"Death of the 80th Victim" (from Nightmare #14, August 1973)

art by Ricardo Villamonte (note: his first published work in American comics)

my grade: C+



Plot synopsis: Someone is attacking Indian women in London, slashing off their left hands, and leaving them to bleed to death. A representative of the Indian community is working with the police and pressuring them to act faster. When his own wife becomes the 78th victim, he takes a more aggressive tone with the detective in charge of the case, only to discover the detective is the slasher himself. The slasher kills him and then decides to write a confession and kill himself, revealing to the reader that he was, in fact, half Indian.


An issue I'm becoming increasingly aware of at this point in Moench's career is that he was sending publishers work faster than they could publish it. Thus, when Doug leaves for Marvel in just two months' time, Warren will still have so much unpublished Moench work that his stories will continue to see print in their pages thru 1976. And, in fact, nearly all of his work for the Marvel/Curtis black and white mags will be produced over the course of only two weeks.

I bring this up now because, while published fifteen months later, this work has an uncanny resemblance to "The Midnight Slasher", another Moench story published by Skywald. Maybe Moench sent Skywald one or two big stacks of stories rejected by Warren all at the same time, and they're just slowly publishing them over a longer course of time. Several times in the past, Moench's Skywald stories have felt reminiscent of styles, tones, and themes he'd tried earlier on at Warren. Could be they were similarly old material just being published later on.

So, like "The Midnight Slasher," this is an atmosphere piece about a Jack the Ripper type preying upon women in the middle of the London night with no supernatural presence involved. Both times, the drama hinges both upon the intensity of the murders and the mystery to be unraveled. What makes this story different is largely the importance it places upon race. The killer is preying upon Indian women, and Moench and Villamonte work this in as a surprise revelation, initially introducing a woman who feels relatable and universal to us, obscuring her in mist so as not to make it obvious until after she has gained our sympathy that she is "foreign".



A similar surprise is executed once again at the end, when we finally get a good look at the slasher's face (also somewhat Indian-looking) only to discover in the last panel that he hated himself for being half-Indian.



These surprise revelations seem to be the visual premise at the core of this story, and, if Moench is relying on a visual premise once again, that's probably another clue that this is an older work.

I suppose that the ultimate message is something about not judging based upon race, or that hating others is just a way of hating ourselves or something. The odd part of all this is the decision to tell a British story exploring racism against Indians. Doug is an American author writing to a largely American audience. Why not make this about African Americans, Japanese, even Vietnamese (what with the war going on)? Any of those would have been likely to strike home far more eloquently.

For what it's worth, this marks Ricardo Villamonte's first work in an American comic book (he receives a written introduction welcoming him to Skywald in this very issue). I'm not familiar with his work, but he did a nice job here.