Along with horror titles such as The Vault of Horror, The Crypt of Terror, and The Haunt of Fear, EC Comics was also responsible for being the leading publisher of crime comics in the early 1950's. Sure there had been crime stories on the news stands before, in pulp novels aimed more at adult readers than kids. Books like The Shadow and The Spider were heavy on words and not much on pictures, with a serious, more realistic tone. They featured masked avengers solving mysteries and were akin more to what would later be superhero tales more so than horror comics. EC changed that by having their crime comics such as Two-Fisted Tales and Crime SuspenStories deal with bad things happening to bad people. There were no werewolves or vampires here, but there were adulterous spouses and axe weilding madmen and were just as taboo and envelope pushing as anything the Crypt-Keeper could come up with.
So let's take a look at one of these nasty little noirs. It's a story of crime and vanity from one of the earliest issues of Crime SuspenStories called...
Faced With Horror.
After forcing the teller in charge of the alarm into the vault and making him fill a loot bag up with money, Sam has Willie bring the other hostages in too. As he does so, one of the tellers pulls a gun and Sam shoots him dead. Willie says that the shot will attract the police, so he and Sam high tail it out of the place. As they’re running out, though, they are suddenly blinded by a bright flash of light. It turns out to be from a camera that some guy used to take their picture. Willie jumps into the getaway car and calls for Sam, who’s taking his own shot at the photographer with his gun, but misses. He gets in the car and the two speed away from the crime scene.
Sometime later, the two men approach their hideout on the outskirts of town. Sam complains that they should have gotten the photographer’s camera, but Willie says they didn’t have time. As soon as they get inside they turn on the radio and hear that the photographer’s picture is being developed by the police and will soon be used to identify the killer of the bank teller. Later that night another convenient news cast informs them that the pic has been developed and one of the men in it was identified as Sam Brogen, small-time gunman. It says police are now combing the area looking for Sam, but Willie was behind Sam in the picture, so he’s in the clear.
Sam starts to panic about not being able to show his face without being caught. All Willie can suggest is splitting up the money and going their separate ways. Sam isn’t happy about this and accuses Willie of trying to ditch him now that things are getting messy. Sam tells him that they’re in this together all the way and Willie reluctantly agrees. Then Sam has a sudden stroke of genius.
So in the middle of the night Sam and Willie drive to a little house not too far from where they’re hiding out. Sam says the man they’re there to see is a top man in his field and Willie asks what they’ll do if the man refuses to do what they ask. Sam says they’ll make him. They ring the bell and a little old man answers the door. Sam forces his and Willie’s way into the man’s house and tells the guy that he knows who he is and he knew he vacationed here. He calls the man “Doc” and tells him that he’s going to perform a little emergency plastic surgery job on him, change his face completely. The Doctor is startled by this and then begins to recognize Sam.
Realizing his life is at stake, the doctor agrees to do what is asked of him. Sam tells him that he wants a whole new face. That he wants to look like a different person completely. The doctor says that is a difficult operation and he doesn’t have enough equipment at his home. Sam tells him to make do with what he has. They go into the doctor’s lab and he tells Sam that he’ll need to put him under an anesthetic. Sam tells Willie to watch the doc and make sure he doesn’t try anything funny.
Several hours later Sam awakens with his head covered in bandages. The doctor tells him that they’ll need to stay on for a week before he can take them off and see his new face. Sam asks if he’ll need any treatments or anything.
That’s all he needs to know, so he pulls out his tommy gun and blows the old doctor away. Then, for good measure, he turns the gun on Willie and shoots him too.
“Now nobody knows about this plastic surgery job! And I can spend all that dough… myself!” he says.
That night, Sam, with his brand new face, drives back to the hideout. Then, one week later…
After getting all the bandages unraveled and looking at his new face, Sam is, shall we say, surprised. But then a terrible realization hits him. The doctor knew he was going to be killed as soon as he performed the surgery, and Willie must have known too. That’s why he stood by and let the doc do this:
Sam realizes that now he’s got all this money and no way to spend it. He can’t show his hideous mug outside ever again (no home chopping network just yet, ya know), so he comes to the conclusion that there’s only one thing he can do about this situation and it rhymes with blewaside, as in, he blew a side of his head off. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Oh EC, you gruesome bastards. This is a pretty simple story with an obvious twist, but damn it if it isn’t effective. You really have to keep things in perspective when reading the old stuff. What seems like hackneyed and obvious tropes now, were fresh and brilliant when EC was doing them for the first time back in the early 50’s. Kids must have peed themselves when they saw Sam Brogen’s mutilated face by flashlight… uh, light under the covers at night. The art by Wally Wood is great and at only six pages it’s a brisk little tale that moves along at a good pace.
I can’t help but wonder, though, if Willie and the doc were so certain that they were gonna be killed by Sam when he woke up that they went ahead and messed his face up, why not just kill him while he was under and split the money between them?
Ah well, guess I’ll just have to FACE the fact that that question may never be answered.
This one gets 8 out of 10 Werthams.
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