Weird Chills
Entry updated 6 January 2025. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1954). Stanley P Morse. 3 issues. Artists include Bernard Baily and Eugene Hughes. Script writers include Bruce Hamilton. 36 pages per issue, with 4-5 long strips and (in #1 and #3 at least) a short text story. Save for the cover, #2 was not seen for this entry.
With the creation of the Comics Code Authority that year – responding to the moral panic inspired by Fredric Wertham – 1954 was not the best time to publish a new Horror comic: Weird Chills duly expired after three issues. Its loss was not a cruel blow to the genre: although there were a couple of interesting strips (not counting the reprints) and the covers were reasonable, its contents were mainly undistinguished.
#1's opening two strips have a wife and lover plotting to remove the husband. In the first this involves trying to drive him insane; in the second, "Last Supper", the lover is a Scientist with "a new type of explosive" to be added to a meal for the husband: once triggered by the stomach's heat "everything within a wide radius would disintegrate ... and leave a blinding, white, yawning void"; the resulting lack of a body would confuse the police and make conviction difficult. However, the explosion is greater than expected and the adulterers are disintegrated too. In "Hallucinations" a man manifests an Invisible alter-ego (see Psychology), who duly manifests one of their own, and so on. "The Man Who Never Smiled", a Vampire tale, is a reprint from Weird Mysteries #4. In "The Gorilla" a recently wed bride admires a gorilla, Chonga, at the local Zoo, whilst a zookeeper enthuses that, compared to man, they are "the more powerful, the more graceful, the more magnificent"; she responds, "Yes, yes – he is magnificent." Spending the next day passionately staring at him, that night she goes to the zoo to find the ape sitting on a throne; the zookeeper declares, "She is yours Chonga – take her for your wife." Before anything untoward can happen the husband arrives, shooting the gorilla and the zookeeper, whereupon the wife breaks from her apparent trance (see Hypnotism). Chonga seems more Intelligent than a typical gorilla (see Apes as Human).
#2 includes "The Face of Horror!", where an author of Monster tales turns out to be a monster himself, and a sf tale "The Missionaries", a reworking of "The Planet Eaters" from Weird Mysteries #1. #3 opens with "Terror on TV", in which a family watches their director son's new television show. This begins unremarkably, until strange creatures appear and start biting the performers, turning them into monsters; this is assumed to be part of the show, until the son returns home, now a monster himself. "Clumsy" concerns a poor scientist working on Suspended Animation. His wife hits upon the idea of their taking out a £1 million insurance policy, with him freezing her for seven years, long enough to be declared legally dead. Unfortunately this husband is clumsy, dropping her frozen body as he is about to revive her; he pieces the shattered body together as best he can and she survives, though no longer the beauty she once was. [SP]
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