August 23, 2009

Ghostly Haunts #50 [1976]

The lead story in this issue is the 6-page "Banquo's Ghost" written by Don Glut and drawn by Ditko. As the more literary minded among you might have already guessed, this is a ghost story involving Shakespeare's Macbeth, specifically a stage presentation of the play which gets interrupted by a ghost, leading to the theatre being shut down and the star having a breakdown.  Ten years later, they decide to re-open the theatre, and bring back the star who desperately needs the work, only to find out what the secret of the ghost is on opening night.

A nice little story by Glut, using a lot of lines from the play to good effect. Artistically this is about average for Ditko's work for Charlton in this era, solidly telling the story but not having a strong visual hook to make it stand out, but also much sharper than some of the stuff with went out with less detailed inks.

Closing out this issue is some more Ditko, a 1-page feature called "Are Zombies Real?", which postulates that the "walking dead" of legends are really just victims of voodoo priests who put people into death-like trances and then dig up and partly revive the bodies. Makes sense to me.  Some good spooky artwork by Ditko make it more than your average filler.


1 comment:

  1. This story is a favorite of mine, even tho like you said it is from the period where his layouts were less adventurous than they had been previously. Back in 1983 (when I was around 13 years old), I bought around 30 Charlton ghost comics out of my local comics shop's 25-cent bins, and this issue was one of them. So while it wasn't one of the first Ditko-drawn ghost tales that I read, it was during the time when I had finally decided to stick my neck out and buy up a lot of these comics. It was comics like this one that made me think I'd made a good decision to do so.

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