Gateway to Horror / They Crawl By Night! / Wolverton does Armageddon

[alicemacher]

Tsk. You should've practiced safe sex... Oh. Never mind.


One final post of Basil Wolverton's horror work, featuring excerpts from two Atlas/Marvel stories plus a bonus selection of especially disturbing Revelation-themed illustrations he did for The Plain Truth magazine. As to the latter, warning for gore.


First up is "Gateway to Horror" from Marvel Tales #104 (Dec. 1951). Two of six pages.



In 1949, adventurers Sam and Vic visit Nevada in search of a rumoured silver mine. They find an old shack on the spot indicated in their map.










Sorry I can't show you the rest (as with the next story, Marvel still owns the copyright). Be assured, though, that this tale has a happy ending for once. Sam and Vic, though hampered by temporarily slow movement, manage to drop explosives down into the shaft and destroy the weird green underworlders. Vic tells the reader at the end, however, that in the intervening two years strange noises have continued to emerge from under the Earth's surface...



Next up is "They Crawl By Night!" from Journey into Unknown Worlds #15 (Feb. 1953). 1.67 of 5 pages.



Poor Mike Webster. An in-patient within a state mental hospital, he sees giant crabs, with human heads, crawling across the floor at night. But his screams drive them into hiding, so that neither his fellow patients nor the doctors believe him. So the next night after lights-out, he stays quiet as the crabs resurface, then follows them into a broom closet, which conceals a long tunnel leading underground. At the end of the tunnel, Mike sees the crab people's apparent leader telling the crowd it's time for them to take over the surface world (see a pattern here?).






Sure enough, as Mike lies in bed waiting for the sedative to kick in, one of the crab people comes for him.







Now for the bonus content, which didn't merit its own post because it doesn't consist of comic scans as such. Rather, these are a few of the many Bible-themed illustrations (most not at all horrific in subject matter) that Wolverton, a devout member of the Worldwide Church of God, did as commissions for the denomination's magazine The Plain Truth, beginning in 1954. What follows are a few of his imagined End of Days scenarios inspired by the Book of Revelation, other apocalypic Bible passages, and by the widespread fear, at the time, of nuclear war.

The first of these is Bomb Crater, with a caption from Revelation 6:8.






This is Plague of the Enemies of Jerusalem, with a caption from Zechariah 14:12.






Here's Boils and Darkness, informed by Revelation 16:10 and the verse following it.






Finally, as an aftermath to nuclear Armageddon, we have Mutants. The editors of The Plain Truth in fact rejected this, feeling it was too extreme for its readership. Nonetheless, Wolverton considered it one of his best pieces of work in his entire career. I'm inclined to agree.







If you'd like to see many more examples of Wolverton's exceptionally detailed (and, again, mostly non-gruesome) illustration style, I highly recommend The Wolverton Bible from Fantagraphics. Thanks for reading!

Comments

[tripodeca113]

Crabs are far better designed than bipedal apes. If anything the crab people are fixing natures mistakes.

[kamino_neko]

Crab people, crab people. Taste like crab, talk like people.

[thediiem]

Maybe I'm reading into it, but these all have a lot of themes about not delving too deep into the world/self, or risk becoming a monster. And that monstrosity is transmissible, being invaded or bitten or violated makes you a monster.

[alicemacher]

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he does not become a monster himself. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you."
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[donnblake]

Hmm. The crab people one has something to say about consensus definitions of 'normality,' and I appreciate it that Wolverton has *no* time to spell it out when he could be drawing and narrating a four panel zoom in on a scary crabface.

For the first one, I'm impressed by the pedal to the metal acceleration of it. I would've expected the old prospector to provide some cryptic warning, which the other two would ignore in their greed and folly, leading to their demise. Nope! Straight into gravitationally melting the faces off.