Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Thing from the Grave!" by Al Feldstein

Life is unfair. Things may seem bad now — and they are pretty terrible — but believe me when I tell you that what we are living through now is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary. Things have always been bad. Prejudice, war, pogroms, and sheer, mindless brutality have been the way of the world from time immemorial. The scales of justice have always been off-balance, and they’ve never tipped in favor of the innocent. Any gains that have been made by the victims of our collective bloody history have had to be torn from the breast of the powerful, the wealthy, and the comfortable. And those gains are never won once and for all. They have to be fought for again and again and again.

Two quotes that I think succinctly sum up the above are from Henrik Ibsen and, my personal favorite writer, Harlan Ellison (and we’ll be hearing more from ol’ Uncle Harlan in a future Blog-o-ween post):

“To live is to war with trolls.”

—Henrik Ibsen

and

“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”

—Harlan Ellison

In other words, living is exhausting work, folks. You have to fight for it every step of the way. And the people you have to fight against are just a bunch of dumb brutes. Get used to it.

But we can’t be at war with the stupidity of the world twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, can we? Heck, no! So where can we find a place to rest our heads awhile in between battles? Who can give us succor in these trying times? What can give our batteries the recharge they need so we can get back to the barricades and fight on?

Sure, a trip to Rick’s Café Américain would do you wonders. I hear they have a helluva band. But Rick’s is all the way over in Casablanca. Might I suggest something closer to home? What would you say to a visit to your local comic books store? And once there, what would you say when I tell you that the relief you seek is to be found in the pages of a seventy-year-old horror comic?

Begun in the 1940s by Max Gaines, Educational Comics was meant to market comics about science, history, and the Bible to schools and churches. Following his death in a boating accident in 1947, Max Gaines’s place at the head of the company was taken over by his son, William. And that’s when things really started to cook.

Under William Gaines’s guidance Educational Comics became Entertaining Comics — or EC for short — and the company collected a stable of writers and artists that I don’t think has really been equalled since. Editors Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman (who also served as writers and artists) led a ragtag group of freelancers that included Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, and Wally Wood. Beginning in 1950, they started what was known as “The New Trend.”

The comics of this New Trend dealt with more mature matters. Titles like Tales from the Crypt, Frontline Combat, Shock SuspenStories, and Weird Science brought the kids who feverishly read them under the covers at night or tucked into the center of more acceptable reading fare stories about racial equality, anti-war advocacy, nuclear disarmament, and environmentalism. Heady stuff for the children of pre-Civil Rights Era America!

It was in EC’s horror line — Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror — that these social issues were melded with a sense of (midnight) black humor and poetic justice. The baddies in these comics were usually greedy jerks who killed innocent people in order to get what they wanted. In turn, their cupidity was rewarded by the universe through the most ironic means. If that didn’t work, then the universe wasn’t above sending in a supernatural agent to rebalance the scales. Anything to get the job done, amirite?

Take, for instance, take today’s story. Written and drawn by Al Feldstein (with colors done by Joshua G. Jones), “The Thing from the Grave” is the quintessential Tales from the Crypt story. It’s just the kind of tale to give the heart a lift...right out of your chest! Heh-heh-heh!

It’s a tale as old as time: Bill and Jim are in love with the same woman. Laura, much to Bill’s chagrin, marries Jim. Determined to have her, Bill waylays Jim one night on a dark and lonely road. And he isn’t looking for a ride into town either. Bill kills Jim, buries his body, and dumps his car into a ravine. Now, all Bill has to do is sit back and wait for Laura to get over Jim’s disappearance, and then it’s a one-way trip for the two of them to Smooch City, if you know what I mean.

And I think you do.

Unfortunately for Bill, Laura isn’t giving up on Jim. She just knows that something terrible has happened to him. What’s a fella to do when all his best laid plans have failed? You guessed it — it’s time to confess everything to the woman whose husband you’ve murdered, lock her in a cabin, and set fire to it!

Granted, it’s a strange solution, but this is a complex problem. Bill doesn’t have time to think things through!

How is Laura going to get out of this predicament? Did Jim really mean it when he said that if Laura was ever in any danger then he would save her...no matter what? Who — or what — is the thing that comes shambling out of the forest and chases Bill over hill and dale? Well, I’ll give you a hint, kiddies: it ain’t a woodchuck, that’s for sure.

“The Thing from the Grave” has got it all: a lover’s triangle, deceit, murder, shallow graves, arson, and retribution in the form of an undead corpse with love in its heart...if not skin on its face. You can’t have everything, I suppose.

The poetic justice of “The Thing from the Grave” is very tasty. As is the simplicity of the way the story unfolds. Over each of the seven pages (eight, really, but the first one is just a full-page intro), Feldstein uses the seven panels per page at his disposal to tell his story in the most economical way imaginable. Page one: Laura chooses Jim, Bill gets mad, Jim heads off in his car. Page two: Bill meets Jim in the dark, Bill kills Jim, Bill gets rid of the body and the car. Page three: Laura refuses to give up on Jim, Bill knows he’s beat and confesses. And so on. Boom-boom-boom. All killer and no filler.

Sure this doesn’t give the writer much time or space to deliver characters of the greatest depth and gravitas, but look at it this way: what Feldstein is telling us is simply another version of a campfire tale. A tale remarkably like “The Hook.” Go back to the first day of this year’s Blog-o-ween and refamiliarize yourself with that little ditty. Who are the boy and the girl in that story, what are their dreams, their desires, their fears? What about the killer? How did he end up losing his hand? How did he end up in an insane asylum? How did he escape? There’s no answer to any of those questions (except, perhaps, for the boy’s desire, which is a trip to Smoochville with his girl), and we don’t need ‘em. All we need is for the story, painted in broad strokes, to move ahead smoothly on its rails to its dénouement. The end. I think the best horror stories tend to be the shortest and sharpest ones. Ending them with the baddie getting buried alive don’t hurt either.

So, that’s our Blog-o-ween story for today. You can find EC’s comics at your local library. Services like Hoopla make it easy to pick up electronic versions of nearly the entire EC catalog. Check ‘em out today to stoke your inner flame until it’s an out-of-control conflagration. Winter is coming, and we all need a little something to remind us that it is possible to upset the order of things and to get a little of our own back, plus the vigorish. I mean, how else are we to have...pleasant—GOOD LORD! CHOKE...