A Game Most Dangerous, Part 7: Island of Death

Welcome back to A Game Most Dangerous! This time I'm veering over to one of the much-beloved 1950s horror comics published by EC: it's "Island of Death" from Vault of Horror#13 (1950) by Harvey Kurtzman.

Steve and Alec are two pilots flying over the Pacific when their motor gives out and they crash near an island. Steve is separated from Alec in the crash and washes up on the island, where he's surprised to find a castle. Steve collapses at the castle doors but the people inside bring him in and share their hospitality. The next day Steve (full name Stephen Crane; not that Stephen Crane!) greets the owner of the castle, Count Alvar Cabeza.

Count Alvar and his silent servant Mulok show every consideration to their guest. After dinner, the count shows Steve his impressive trophy room full of the most dangerous animals on Earth (many familiar names to readers of Richard Connell's story such as the cape buffalo). No longer challenged by pitting his wits against animals, Count Alvar wants to hunt "the craftiest of animals... homo sapiens... man!" The count tells Steve he has 12 hours to hide in the island's jungle, then the count will hunt him with a crossbow.

Heading into the jungle, Steve finds his only tools are what was in his pockets: a cigarette lighter, handkerchief and his pocketknife. He finds some wreckage from the plane washed ashore and uses it to help build a trap. The count, Mulok and their hunting dogs come after Steve but Steve's traps kill Mulok and the dogs. Still, the count finds Steve and is about to kill him when Alec appears and uses his pistol to shoot the count in the arm. Alec quickly explains he washed up on the opposite side of the jungle. The count stumbles away from the two men and right into a nest of wasps which sting him to death. The two pilots find a boat at the castle and use it to depart.

Thoughts: There was a time when EC was considered by comics fandom to be the unchallenged master of horror comics, thanks largely to the effort EC's professionals placed into promoting themselves. Nowadays, EC is considered "good by the standards of the 1950s" and more and more there are reappraisals of horror comics by other publishers of the time (Atlas/Harvey/Fawcett).

All of this is to say that EC were just as fallible when it came to ripping off other people's ideas as anyone else in the field. This has to be laid at the feet of Harvey Kurtzman, not only as the writer/artist/editor of the story but because his single greatest failing as a creator was that he couldn't manage his deadlines. From that view, it's not surprising at all that he'd rip-off Richard Connell.

But now that I have that off my chest, this is the best story I've featured on A Game Most Dangerous thus far; it's very faithful to the story and depicts the various details of the story to an extent which the other entries have largely ignored. And boy, that Kurtzman knew how to draw!

The Hunter:

• A RussianEuropean nobleman (3/4 points)
• Who is a big game hunter (4/4 points)
• But is no longer challenged by big game (4/4 points)
• So he hunts men on his secluded island (4/4 points)
• Justifying this through a eugenics/Darwinian philosophy (0/4 points)
• He is aided by his servants, including a disfigured mute (4/4 points)
• And his vicious hunting dogs (4/4 points)
• He obtains his prey by scuttling nearby ships (0/4 points)
• His victims are given a time limit of 3 days; if they are alive at the deadline, they win the hunt (0/4 points)
• As a further example of his sense of "sportsmanship", he will deliberately prolong the hunt if he finds it interesting (0/4 points)
• His victims are placed on display in his trophy room (0/4 points)

The Hunted:

• A famous big game hunter (0/4 points)
• Who philosophizes about what (if anything) animals sense while being hunted (0/4 points)
• He is cast overboard and finds himself on the hunter's island, alone (4/4 points)
• The hunter knows him because of his reputation (0/4 points)
• When he learns the hunter's scheme he refuses to hunt alongside him (0/4 points)
• Hunted by the hunter, he flees into the wilderness trying to avoid detection (4/4 points)
• His only tool is a knife which the hunter gave himwas in his pocket (3/4 points)
• In time he constructs traps to kill the hunter or his servants (4/4 points)
• He survives the ordeal by leaping over a cliff (0/4 points)
• Although the hunt is over, he confronts the hunter and duels him to the death (0/4 points)

The Island:

• Is a tropical island in the CaribbeanPacific (3/4 points)
• Surrounded by dangerous reefs which wreck ships (0/4 points)
• The island has a dangerous swamp (0/4 points)
• And high cliffs (4/4 points)

The total: 45/100

The hunt is still on! Be back next time!

There's nothing to get MAD about

Word has come out that Mad Magazine is about to be cancelled. I have never been a regular reader of Mad, but the news brought a few things to mind.

There are three good reasons I can see why it has happened:

1. The magazine format is (unfortunately) a dying medium and Mad relied heavily on newsstands and subscriptions.
2. Their parent company, Warner, folded them under DC Comics' umbrella to save money and they've never been comfortable as a cog in a corporate machine.
3. They're not relevant.

To that last point, do you realize it's been 25 years since The Simpsons mocked Mad's toothless humour in the episode "Bart of Darkness"? ("'The Lighter Side of Hippies.' They don't care whose toes they step on!"). I mean, 25 years! The Simpsons themselves have been toothless and irrelevant for the last 20 years!

People of a certain age (ie, older than me) wax nostalgically about how subversive Mad was in its heyday, that it was a real "truth to power" publication (Mike Sterling has a nice reminiscence here). And even in my junior high years, kids who brought Mad to school were rebels.

Yet, for all that, I can't recall a time among my friends or online where someone asked, "Hey, did you read that new issue of Mad?" Like, there was never a standout story which got people talking. Instead, Mad had a sense of sameness; you might ask, "Have you ever read a Spy vs. Spy?" but never ask, "Have you ever read this Spy vs. Spy?" I feel like after reading a certain number of Mads one reached their limit and didn't need to read more. The names of the celebrities and movies being parodied might change, but little else did.

It was just two months ago that I read the four volume set The Mad Archives, which cover the first 24 issues of Mad, comprising all of the full-colour comic book-format issues plus the first issue of the magazine format. Those issues were the product of Harvey Kurtzman, a brilliant humourist, but at times the archives were a struggle to get through. For the first two years of publication, Mad was a bi-monthly comic, but in its third year it went monthly and that seems to have been more than Kurtzman could manage. The book got a bit tedious in its third year because Kurtzman was so clearly trying to fill up pages to make deadlines instead of assembling quality material. There were far too many pages with recycled art, photo captions or even next-to-no-content (the 'joke' being that the page would be practically blank or illegible) again and again.

And yet, Mad really was something special. In those issues there were running features by Wally Wood & Bill Elder which mocked popular comic strips or comic book characters and the first few movie parodies showed up. Among those parodies was, of course, 'Superduperman' in Mad #4, a parody of Superman which turned out to be immensely influential on the comic book medium, as a young Alan Moore absorbed a lot of lessons on how to deconstruct super heroes from Kurtzman & Wood's jokes.

It's funny, though, that the magazine format Mad wasn't something I thought of as a comic book. Through my teenage years, I thought of 'comic books' as a publishing format, not a type of storytelling. I saw comic strips and Mad magazines as something separate--which, I later learned, was one reason why Bill Gaines was happy to transition Mad from the comic book format to magazines--comics books were seen as an exclusively children's medium, but magazines were not. It was a shrewd move for Gaines (and also something Kurtzman demanded, but Kurtzman walked off Mad only a year later; he went on to create Trump, Humbug, and Help!, but none of them really stuck).

I have a lot of admiration for many of Mad's usual gang of idiots: Kurtzman, Wood, Elder, John Severin, Sergio Aragones, Al Jaffee, Dave Berg... and I was impressed that at times they attracted some of my favourite non-comics humourists like Stan Freberg and Bob & Ray. I'm glad that for more than 60 years, there was a place for Mad in this weird little world of ours. I read very few issues of Mad, but I was happy there was a continually successful comics publication that wasn't a super hero book. RIP Mad. And, by extension, this is the true death of EC Comics.

"I am ready to learn your lesson." Marley's Ghost review.

Comixology has recently published the digital comic book Marley's Ghost on their website. It's an adaptation of Charles Dickens' great Christmas classic A Christmas Carol, based on notes by the legendary comics artist Harvey Kurtzman.

How this comic book came to be is almost the most interesting thing about the book. Kurtzman spend years working on his graphic novel Marley's Ghost, but could never find a publisher. This comic was drawn by Gideon Kendall using Kurtzman's layouts and designs as his guide, with Josh O'Neill and Shannon Wheeler adapting Dickens' text to the medium (not why you need two writers to adapt the text, but here we are). The book includes images of Kurtzman's layouts and of a finished page which he had Jack Davis draw. I'm afraid the comparison between those pages and the actual book hurts the finished product a little, in my view. Kurtzman's art was simply so uniquely his own that I was instantly more taken with his layouts than those of Kendall. Likewise, Jack Davis' cartoonish characters outstrip those of Kendall.

But there's nothing wrong with Kendall's efforts on this adaptation. His own cartoony designs (particularly the long-faced Scrooge) are excellent, keeping the scenes lively. And it may simply be impossible to do wrong when faithfully adapting Dickens, which is what this book is - it retains much of the dialogue from the original work.

As I write this, Marley's Ghost is on sale at Comixology. Why not pick it up before the holidays are over?

Bradbury 31, Day 6: "It Burns Me Up!"

"It Burns Me Up!" is one of those Ray Bradbury short stories which doesn't quite fit the usual genres he's pinned to - it isn't horror, fantasy or science fiction. It does have a somewhat unusual storytelling device in that it's narrated by a dead man, but even that's not unheard of in literature. First printed in 1944, I suppose you could call it a crime story as the plot involves investigators looking into the murdered man's death while the narrating dead man complains about their shoddy work.

Although it's not one of Bradbury's best-known works, it too has been adapted, via Topps Comics in 1993. Topps had a knack for bringing in some of comics' all-time greatest creators for their Bradbury adaptations and in this instance, the adaptation came from Harvey Kurtzman, best-known for his work at EC Comics, who were, of course, boosters of Bradbury's in the 1950s. As Kurtzman wasn't involved in the 50s adaptation it certainly seems right for him to adapt one of Bradbury's tales; as his work was rather sketchy, Matt Wagner (a legend in his own right) came in to finish it up; Wagner explains the process through a series of articles here. It's a very neat look at Kurtzman's work with his geometric characters appearing almost 3-dimensional on the page. Seek it out!

Tomorrow: More Ray Bradbury!