SINISTER SIMULACRA

Call them reference photos or call them swipes, many comic artists are known to have file cabinets full of images they can refer to when creating their work. Some are vaguely discernible and some are just blatantly lifted like those seen here from Brazilian horror comic book covers.

The Mummy's Shroud

The Manster

Son of Frankenstein

Blood of the Vampire

SINISTER SIMULACRA

Image swipes of famous monsters sometimes show up in the unlikeliest of places, such as in this three-quarter-page filler from CRIME AND PUNISHMENT #16 (Lev Gleason, July 1949), Lon Chaney as The Phantom of the Opera is clearly seen as the "ghost" that haunted a killer.

COVER MYSTERY UNMASKED!

UPDATE: The two comments from "Anonymous" below got me thinking again about a detail that was knocking around in my head when I wrote this post but couldn't come up with an answer: not only was it the face in these images, but it was also that clawed hand springing up from the ground. I knew I'd seen it somewhere but until the comments came in it just wasn't coming to me.

I have a copy of the MASTERS OF HORROR anthology and after digging it out from the back of one of my bookshelves I scanned it. The image is a match, and after considering the possibilities that the comments brought up, I'm incline to agree.

I haven't bestowed one of these for a while, so, "Anonymous", consider yourself a WOM Certified Monsterologist!

ORIGINAL POST:

I recently came across this image from the September 1946 issue of BLACK MASK and something tickled my brain. There was something decidedly familiar about it and after a few seconds of thinking I remembered it -- or something close to it -- on an early CREEPY cover.

Turns out I was right and the image indeed was used on the cover of CREEPY #24 with the art credit going to Brazilian artist Gutenberg Monteiro. The image shows up again on a 1954 British detective pulp called DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE. I posted something about this HERE.

It didn't take a brain transplant from Dr. Frankenstein to figure out that the original image was from the BLACK MASK cover by the esteemed pulp artist Rafael De Soto. I believe we can now call this mystery "case closed".

See more Sinister Simulacra HERE.

AUSTRALIAN HORROR 'ZINES

Monster Kids down under had their fair share of monster 'zines to read. Most of these were reprints from U.S. mags such as those from Warren. This cover gallery shows that Aussie artists could do as well as anybody else, including the obvious steals from horror film stills and even outright swipes from their stateside counterparts!

EERIE PUBLICATIONS COVER SWIPES

A few days ago, I posted an announcement for the upcoming book that collects all the Eerie Publications covers, and showed a sample of some of the luridly grotesque images that were intended to entice readers to grab their magazines instead of a copy of CREEPY, EERIE or VAMPIRELLA.

Culling through my files, I came across a number of covers that used image swipes from movies and horror actors. Here a a few of them:

Karloff as The Mummy.

A pose from a photo from FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN.

Barnabas.

Karloff's mummy again.

Taken from a still from EL VAMPIRO.

A riff on Karloff's Frankenstein monster.