Plop! #1: The Gourmet

[alicemacher]

Plop!, usually subtitled The Magazine of Weird Humor!, was a 1970s DC anthology comic focusing on just that: wacky stories and gag pages with a horror or dark fantasy slant, hosted by Cain, Abel and Eve from three of DC's other horror/thriller titles. Here, from the first issue (Sept-Oct 1973), is "The Gourmet," by Steve Skeates and Bernie Wrightson.


The wealthy, ill-mannered Vernon Glute spends his days feasting on expensive dishes of all sorts, particularly his favourite: frogs' legs. Until the fateful night he sends his long-suffering cook Hormsley back to the kitchen for yet another fresh helping...

Comments

[kamino_neko]

Honestly, this one would be perfectly at home in a 'serious' horror magazine like House of Mysteries.

[alicemacher]

It wouldn't surprise me if the story had originally been intended for one of DC's more straightforward horror titles, only for editorial to save it for future space-filling use instead. That's not uncommon in the business. EC Comics, for example, would run the occasional "Grim [sic] Fairy Tale," a dark-but-goofy parody of a classic folktale, in its 1950s horror titles (and, once, in the genre-sampler Shock SuspenStories to fill that issue's horror slot). When they launched Panic in 1954 as its second humour title, an original "Grim Fairy Tale" appeared in the first issue despite the comic not being horror-based.

[kamino_neko]

Doesn't look like an inventory story, though - Wrightson's dated signature is only about 6 months off publication. Though, yeah, I could see it being a HoM story that they diverted when they decided to introduce Plop!.

[wizardru]

Plop! was an odd-duck, iirc. I have an issue or two of it, somewhere. I believe the one I have had a Wrightson-drawn story with a take on Pygmalion. It was definitely more conventional horror, really.