Archive for September 1st, 2009

I am still doing the ongoing review of Dark Horse’s Creepy issue #1. This is day 5. Today I will be talking about All The Help You need. It is one of the good stories so I don’t need to say much about it.

You may be wondering about the image accompanying this post. It is from the story under discussion. But it is not colored in the magazine. In looking over my last few posts I noticed that all the images have been gray scale. That’s what the book is. But on the blog it gets monotonous (snicker). So I figured screw it, and colored the picture myself. Further down the post you can see a different example that I left alone.

The author of this story is Neil Kleid. He has won awards for being awesome. And in this story he did not disappoint. It’s a great story. He’s a good writer, and if you look him up on Google you can find a lot of his earlier works. I will be seeking more of his stuff.

The other guy is obviously a good illustrator, which you can tell just by looking at this story, but what a lot of people don’t know is that he did not originally start out to be an artist.

Just after the war…

Brian was born in 1953 just after the United States lifted the ban on selling rubber. This was fortunate for his family, because his father had been a freelance rubber salesman before the war.  Since the United States entry into WWII his dad was forced into alternative lines of work such as going door to door and begging for dust. Also, after spending his last money on a mail-order trade school, his father tried his hand at fish grooming, but was unable to get the necessary equipment because of all the fish clippers being sent to troops fighting in the south Pacific.

By the time Brian was 6, his father was back on top of the rubber game. With his father often gone for weeks on end and his mother too drunk to stop him, Brian took a great interest in tap dancing and the making of unusual noises using only his hands.

He graduated from the East Albert High School with a full tap-dancing scholarship. He then attended New Smithville University where he found himself unable to keep up with the demands of college English.

Although a brilliant tap-dancer, he lost is scholarship his second year due to the English Professor being an “asswipe”. In later interviews Brian referred to that Professor as “the cocksucker [who] had it in for me”.

Dazed, and still a little hung-over, he was wandering from door to door trying to find his girlfriend’s apartment when he noticed a circus recruitment poster in the local drugstore window.

The following morning he enlisted in Barnum & Bailey’s and became Willy the Tap-Dancing Clown.

Unfortunately for Willy, tap shoes don’t work on sawdust. After an agonizing three weeks of stomping almost to the point of exhaustion, just to try to make a sound, he was forced to juggle.

Again his natural talents came to his aid. Although two dead weasels in a burning wet sack could juggle better then he, the strange noises emanating from his hands whenever he managed to actually catch a ball made him a crowd favorite. After only 8 short months on the road he was promoted to King of the Circus and given a hand wash and wax, as was the custom.

By the late 60s the lesser circuses had all but shut down and even his was feeling the pinch from lack of public interest. Then if the failing circus wasn’t enough, he got caught up in an elephant molestation scandal.

A woman that he had fired several months earlier, accused him publicly of fondling the elephants. He denied the allegations, but by the time he was cleared of all charges the circus was unrecoverable.

He hanged himself in his own studio a year later.

His younger brother, Ned, found him still alive. He cut him down and called an ambulance. The doctor on call said that had Ned arrived a few days later, or had Brian hanged himself by the neck, rather than the nut-sack, he would have died.

Brian was placed into an asylum after that, where he remains to this day.

Wait…

That was Brian Chinchilla. The guy who drew this was Brian Churilla. Nevermind.

Point is I don’t need to write anything about this story. It’s great and both the people involved are very talented guys.

Look at the artwork, then go buy the book. I have two more stories to review and they are both good.

Tune in tomorrow kids for Loathsome Lore: Faustian Deals.

Is that brimstone I smell?

No.

I had eggs and beer last night.