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juushikaTitle: The Complete Web of Horror
Editor: Dana Marie Andra
Published: 2024
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 555,460
Text Number: 2084
Read Because: seduced by the new books section, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: Web of Horror was a short-running horror fiction comic anthology, published in 1969-70, collected here in its entirety, including prospective issues that went unpublished when it folded.
"Strangers!" by Syd Shores (volume three, page thirty) is about a twink and a bear struggling to survive after crashlanding on a desert island. The twink is useless, and growing weaker every day, but the bear looks after him, feeding him wild game. Because! the bear is a vampire! and preserving the twink as a food source, feeding on him each night! After the twink finally fights back, rescue comes—but it's too late, the twink has become a bear/vampire, himself! (You can find this here on Archive.org.)
I highlight this story because it's delightful; the subtext really is that close to the text, the art reflects the innuendo, and it's well-paced and -plotted. But it's telling that I'd rather talk about one piece than the mammoth collection. The other standout is "Eye of Newt, Toe of Frog" by Frank Brunner (art) and Gerald Conway (story), unpublished in the original run, here in Volume 4, about a rebellious wife reverse psychology'd into dark magic invocations. And that's it. Plenty of the pieces are fine, most are tolerable, but this is more interesting as an artifact of its time than in the individual stories; a forerunner in horror comics, it has all the prejudices expected from the time period and speculative plots that are more spectacle than psychological, a Twilight Zone-y "wouldn't it be fucked if...?". I'm grateful for archival efforts like this one, but would only recommend this to ultra fans; I appreciate genre history but not Western comics, and I think you need to be big into both to get much from this.
Editor: Dana Marie Andra
Published: 2024
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 555,460
Text Number: 2084
Read Because: seduced by the new books section, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: Web of Horror was a short-running horror fiction comic anthology, published in 1969-70, collected here in its entirety, including prospective issues that went unpublished when it folded.
"Strangers!" by Syd Shores (volume three, page thirty) is about a twink and a bear struggling to survive after crashlanding on a desert island. The twink is useless, and growing weaker every day, but the bear looks after him, feeding him wild game. Because! the bear is a vampire! and preserving the twink as a food source, feeding on him each night! After the twink finally fights back, rescue comes—but it's too late, the twink has become a bear/vampire, himself! (You can find this here on Archive.org.)
I highlight this story because it's delightful; the subtext really is that close to the text, the art reflects the innuendo, and it's well-paced and -plotted. But it's telling that I'd rather talk about one piece than the mammoth collection. The other standout is "Eye of Newt, Toe of Frog" by Frank Brunner (art) and Gerald Conway (story), unpublished in the original run, here in Volume 4, about a rebellious wife reverse psychology'd into dark magic invocations. And that's it. Plenty of the pieces are fine, most are tolerable, but this is more interesting as an artifact of its time than in the individual stories; a forerunner in horror comics, it has all the prejudices expected from the time period and speculative plots that are more spectacle than psychological, a Twilight Zone-y "wouldn't it be fucked if...?". I'm grateful for archival efforts like this one, but would only recommend this to ultra fans; I appreciate genre history but not Western comics, and I think you need to be big into both to get much from this.
