Ryan B does Lower Berth

Welcome to Comic Book Crud: the comics your parents didn't want you to read.

For my first review I thought I would start with a horror comic that everyone is aware of one way or another. Whether you read the original EC comics back in the 1950's, read the many reprints in the early 1990's, or just watched or was aware of the HBO TV series that ran for seven seasons, Tales From The Crypt and its iconic host, The Crypt-Keeper is one of the most recognizable and enduring horror comic properties of all time. Where better to begin than with a very special instalment of this classic anthology? So pull up a toad stool and get ready for the TFTC story titled...

Lower Berth.



Our story starts with The Crypt-Keeper, in full carnival barker mode, welcoming us into his crypt where a smartly dressed skeleton is selling tickets to some creepy attraction. The Crypt-Keeper  says that this story is a collectors item and he's not wrong; this is definitely no ordinary tale from the crypt. 

   

We're informed by The Keeper that this story takes place in the past, "Long before the advent of radio, movies, television, and comic books". We're then introduced to Ernest Feeley, the sleazy owner of a travelling carnival and side show, advertising his oddities such as Fanny, The Fat Lady, and Fego, The Fire-Eater. Feeley begins to talk up the headline attraction, an actual Egyptian mummy, Myranah, or Myrna as she is referred to throughout the rest of the story for no given reason. Myrna is owned and exhibited by Dr. Zachary Cling, an archaeologist who tells a story about how he discovered the mummy in the valley of the kings. Originally she was a lady-in-waiting to the Pharaoh's wife. The pharaoh made advances on her, which she refused, and so he had her mummified alive. After the story, Doc Cling then removes the bandages from Myrna's face so the crowd can gasp and choke at it.

And some just suddenly craved beef jerky.

Cling apparently went to the Indiana Jones school of archaeology, because this is the way it's been going at the carnival for a long time, but on the day this story takes place an old hillbilly doctor named Jeb Sickles comes down from the Ozark mountains and tells Mr. Feeley a tale that changes things up. He tells him that two years prior he was summoned to the cave of an old mountain crone who begged him to help her dying son, Enoch. By the time Sickles gets to her cave it's too late to save the boy, who happens to have two heads by the way, so Sickles takes the body from the old crone and decides to stick it in a moonshine still. In the present, he tells Feeley that the body is still there and he'll give it to him for his side show if he's interested.

He is.

The two men go to the still and get the preserved corpse and Feeley offers Sickles a job with the carnival to come along and exhibit Enoch. He agrees and it's not long before Enoch, now in a specially made glass tank, is sharing star billing along side Myrna the mummy. Each day the curtains of the two oddities are pulled back, revealing themselves to one another, especially Enoch, whose naked. Each day the two dead things gaze on each other.

She gets him all wound up.

Eventually, against all odds and laws of nature, the two corpses fall in love. Feeley, however, is oblivious to this and decides that Myrna just isn't bringing in the crowds like she used to, so he moves her and  Doctor Cling out front as the draw for admissions, much to Cling's chagrin and also Enoch's who does not see his beloved Myrna the next time his curtain is opened. Myrna too is disappointed and so, under cover of night, the two monsters come to life and escape their displays to elope with each other.

"Of corpse I'll marry you."

And elope they do. The next morning when the three carnival employees find the attractions missing, they start pointing fingers. Feeley points out that if both the exhibits are missing, then neither of the men could have done it and that's when they notice the trail of mummy wrappings and formaldehyde drops leading away from the carnival. The men follow the trail Scooby-Doo style until they eventually come to a justice of the peace. The JP tells them that a couple had come in the night before and asked to be married. Other than the smell of alcohol on them, he didn't notice anything strange about the pair. Feeley and co find this odd and ask if the man noticed anything strange about their appearance to which he says he didn't even see the two of them because he's blind!

They then promptly overreact.

The trail stops there and the story cuts to a year later when the carnival has come back to the same Ozark town again. Doc Cling and Jeb Sickles conveniently stayed on with the carnival as handymen so they're on hand when an old hillbilly comes in to tell Feeley all about the rumors of an Egyptian mummy and two-headed corpse seen in the old crone's cave. The three men check it out and indeed find their missing property, dead (again?), inside the cave. They quickly gather Myrna and Enoch up and rush them back to the carnival grounds completely oblivious to the abomination crawling out of the cave after them.

Phil Spector

That's right, this story of love and necromance culminates in the origin of The Crypt-Keeper himself! 

EC comics was very ahead of its time, which is probably why it didn't last more than five years, yet the material it created has lived on for decades. This story is a great example of why. While not particularly scary, it definitely provides a creepy scenario, two dead bodies coming to life and then coming together and then... well there's a little baby thing. Now, it's never explained how the resurrections and the birth and such things are possible, or why after a year later Enoch and Myrna are just dead again and able to be reclaimed, but you really have to look past the logic flaws, because most things that are frightening or bizarre are not logical and that's what makes them unnerving. At a time when the horror comic itself was basically being invented by EC they already decided to start innovating by not just having a self contained horror story, but a horror origin story for a host character. That just hadn't been done and hasn't been done much since. Everyone knows Batman and Superman's origins, but for my money Lower Berth is definitely the best comic book character origin story ever. Plus how can you not love the little Crib-Keeper up there?

I give this story 7 out of 10 Werthams.

 

Lower Berth has one adaptation and that is as a season two episode of HBO's Tales From The Crypt TV series. The episode stays very true to the comic, especially compared to other episodes that decidedly don't. Where it varies is in small details like having Enoch not be a two headed corpse in a jar, but a two faced living freak in a cage. Enoch and Sickles are actually the resident attractions at Feeley's carnival this time and it's Doc Cling and Myrna that join up after the story has begun. The rivalry between the two men is made more pointed here eventually ending with both men murdered. Cling by Sickles with a pair of hedge clippers (I told you it was more pointed here, heh) then Sickles is done in similarly by Enoch so that he can get to his sugar mummy.

Oh yeah, there's also something in there about a curse on Myrna's jewels or something, but that never really goes anywhere, almost as if they were trying to justify her coming to life at the end, or maybe they thought you couldn't have a mummy in a story without a curse. Either way, her back story as a lady-in-waiting is never even revealed nor is the importance of the jewels. And with the exception of Myrna coming to life eventually, the supernatural elements of the original story are toned down to a more realistic level. A positive change is that by having Enoch alive to begin with it at least leads one to assume why, after Feeley finds them both dead together in the cave at the end, they aren't able to just come back to life.

Presumably when Enoch died, so did Myrna and the love that brought her to life in the first place, or something like that. Luckily there's still enough weirdness and questions left unanswered to make it creepy and at the end of the day each version is really just a lead up to this...

So as adaptations go, this one is pretty decent. It's not the best episode of the series, but neither is the source material for the comics. Lower Berth is, however, a fun and unusual origin story with a creepy carnival setting, a mummy, a freak, all the things that make horror stories like this fun. You really can't go wrong with either version.

So that's my first foray into fear my friends. I hope you'll join me in the future when I dissect and disgust, or rather, discuss all the horror comics and related media that brought me so much joy groaning up. Good lord! I think I've caught the pun bug.

Stay Ghoul.