Monday, November 26, 2018

Pleasant dreams?

It's kind of amazing that I have been a fan of comic books and old-time radio for as many years as I have, and yet still have so many new things to discover in how those two hobbies overlap. Just recently I was amazed to learn that radio's Inner Sanctum appeared as a comic book! Sure, a few years back Ernie Colon made a comic with semi-adaptations from the radio show (I wrote about it here), but this was a comic book from 1943 when Inner Sanctum was still on the air!

The comic book in question is Super-Magician Comics v2 #7, published by Street & Smith. The Grand Comics Database has no idea who was responsible for this comic, as Street & Smith's comics were usually printed anonymously and there simply hasn't been as much scholarly attention placed on them as on Fawcett, Quality, Marvel or Dell comics of the same era.

Interestingly, the comic's Inner Sanctum feature begins as a biography of Raymond Edward Johnson, using a very loose cartooning style to illustrate his time as a golf caddie and waiter before becoming an actor. On the third page, Raymond is dressed up in black and wearing a top hat (as he often appeared in publicity pictures for the radio show) and within an old house with a squeaking door.

The story is about 'the mummy's curse' and if it was based on a radio script, I haven't been able to find it. A woman believes that a mummy has the face of her missing husband and there's an evil yogi who tries to hypnotize her. It has a very strangely dizzying pace which leads me to believe it's trying to adapt a 30-minute radio play in only 5 pages, but I can't be sure.

Come back tomorrow for another radio/comics oddity...

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