Thursday, April 14, 2022

I would've thought Ditko wrote this one, too.



Could've done with some credits, but we'll trust the GCD: 1971, Ghostly Tales #85, featuring "The 9th Life" Written by Joe Gill, art by Steve Ditko; "Hide and E-Eeek!" also by Gill and Ditko; and "Gypsy's Revenge!" Written by Gill or Pat Boyette, art by Pat Boyette. (The table of contents lists them in a different order!) 


"The 9th Life" is a good one, in a Twilight Zone vein: young misanthrope Michael Hoyt hates his life, hates the world, hates about everything; but does show kindness to a scared cat shooed out of a tenement. In what could be a dream, Michael is visited by the cat in the form of a pretty witch, Felicia. She offers to help him find a better life, and what could be better than living in pre-Revolution America? Just about everything, if you're interested in not getting hung for shooting your mouth off... 


That's a bust, so Felicia helps him escape, to about a hundred years after that. Good times...unless you catch about anything, in the days before penicillin. Michael is starting to realize there are risks in any era, and returns to his own time to try and improve it, or at least accept the things he can't change. But, he does get introduced to a familiar girl at a party, so maybe his future is looking up. 


"Hide and E-Eeek!" is odd to me, if only because the book's host, Mr. Dedd, intervenes: you never saw the Crypt-Keeper or the Old Witch do that, did you? Wearing a human face resembling the Spectre's Jim Corrigan, Dedd attends a party where bitter old creep Mr. Spite has made most of the guests disappear. Feeling his family had wrecked his life, Spite was using mysticism or hypnosis or something to kill all his relatives before he died, forcing them to dig their own graves in his basement. Dedd puts a stop to that, leaving the guests befuddled as to why they were all digging... 


"Gypsy's Revenge!" reminded me of Doctor Doom, a little: evil Lord Malko, um, lords it over the countryside, but seemingly allows an aggrieved gypsy to kidnap his son and raise him. Is he just lazy, or have a longer game in mind? The boy Esau seems to excel in the mystic arts, but is he a willing participant or a pawn? I feel like a couple pages were out of order in my copy, so I'm not quite sure either.

1 comment:

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

That guy from the first story is most definitely a fucking doomer. Reminds me of an episode from some 90's PBS kids show where this spoiled kid took his easy life for granted & was taught a lesson by being straight up kidnapped & sent back in time to the colonial days to appreciate how good he had it. The kicker being that he was black, so I imagine his living back then would've been even worse than had he been white or any other ethnicity.

That last one is most definitely ripped from Doom's origin story. Has to be.