scary...unless you're the werewolf.

 

More about →