Recent Reading Roundup!

 TUROK SON OF STONE #50:

I have admired this cover from afar for a over two decades now, since the first time I saw it posted in some online list of "all-time crazy comic covers" or some such thing.  After finally pulling the trigger on buying a copy, I was very pleased to find that the awesome cover sits atop a downright excellent issue of Turok, too! Whenever I looked back on this cover over the years, I always a) reminisced about how much I liked reading the Whitman reprints of Turok as a kid, b) lamented how this issue was never one of them, and c) amused myself with how radically inaccurate the hungry hungry T-Rex is drawn on this cover. Yes, that's all part of the charm, and you'll get no argument from me. However, now that I've actually READ the issue, I know that it's NOT a T-Rex that's depicted on the cover to begin with, but a completely unique, "previously unknown" creature! Long story short, T-man and Andar accidentally unfreeze this unique "Honker" AND her eggs from their stasis at the bottom of an icy lake. The duo takes a grim but surprisingly ecologically-minded approach to the situation, opting to kill the mama dino AND destroy her eggs because the "modern" Honkers of the Lost Valley would never deal with this new predator that they had evolved without for so long.  Okay, but Turok...what if that ledge shielding the lake from the sun had collapsed when you and Andar were nowhere near it?  Nevermind! Doesn't matter! An indisputably awesome cover and seriously great story = Early X-Mas, and also the longest commentary on any one issue you'll get in this post! 

GHOSTLY TALES #61:

This one surprised me twice: First, because the cover had me bracing for some typically racist shenanigans, but surprised with a tale about the arrogant white invader getting what's coming to him, and Second, because the (excellent cover) was rendered by someone other than Steve Ditko, when the story it advertises was very clearly illustrated by Ditko himself.  Pretty sure that's first time I've see a Charlton Ditko story "covered" by another artist. The rest of the issue was "eh."

GHOST MANOR #15:

On the other side of the coin, we have this issue, where two out of the three stories within are illustrated by Ditko (nice!), including the cover story! As epic as that cover appears though, the short tale attached to it felt more like a Gold Key "Grimm's Ghost Stories" tale, with a "happy" "was it all a dream" style ending. The opener "Search for a Victim," also drawn by Ditko is a far better (and grimmer) offering.

HERCULES #5:

This "Sergius O' Shaugnessy" (Denny O'Neill) written and Sam Glanzman illustrated visual feast gives us a VERY altered version of the mythical encounter between Hercules and the Queen of the Amazons, casting Hippolyta and straight up evil and ruthless. Convenient, that. Still, a blast of an issue.

HERCULES #11:

This one is written by Charlton's human story factory Joe Gill, but still thankfully illustrated by the masterful Mr. Glanzman.  I say thankfully, because even thought it's not a BAD issue, it is marred by either Joe (I'm inclined to believe) or Sam (because he was also apparently the letterer, despite some separate pseudonym being added to the credits) adding very "Batman '66" style campy "exclamations" in and around some of the panels, the worst of which being the words "Hot! Scorching! Fiery! Yeah!" between two panels of Herc walking across the desert.  Ugh.

GHOSTLY TALES #63:

While I love this cover, the story it represents ends up being a clunker, largely due a twist ending that seems to come out of nowhere because...it does! If one little piece of the main character's history was revealed before the end, it would have worked SO much better. It also contains lines like "The weakling...fainted like a woman!" Other than some decent artwork, the rest of the stories didn't bowl me over, either. Sigh. But it's not like this was the worst comic book of this Recent Reading Roundup...

SCARY TALES #40:

Because THIS was the worst comic book of this Recent Reading Roundup! Have you always wondered what would happen if Jack Kirby and Neal Adams created a "Gatchaman" style superhero series with largely flavorless or downright unlikable protagonists? And not only that, but such a thing was only ever brought into this world by someone at best amateur talent who THOUGHT that what he was doing, and only had a weekend to do it?  Well, look no further!  I'll give 'em this: the giant ro-beast-like monster-bot of "The Devil's Organist" actually comes pretty close to hitting that target. Otherwise, this is a tragically bad comic book story, and its placement in THIS series is just bewildering.  Welp. Guess we'll have to get BEYOND it...

BEYOND THE GRAVE #17:

Another rather late Charlton offering (1984!), this issue kicks off with a great 9-pager by Cuti and Staton that features an agoraphobic stand-in for a certain Lovecraftian author that is both fun to read and pleasant to look at! What a concept! This is followed up by an 8-page "scared straight in the swamp" tale illustrated by Steve Ditko ("sort of" the cover story) that does not disappoint, and "The Empty Room" wraps it all up with a haunted house tale by Gill and Newton that might not have the strongest ending, but is a fun, creepy, nice-looking affair all the same. A solid issue of a Charlton Horror Anthology Title (CHAT), indeed! We're coming down to the Final Three now, folks!  Can we keep it together??

GHOST MANOR #22:

Our last issue's cover might have only had a thematic link to its cover story, but the one you see above could practically be a panel from that story blown up and slapped on the front of the book! It's not, but it definitely fits right in with "Mr. Beazely's Ghosts," the final tale in this issue, also by Gill and Newton, who anchored our preceding "Ghost Manor" outing. It's a good tale, too; a 9-pager about a overzealous caretaker and the couple who plot to unseat him from his prized property. Before all that, the issue kicks off with "A Shocking Tale," a Gill and Ditko joint about an another overly zealous sort, this time an electric-chair-enamored executioner who gets a different sort of "charge" than the one he was after. Thatt one leads into "Crawling Death," in which a holy-rolling snake handler discovers the price of greed and betrayal in one of these types of comics. Another really solid CHAT!

HAUNTED #18:

At first I mistook this cover for Tom Sutton's work, but one look at those space helmets will tell ya: this is a Joe Staton job! And a pretty great one at that! This ish opens with "The Survivor," an odd little -pager illustrated by Ditko that deal with near future (2155) space travel, self-serving betrayal, and, reminding you that this is comic from 1974, mysterious Asian mind-swapping techniques. "Final Operation" is a 7-page saga written and drawn by the great Wayne Howard (of Midnight Tales!), telling the all-too-timely here in 2025 tale of a super rich man willing to pay ANY PRICE for immortality, and our cover story comes along at the end with "Film Freak," by the fan-favorite (It's me. I'm the fan.) team of Cuti and Staton. In that one, a man who's become progressively more and more "lost" within his love of science-fiction finds out just what his long-suffering has planned for him now that she's had enough. That doesn't hit close to home at all, does it, nerds?

(BARON WEIRWULF'S) HAUNTED (LIBRARY) #35:

This far-more-recognizably Staton cover is followed right up another Cuti-Staton cover story called, much like it is on the cover, "The Egg." It's a fun little 8-pager about a kid who brings home something he finds on the beach that nearly causes the end of the world but ends up smelling delicious instead. Confused? You'll have to read it to fix that, effendi! Riding on the heels of the opener is "Invincible," an 8-pager with Don Heck-esque art about a Wizard in medieval-ish times who's grown sick of getting second billing behind all those jocks-I mean, Knights. It's not bad, but it's interesting more for its unusual premise than its actual ending. At the end, we all treated to an All-Sutton 6-pager called "A Budding Evil," about a gruesome (and sexist!) gardener who winds up fertilizing his own fiendish foliage. A 1-page treatise by Cut and Newton on "How to Become a Werewolf" rises at the very end to enlighten us about the less cinematically popular ways in which legend would have one achieve a lycanthropic state. Not a bad one to end on!

And yes, two of the stories from that issue at the end were reprinted from comics originally published in 1971. I'm not gonna bother with such details in these posts for the most part. To paraphrase a movie I never really watched: "It's Charl-ton, Jake."

That's it for this Roundup, folks!