Tuesday, December 26, 2023
"The End" Week: Arrgh! #5!
I didn't feel like I wrote enough "The End" posts last year, so I started much earlier this year...largely because this was in the same quarter-bin as the first book we looked at this year, but anyway. From 1975, Arrgh! #5.
We mentioned before this was a horror-spoof book from Marvel, but most of this issue was reprinted from 1954's Get Lost. Which was a Mad knockoff, made notable for being the work of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, who would've been in the middle of their run on Amazing Spider-Man when Arrgh! #5 hit the racks. The cover feature, vampire spoof "Count Varicose" might have been new, or merely unpublished before. "The Invisible Mr. Mann" is supposed to be a bio-pic style angle on the Invisible Man: it isn't that lofty, but has a couple jokes that still hit.
Less so: "The Some-Thing," spoofing The Thing from Another World. Then "Der Spider und Der Fly" by "Z.Von Fraud" is a weird dating fable? Despite not being based on anything I can think of, it feels even more dated!
Ok the “Count Vericose” title is clever, corny but clever.
ReplyDeleteWas the Z.Von Freud supposed to be like Sigmund Freud? Warren Zevon maybe?