Years of horror movies have conditioned me to think of 'caretakers' as creepy weirdos, and today's book backs that up! From 1986,
Blue Devil #20, "Old Haunts" Written by Gary Cohn and Dan Mishkin, pencils by Alan Kupperberg, inks by Bill Collins.
Dan Cassidy, Blue Devil and "weirdness magnet," is checking out a new place: the House of Weirdness! But when a cute little puffball escapes, Cain tells him it's really the "Hairy Devourer," and loose on Halloween it could destroy the entire world! Which is pretty typical for Dan, yeah. His would-be sidekick Gopher, out in a red devil suit, ends up trick-or-treating with the Devourer; while Dan's girlfriend Sharon is going to go see the Doors--er, the Windows; a sixties band whose lead singer has returned, seemingly from beyond the dead! He had died years ago "when this
Tarot-reading chick got mad and laid one heavy-duty
bad trip on my head!" (Not Madame Xanadu?)
The singer needs to sacrifice a soul to try and save his own, so of course he tries to use Sharon's. Dan manages to save her, with an assist from Gopher, and the singer (and the venue!) are sucked back to hell. To make up for the Hairy Devourer disappearing, Cain says it's only fair Dan take the room in the House; it's a terrible idea and he doesn't want to, so of course next month he's moving in! I'm not sure why it was the "House of Weirdness," though; except that
Elvira might've had the House of Mystery lease then.
Well that's certainly not very cash money of Jim, uh I mean Not Jim. The "Windows" really? I mean the Doors shouldn't sound any better but I guess it does because we've all been conditioned over time to accept it.
ReplyDeleteThe ending kinda reminds me of that famous quote of his that seems very appropriate:
"I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames."
And then it did...
Ah, Blue Devil- one of the greats from this era of DC. I've got this one (most of this series, actually) and I think Gofer had officially taken on the Kid Devil name by this point so he was just in his super-suit here. As for the 'House of Weirdness', you're not far off- Cain got evicted (by Karen Berger, appropriately enough) in the last issue of House of Mystery. The House was also torn down but that's never stopped it before. They stuck around with the House of Weirdness because it existed on both coasts simultaneously, and that way they didn't need to do three or four road trip issues every time Dan needed to go from LA to New York (understandably, he's on the no-fly list).
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