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Monday, April 21, 2014

Comic Review: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial
Adaptation and Art by Richard Corben
Colors by Beth Corben Reed with Richard Corben
Letters by Nate Piekos of Blambot
Cover by Richard Corben
Dark Horse Books
April 2, 2014

Preview
The fear of being buried alive is presented in two horrifying Poe adaptations by Eisner Hall of Fame inductee Richard Corben—“The Premature Burial” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Sometimes the graveyard is a place for burials. Sometimes the graveyard is a place for “The Premature Burial.”

Victoria drank from the glass of wine that Lucian had poured, telling him that he would not share her bed before marriage, then leaving. Unfortunately, there was more than wine in the glass, as she fell ill and died. After she was buried, Lucian returned at night to dig her up. When he decides to take what he had been refused before, not dead, she awakens and kicks out a foot that sends him back against a gravestone and knocks him out. (Remember this was 1840 before embalming fluid so not all expired when they did.) He is deemed dead and buried. But he is dug up at night by the gravediggers who had shoveled the dirt at his funeral. Alive, he is taken back to his father’s house where he is told that Victoria wants him in marriage. But he will get more than the wedding bed.

In the second story in the comic, “The Cask of Amontillado,” two visitors to the vaults of the Montresors are disturbed by the footsteps of a man and a woman. The man, a Montresor, takes the woman to where the dead of his family rest, but only to where a cask of wine sits. He tells her a story of when he once wore a hooded costume to join the crowd of revelers at the carnival to find her husband, Fortunato. He was searching for another person to taste his wine in a cask to make sure it is Amontillado. Instead, Fortunato spouts that the other man is a fool and he will taste the wine to let Montresor know the truth of its vintage. But Montresor has something else in mind for him, all for some slight he thought Fortunato has done him.

Both adaptations of two Poe tales are done well and the artwork is creepy and splendid. Corbin takes two horror tales from the 19th Century and makes what are two short stories of fine wine and both are now the perfect glass of aged vintage unburied for your taste buds.

5 sheep





Pamela K. Kinney
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aka Sapphire Phelan
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4 comments:

  1. I meant read it but my brain is broken.....54321....boom

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I am liking the artwork, just the right amount of creep going on here :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. This will have to be a must read for me. I love Poe!

    ReplyDelete