Psycho #3 - Skywald

I've been wanting to get my hands on some of Skywald's output for a long time, but just had never gotten around to picking some copies to review. Luckily, my generous friend Craig Wichman sent me two Skywalds--Nightmare #6 and this one, Psycho #3. Even more generously, he said I could keep the Nightmare for myself. What a pal!!

(btw, over at The Aquaman Shrine, I have a desgination for anyone who contributes something that goes up on the blog--they officially become members of F.O.A.M.--Friends Of AquaMan. So now it seems I have to come up with something similar for this site! Anyone have any ideas?)

Ok--onto Psycho!

Behind the very nice, striking cover by Boris Vallejo, is "Frankenstein Book II", written and penciled by Sean Todd, and inked by Dan Adkins. Like the title would suggest, this feature picks up right where the original Frankenstein novel leaves off, in the frozen wastes of the Arctic. Here though, the Monster has rescued his creator from the freezing water and heads back to the laboratory of his birth.

The Monster meets up with Egor(yes, spelled with an "E") and they use the same instruments to bring Dr.Frankenstein back to life...yeah, there's no way this can go wrong.

All in all, a pretty clever idea, to literally pick the story right back up, even though it quickly turns away from the literate mood of the original and heads for more Marvel-style monster comic territory. In fact, never having read a Skywald before, I'm a little surprised how closely these mirror Marvel's style--I had always heard the Skywalds were closer to Warren. Still, a fun first chapter.

Next is "A Coffin For Captain Cutlass" by Gardner Fox and Serg Moren(?), a story of pirates, a giant one-eyed monster, an ancient curse, and hero using the phrase "Stab my vitals!" Hmm, never caught on.

Before the next story is an ad for some of Skywald's other offerings, like Nightmare and the crime mag The Crime Machine. We'll get to an issue of the former tomorrow, and as for The Crime Machine...we've got something special planned for that!

The progenitor of Things Man- and Swamp, The Heap, stars in the fairly straight-aheadily titled "The Heap Meets The Horror Master!", by Chuck McNaughton, Ross Andru, and Mike Esposito. I've never read a Heap story before...were they all this isane? The Heap tries to help out a trapped deer(aww, sweet Heap!), and discovers a cabin in the woods, where we get to see him eat a rat. He's captured by the aforementioned Horror Master, who locks him up in a tomb along with the corpses of Rasputin, Attila The Hun, Caligula, and more. Wait, we're not done yet!

The Heap escapes and stumbles, or, er, sloshes upon a ceremony by the Horror Master, who is attempting to revive...Adolf Hitler!! Interestingtly enough, the Heap takes this all in stride, and begs HM to use his powers to free him of his Heap-y body(ah, if only Alan Moore had gotten his hands on this character instead of Alec Holland...). But HM turns on the Heap and attacks him(with more zombies, non-historical ones), but of course it all goes wrong and leaves the HM buried in an avalanche, with the Heap alive again to be tortured another day!

Wow.

After a letters page breather, Chic Stone does the story and art for "Gruesome Crewcut!", a horror story kicked off by a Dad's insistence his long-hair son get a haircut, and quickly goes totally insane from there(it has to go quickly, it's only three pages). I guess this was Skywald's version of relevance in comics.

Next is "The Man Who Stole Eternity!" by Fox and Bill Everett, about a common street thug who stumbles into a weird alternative dimension, under the command of an evil-type sorceress. I found it kind of blah, until all the sci-fi stuff stops and it ends with a classic horror-type ending.

And then we end with "The Love Witch" by Marv Wolfman and Jack Purcell. I've never seen the work of Purcell before--it looks a lot like a sloppy version of Ernie Colon, but it does have a lot of spirit. And in fact, there is some really beautiful shots in here, like this portrait of of the Vampirella-esque title character:

...I mean, that's a nice use of space.

"The Love Witch" is a fun tale full of wizards, monsters, hack-happy barbarians, and a sexy, chain-mail wearing protagonist.

Well, I've finished my first Skywald, and it was a mixed bag. Some good stuff, some forgettable stuff, some surprising stuff. Over the years, I had heard mostly bad remarks about the Skywald books, but after reading an article on them in Comic Book Artist (Volume 2, #5) I decided I really wanted to see for myself. And thanks to Craig, I finally got to! Thanks Craig, and I can't wait to get to tomorrow's copy of Nightmare!