Number 1100


One thousand Pappy posts ago


In Pappy's #100, posted on February 27, 2007, I showed one of the printings of this story, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I scanned the Strange Suspense Stories version published by Charlton in '54, which was actually the third printing (by the third publisher) of the same strip in five years. Read my original comments at Pappy's #100 to see the unusual publishing history of this story.

The version here comes from Startling Terror Tales #10 in 1952. If you don't want to ruin your eyesight on my crappy 2007 scans, you can see much better scans of the Strange Suspense Stories version at The Horrors Of It All for part 1, and here for part 2.

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is drawn by Wally Wood, and I believe it's inked by Wood collaborator Harry Harrison, who once bragged about how fast he could ink a page. This does have a hurried quality to it, but that could be because it was drawn originally for publisher Victor Fox, who was notorious for being late on payments, if he paid at all. Maybe Wood and Harrison didn't want to give it the full treatment because of that. The first few pages have more detail than the last pages, for instance. But despite that it has come down to us as a really interesting and vintage horror comics version of the classic tale by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The cover is by L. B. Cole.