Nasty Panels and Covers

[Calenture]

Stavner wrote:

Here's a puzzler: which five panels or covers from pre-Code horror comics are the most gruesome?

Here's my five:

The panels from EC's "Foul Play" showing the guy being used for baseball parts;

The cover for the EC comic containing the story about the two murderers who use a swamp to dispose of their victims, who have been cut to pieces; the victims return, only with body parts mixed up;

The cover for an issue of Atlas/Marvel's "Menace" showing a hand removing a glove--made of its own rotting flesh;

An EC panel showing the results of a person being fed into a meat grinder;

And the nastiest one of all, a non-EC comic's cover showing a maniac with an armful of freshly severed tongues!

So what's your choices?

I don't know if I can match those choices of yours, Stavner. I don't have any pre-Code comics and it might take all week just finding and scanning some stories...but I'll try.

These panels are from a page of Warren's Eerie magazine, a serial called Coffin, scripted by Budd Lewis and drawn handsomely by Jose Ortiz, this story in issue 68, 1968.

Remember that if you want, you can click the picture to visit Flickr - then click on the picture there, and then on the "all sizes" button above it, to see them in greater detail.

Coffin was a cowboy cursed by an Indian medicine man to eternal life and staked out in an ant-hill so that his face is eaten away. In this story - which starts with him shooting and eating a vulture - he takes up with a travelling fair, where he becomes a geek and is fed live chickens by the evil Halfwalk - a legless man with telekinetic abilities (he floats in mid-air in the final scenes).

Halfwalk runs a freak show - and he never runs short of freaks. He makes them through surgery. Here we see his tame doctor deciding he can't handle it any more, and Coffin setting out to finish the show...
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