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The Complete Saga of the Victims
In this graphic novel, two attractive young girls are kidnapped and relentlessly tormented by scalding water, sandstorms, and dead Nazi storm troopers marching over them.
96 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 29, 2017
While I was an avid horror comic book/magazine reader in my youth (the mid-late 1970s), I never did run into any of New York based Skywald Publishing's horror comic magazines (so I'm looking forward to eventually reading the historic collection Skywald!: The Complete Illustrated History of the Horror-Mood). But here is a slim volume collecting (and finally completing) a particular serial that ran therein.
There is an interesting essay to be written about the horror genre's relation to the comic book illustrated format - but here is not the time and place. Instead, it's worth saying that this is an odd book, in some ways very much like serials that ran contemporaneously in Warren's EERIE magazine back in the day and yet, not at all.
The story, for what there is, is pretty straightforward - Two beautiful, young female students at SCOLLARD MANSE, a fashionable 'finishing school' for girls in Manhattan (Josey Forster from Rhodesia and Anne Adams from Washington DC) find themselves suddenly kidnapped and taken deep under the stately old school building by some troglodytic monsters where they are menaced by a strange cult. Escaping, each successive installment features the girls being threatened in new and more bizarre ways - NYC overrun by troglodytes, a menacing man with invisible skin, a wealthy man who whisks them off to a small European kingdom in his flying car, a castle full of vampires, a robot, a pterodactyl, a volcano, a pirate ship manned by zombies, a maelstrom, a giant octopus, a Nazi dwarf in a submarine, a cannibal jungle king, a sandstorm, undead Nazi stormtroopers.... etc and so forth....
Now, that probably sounds pretty crazy. And it is pretty crazy. In truth, you're not reading this to read a coherent story (here - finally completed after having been left unended when Skywald folded decades ago, despite constant promises in the original narrative that there would be a solution to this nonsensical narrative) - instead you're reading a showcase designed to juxtapose some very well-done figure/good girl art of the threatened characters (who are never actually "tortured" per se, so much as harried and subjected to physical/environmental duress) with some effective creepy creatures and widescreen spectacle. Another way to look at it - this is a weird glimpse into the mind of a young, New York area grindhouse devotee during the mid 1970s, filtering through lots of eurohorror, eurosleaze, Hammer films and disaster movies (with all overt eroticism and violence stripped out). One can see echoes here of so many period movies (SHOCK WAVES, ROCKY HORROR, THE BLIND DEAD series, SUSPIRIA, Cosmic SF, Hammer studios and Jess Franco films, etc. - the climax even lifts a bit from the ending of the oddball osbcurity TENDER DRACULA) while Anne and Josey (very FOXY BROWN in design) could have stepped from some movie loved by Quentin Tarantino! The half-baked post-modern excuse for the narrative isn't particularly deep or well-deployed, of course, but for a comic intended for teenage horror fans in the mid-70s, still surprisingly ambitious and thoughtful - hey kid's, give a moment's thought for those poor girls you see being constantly menaced in all your horror films (Grant Morrison would probably chuckle at the modern introduction's comic-frame play)!
A goofy, well-illustrated oddity. In a sense, easily skippable but I found it quite a lot of fun!
There is an interesting essay to be written about the horror genre's relation to the comic book illustrated format - but here is not the time and place. Instead, it's worth saying that this is an odd book, in some ways very much like serials that ran contemporaneously in Warren's EERIE magazine back in the day and yet, not at all.
The story, for what there is, is pretty straightforward - Two beautiful, young female students at SCOLLARD MANSE, a fashionable 'finishing school' for girls in Manhattan (Josey Forster from Rhodesia and Anne Adams from Washington DC) find themselves suddenly kidnapped and taken deep under the stately old school building by some troglodytic monsters where they are menaced by a strange cult. Escaping, each successive installment features the girls being threatened in new and more bizarre ways - NYC overrun by troglodytes, a menacing man with invisible skin, a wealthy man who whisks them off to a small European kingdom in his flying car, a castle full of vampires, a robot, a pterodactyl, a volcano, a pirate ship manned by zombies, a maelstrom, a giant octopus, a Nazi dwarf in a submarine, a cannibal jungle king, a sandstorm, undead Nazi stormtroopers.... etc and so forth....
Now, that probably sounds pretty crazy. And it is pretty crazy. In truth, you're not reading this to read a coherent story (here - finally completed after having been left unended when Skywald folded decades ago, despite constant promises in the original narrative that there would be a solution to this nonsensical narrative) - instead you're reading a showcase designed to juxtapose some very well-done figure/good girl art of the threatened characters (who are never actually "tortured" per se, so much as harried and subjected to physical/environmental duress) with some effective creepy creatures and widescreen spectacle. Another way to look at it - this is a weird glimpse into the mind of a young, New York area grindhouse devotee during the mid 1970s, filtering through lots of eurohorror, eurosleaze, Hammer films and disaster movies (with all overt eroticism and violence stripped out). One can see echoes here of so many period movies (SHOCK WAVES, ROCKY HORROR, THE BLIND DEAD series, SUSPIRIA, Cosmic SF, Hammer studios and Jess Franco films, etc. - the climax even lifts a bit from the ending of the oddball osbcurity TENDER DRACULA) while Anne and Josey (very FOXY BROWN in design) could have stepped from some movie loved by Quentin Tarantino! The half-baked post-modern excuse for the narrative isn't particularly deep or well-deployed, of course, but for a comic intended for teenage horror fans in the mid-70s, still surprisingly ambitious and thoughtful - hey kid's, give a moment's thought for those poor girls you see being constantly menaced in all your horror films (Grant Morrison would probably chuckle at the modern introduction's comic-frame play)!
A goofy, well-illustrated oddity. In a sense, easily skippable but I found it quite a lot of fun!
July 17, 2012
Fun '70s horror-sleaze gorgeously illustrated in black and white by Jesus "Suso" Rego. The story is an exercise in creating increasingly sadistic and bizarre torments to put our bewildered heroines through (their tiny outfits get increasingly tattered with each episode). The story's high-pulp nonsense but fun and the illustrations are the main attraction here. Suso reminds me of some love-child of late Wallace Wood and Gray Morrow.
December 18, 2019
Quite possibly the stupidest thing that I've ever read. The art, however, is often brilliant. The ending was hardly worth the thirty-year wait...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews