Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Edgar Allan Poe Day : comic double feature

Today is Edgar Allan Poe´s birthday so I wanted to do something special and post two of his classic tales by two of the greatest comic artists.


Longtime readers may recall that I posted links for these stories in 2011 but since the blog in question no longer exists it´s fair to re - post them.

The first artist is Bernie Wrightson who is not only one of the best known horror comic artists but one of the greatest artists - period who has lent his talent to uncounted horror mags like DC´s THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY.


Speaking about DC Bernie Wrightson is of course best known for his SWAMP THING series he did with writer Len Wein in the 70s which is one of horror comics classic series. Just check out this great collection of SWAMP THING splash pages from DIVERSIONS OF THE GROOVY KIND .


Our first story is THE BLACK CAT which was first published by Warren in CREEPY 62 ( May 1974 ) and which I read for the first time in color in Pacific Comics´ BERNIE WRIGHTSON - MASTER OF THE MACABRE series.

I wrote earlier that the blog where I found these stories has been deleted but I just found out that Henry J. Kawuga on PROFESSOR H`S WAYBACK MACHINE has a post on the color version of this story by Pacific and also a the original black and white version ( which includes the german version of the first page ). There are all kind of links to other interesting posts with other adaptions of Edgar Allen Poe stories there so check them out.  


So I thought THE GOLDEN AGE has vanished but it seems it just found a new home. Which means I can at least fix the links on the other post.

Our second story is by Richard Corben, also one of the greatest artists there is who has done everything from horror to fantasy to sci fi.


He´s best known for his lavishly illustrated ( and quite graphic ) DEN and FUTURE WORLD series but lately he has done a lot of Edgar Allan Poe adaptions for Dark Horse which have just been collected. He also did a five issue mini series called RAT GOD which I still haven´t bought.

The Raven by Richard Corben also appeared in CREEPY, in issue 67 ( December 1974 ) and you can also find the story on THE GOLDEN AGE and COMICS BOOKS STORIES. I was thinking about just posting the links but since I already promised to post two stories I can´t back out now.


I got no links for Richard Corben but Hyperdave at DATAJUNKIES offer a brief Bernie Wrightson retrospective, SCANS DAILY has a post on his Frankenstein portfolio and you can listen to him at the Sidebar podcast.

Before we come to the video section there are two more birthdays I have to mention. The first one is Julia Louis Dreyfus who celebrated her 55th birthday last Wednesday. Yes, that´s right. On the same day that Traci Bingham ( and Nicole Eggert ) have their anniversary and somehow I completely blank on it every year. To Today´s audiences she´s best known as Vice President Selina Meyer on the comedy show VEEP but I saw her first as the funny and sexy Elaine Bennet on the cult show SEINFELD.


Even though it was not shown to the general public in Germany ( they always aired it when most people were asleep ) I managed to catch a few with Elaine´s best scenes. SEINFELD has been in amazon´s bargain section a few times now but as always I didn´t have the money to spend.


The other birthday is country mega star Dolly Parton who turned 70 Today. In her case nomen really is omen because if anyone looks like a living blowup sexdoll it´s the blonde with the huge twin torpedoes ( which have been reported anything from 38CC to 48DD ) with the world record for a woman with the biggest breasts in a non r - rated movie for Nine To Five. One thing´s for sure : Dolly´s husband definitely needs no viagra pills.


Because I still haven´t watched The Best Little Whorehouse ( I don´t like movies about society´s double standards ) I have decided to do a post about Edgar Allan Poe instead which I know is a relief to some readers. Speaking about double standards, I find it unsettling that I never get comments about these horror posts or the ones that talk about alternate sexualities but whenever there is a picture of a hot woman ( not even full frontal or any nudity ) people are up in arms commenting. Anyway, while I didn´t make a post on Dolly I still want to wish her a happy 70th birthday.

Since it´s her birthday Today I want to start the video section with Dolly Parton. As country music is mostly neglected on german tv most of the clips of her on YouTube are new to me and since I couldn´t find one in good quality I opted for one from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.



For our other birthday candidate I picked An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe, where Vincent Price recites various stories to a live audience.



Combining country and horror we have the Oak Rigde Boys with Elvira.



Today´s cartoon video is The Simpson´s version of The Raven which was part of one of their Halloween episodes. These episodes are always great and while I don´t read as many Simpson comics as I used to I still make sure to get each new issue of BART`S TREEHOUSE OF HORROR which has always great guest artists like Gene Colan. By the way, on the Simpsons they predicted Donald Trump as president of America in the future.



There don´t seem to be any good videos with Richard Corben on YouTube so here is a motion comic that uses Bernie Wrightson´s Frankenstein.



New to the blog ? Everything you need to know about TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN : top ten posts / more posts of interest / best of the best


If you don´t like the road you´re walking start paving another one.

6 comments:

Terry Hooper-Scharf said...

Is it a regional language thing? We always said Schwarze katze or Katz and I never came across "kater" before? I lost contact with Edith Nebel who used to write sci fi and reviews back in the 80s and she worked at Reader's Digest. She was into linguistics and explained (excluding Yiddish) there were something like 21 German local dialects. That was back when we all wrote interesting letters. I noticed this language thing with radio -Austrian is odd to my ears, and I notice accents more and more. A German woman in comics was talking to me and we discussed German jokes and when she told one in German I said "Excuse me -which part of Germany are you from?" The Schwarzewald area apparently. I told her one joke I never understood and she said "Lippischer!" Apparently my accent (which I never realised I had!!) was a Lippe one.......sorry, were we talking linguistics or comics?

Terry Hooper-Scharf said...

I really do apologise but I went off on a tangent there. Seems I can't delete the comment. Oops.

SUBZERO said...

Well, Kater is german for a male cat but I don´t know if it is appropriate for the Edgar Allan Poe story. And it´s not a regional thing.

Terry Hooper-Scharf said...

Where I lived we called tom cats "Katzer". Go figure.

SUBZERO said...

Well, did you never hear about DER GESTIEFELTE KATER ? That´s the german version of the puss in boots. It´s a fairy tale for sake.

Henry R. Kujawa said...

I have discovered 27 different comics adaptations of "THE BLACK CAT"-- so far!! (I have 8 of them up at the moment.) My favorite is Berni Wrightson's, while my 2nd-favorite is that of Luiz Saidenberg, from BRAZIL. For that one, as with a growing number of stories never published in English, I've done an English translation, AND added brand-new color.

Imagine my delight to find out Saidenberg is STILL around, and STILL doing comic, more then 55 years later!! I got in touch with him, and HE was delighted with what i did with his story.

http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2016/01/poe-1961-pt-3.html