| Slot: |
Beyond 18 |
| Item: |
Beyond 18 Universal |
| Grade: |
CGC |
| Cert #: |
1264921008
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Owner Comments
Beyond #18 is referenced in Geoffrey Wagner’s “Parade of Pleasure” (POP) in the text on pages 81-82.
Wagner describes Beyond #18 as follows “These crime-terror booklets, seemingly on the increase, show a monstrous reiteration of the morbid, of tombs, electric chairs, mortuaries, surgeries, and so forth. Take The BEYOND no 18: its first story tells of a girl who tries to murder her husband, only to find him turn into a phoenix which finally burns her in its embrace… The second is a welter of murders committed by a ‘ghost’. The third concerns a man who finds a severed hand in a Ming dynasty box. This hand steals his girl-friend in a fine scene and eventually strangles the man himself while he is in a strait-jacket in a lunatic asylum… The fourth story starts off with a man dying in the electric chair, but he proves unkillable and returns to life to run a gang of crooks in a city where the police are powerless to stop him with mere bullets. In the end his body decays, rather contradictorily, and ‘Jules Scholler dragged his rotting body to the dump. There, amidst the burning garbage, he committed his tortured soul to the flames.’
As described by Wagner, I have included a scan of the panel of Jules Scholler committing his rotting body to the dump.
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| Slot: |
Beyond 27 |
| Item: |
Beyond 27 Universal |
| Grade: |
CGC |
| Cert #: |
0249159002
|
Owner Comments
The Beyond #27 is referenced in Fredric Wertham’s “Seduction of the Innocent” (SOTI) in the text on page 111.
Wertham offers a story from The Beyond #27 as an example of extreme violence in the comics of the 1950s. He describes a passage as follows “In many comics stories there is nothing but violence. It is violence for violence’s sake. The plot: killing. The motive: to kill. The characterization: killer. The end: killed. In one comic book the scientist (‘mad,’ of course), Dr. Simon Lorch, after experimenting on himself with an elixir, has the instinct to ‘kill and kill again.’ He ‘flails’ to death two young men whom he sees changing a tire on the road. He murders two boys he finds out camping. And so on for a week. Finally he is killed himself.”
Wertham is clearly describing the story “Strange Potion of Dr. Lorch” from The Beyond #27. I have included a scan of the page where a bestial Dr. Lorch flails to death two young men changing a tire as described by Wertham on page 111.
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