IIRC, Warren used to poll its readers every year about what they liked, and Torrents won Best Artist in '73 or '74.

Torrents was guilty of this on "Clash of Leviathans," but otherwise his art did a beautiful job complimenting Moench's words and intentions. I often wonder how that was accomplished what with the language barrier. Moench used to provide breakdowns along with his scripts, but I don't think he was still doing that by this point.



This is true sometimes. Again though, I haven't seen it be an issue with Torrents.

As we already know, in November of 1972, Moench had a confrontation with Jim Warren over Moench wanting to submit to other publishers because Warren wasn't buying and publishing enough of his material. Moench literally told Warren to "f*** off". In response, the usually tough talking Jim Warren sent Moench a box full of gifts and published an unprecedented four Moench stories in a single magazine issue (Eerie #44) the next month as a means of trying to win Moench back.

I bring this up now because, one month after Moench tentatively quit Warren to accept a job at Marvel on a trial basis, Warren once again published four Moench stories* in Creepy #57, presumably in an attempt to lure Moench back once more.


*For those of you just joining us, Warren was sitting on a backlog of purchased/unpublished Moench stories, so that's where these four stories and all that follow are coming from. The faster Warren could publish Moench's backlog of stories, the greater the amount of new work he'd be able to purchase from Moench.



"Hope of the Future" (from Creepy #57, November 1973)

art by: Jaime Brocal

my grade: A-



plot synopsis:

A man shut in his own home while dangerous children walk the streets and burn adults alive reflects on how this all came to be while grieving for his dead wife. He recalls being a professor of Palmistry (palm reading) who visited a school and discovered that all the children had disturbingly short life lines. He warned everyone of a coming disaster but could not at the time explain why adults had normal life lines on their hands, only later realizing it's because they'd already lived the majority of their lives. The disaster ended up being that a cloud of cosmic dust had affected all the Earth 12 years earlier but was deemed harmless at the time. It planted a seed in all pregnant women, causing their children to become superhumanly smart and mature, die at the age of 12, and be reborn as killers who would take over the Earth for some unseen alien invaders. The man ultimately realizes he cannot win and surrenders to the children.


Moench has truly perfected the art of the constantly twisting storyline to the point that we can be repeatedly shocked and enticed just by watching a guy move through a house, blow bullets through children's heads, and provide a ridiculous amount of backstory that, somehow, never gets tedious. First we want to know what's up with the kids, then what's up with the shortened life lines on the palms, then what the disaster was, then what the cosmic cloud did, etc etc, until we arrive at the inevitable conclusion.

There are problems with this story, to be sure. It would be nice to see some complication or twist arrive in the present moment, and not just in the past that we are informed of (and yet we only get one actual flashback).



And I have a hard time accepting the idea that a professor of palmistry would have so easily pieced together the logical conclusion that a cosmic cloud from 12 years earlier infected all pregnant women, implanting them with an alien virus that caused all of this. Seems a little out of his realm of expertise. And, if this guy makes a living writing about reading palms, I'm not so convinced he has any expertise.


As for influences, Moench pulled many of his ideas from songs he was listening to and late night movie reruns he was watching. In this case, this story pays a clear homage to Vincent Price's Last Man on Earth,



as well as its more recent remake at the time: 1971's The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston. Of course, making the villains cold-blooded children was a beautiful twist, and the complex series of mysteries Moench lays down for us in order for us to arrive at the full plot and backstory was all his own creation as well.

As a result, while this is far from a perfect story, it's a damn good one, especially if you like Post Apocalyptica.

I love dinosaurs and I love Moench, so I think you could easily infer how much I love this story.

In an interview somewhere, Bill DuBay spoke about how labor intensive it was to do Corben's color stories--the art was B&W and Corben and DuBay hand-created color separations in pencil, with a lot of print test back-and-forth. But they were very popular and usually look great (though they could look like hall if the registration was off, like on at least one issue I had).

Corben's color printing techniques were the most advanced and most complicated ones of the 70ies and 80ies. He basically gave nightmares to printers and spent more time on technical details than on actual drawing and coloring. When you read his letter pages in his self published comics from the eighties, he gives ample details on the process and often on the failures. Many of his stories have seen multiple printing with multiple color works.