A serious house on serious earth it is.
Written by David Hine, illustrated by Shaky Kane, lettered by Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy BetancourtCover by Shaky Kane
TALES FROM THE HAUNTED JAZZ CLUB’ Red Wraith recounts three tall tales of love and mutilation. An incompetent doctor performs surgery on his beloved wife, a beatnik learns that sexual inexperience, marijuana and sharp instruments make a dangerous mix, and a woman with morbid fear of human hair discovers that a bald body can still be hairy inside.
Issue #2 seems more traditional than the opening chapter, if only because it follows the rules of its chosen genre rather closely. It’s a ‘weird tales’ anthology, like “Tales from the Crypt” or “House of Secrets”. We’re in The Hunted Jazz Club and three performers rise upon the stage one after another to tell stories of the grim and macabre, with the caveat that these are all meant to be real stories in the world of the comics. All the while a snarky patron comments upon the bullshit nature of these kind of fantastic tales.
Once again I notice the gender issue. the first two performers are males and their stories are about men mutilating female bodies in an attempt to fix them; one fails quite grimly and the other succeed even more grimly. The teller of the second story even mistakes the act of physical correction, a man using a screwdriver to fiddle with brain of a woman, with sex. This is one of these things that just screams at the reader, all the while making the reader scream.
The third story, on the other hand, is told by a woman who, while not exactly taking revenge, ends up killing a man and being quite justified in doing so. There’s a whole conversation going around right now about the ease in which horror stories turn to mutilation of female bodies for easy shocks, even more so if they can combine the mutilation with titillation (sex + violence). Here, the final images in the series of tales designed to terrorize are of the male body revealed as empty receptacle. He’s not just a monster, but a pathetic monster.
I don’t know if this is intentional or not but the that last story is also the best looking of them all. Shaky Kane is generally a phenomenon artist who always does his own thing, and does it very all, so I got to assume something in those last few script pages really connected with him. the image of the woman slowly pulling away at the single armpit hair of her dead boyfriend, the mood shifts and tension grows as the scene changes from a person looking for justification for murder to an actual scene of monster discovery. It’s sickening and revolting, just as it is trying to be. There’s always an element of horror to Kane’s drawings, a sense of reality wrapped too far to comfort, something that should be innocent that ended up corrupted but here it’s in the service of genuinely creepy writing.
The other curio is the first story, “Hand of Clay,” which is claimed in the credits to be based on “The Idol with Hands of Clay” by one Dr. Frederic Treves. At first I assumed this was done for the sake of verisimilitude, that there is no Dr. Treves and it’s like one the texts H.P. Lovecraft mentioned in his stories as being the factual base for the fantasy he now conjures. But Lovecraft was pre-internet and so I simply googled the name of author and story and not only is the story real, it is also not a story. It’s a factual account, and Dr. Treves was the man who met and then wrote about Joseph Merrick, the subject of the film Elephantman.
That’s a weird choice to make, and quite a merry chase for the curious reader. Is it also part of some thematic concern? Treves is seen, publicly at least, as an old fashioned man trying to fix something that he conceives of as broken; but this could also another false breadcrumb leading the reader on the path to madness. Speaking of which, Joseph Merrick also gave a brief, appearance in “From Hell.” I brought that graphic novel up in the previous installment without knowing that he’ll be relevant here. So everything is connected. Or, at least, we want everything to be connected.
The last word on is on the final page. It all ends up with The Shield of Justice, our murdering paranoid hero from the previous issue, turning up to recruit the main presenter of The Haunted Jazz Club, who turns out to be another superhero. So we have superheroes creeping up from their graves and taking over detective pulp stories in the previous issue; and now they seemingly take over from the horror anthology model. Possibly a commentary not just on the generational shift of the comics market but its homogenization. The makers of the dark and socially-relevant horror stories were forced to step-down to censorship and stoking of public fears, leaving only the clean-cut boys in capes. And just like in that dark period the Shield of Justice’s pretense at black and white morality is brought hand in and hand with his loathing of reds (communists) and pinks (homosexuals).
It’s not just the club that is haunted, it is the whole medium of comics!
