To be sure, EC probably wouldn't win any awards from modern feminists, as their stories of horror and suspense were often filled to the brim with trampy ladies and cheating wives (for instance, Kamen and Feldstein's "Piecemeal," printed a couple of years later). Since all or most of the EC personnel were men, it's not surprising that their stories played to male fears or insecurities-- which, to a pluralist critic like myself, is all to the good.
Over a year after "Daddy" appeared in print, some unbilled creator or creators produced a horror-story for a lesser-known company, Superior Comics. "Crawling Evil" seems like a deliberate inversion of Kathy's psychological situation, one that exacerbates male anxieties by portraying women who use their witchiness for evil rather than self-defense.
The splash page for "Evil" is crudely drawn but captures the raw vitality of a free-flowing imagination. If it were less formulaic in its construction, the narrative might be indicative of a trampling fetish, though the subject's a moot point since the creators-- credited simply as "the Iger Shop" in Craig Yoe's HAUNTED LOVE reprint-- will probably never be identified. (Curiously, though, Bradford Wright's COMIC BOOK NATION states that sadomasochistic images were common in the Iger Shop, and that much of the work was produced by women.)
The story's opening puts an emphasis on femininity as a source of evil. Here main character Lorna is just a little girl when she witnesses her granny-- also her only parental figure-- spit at some male road-workers who are just minding their own business, though it's clear that Granny has a reputation for the "evil eye." Lorna asks her grandma for an explanation, and the otherwise unnamed beldame tells Lorna that she wishes all men were dead because one of them left Granny at the altar. The old woman still made a marriage of convenience to a "spineless fool," and that before Lorna's grandfather died, they gave birth to Lorna's father, who is now also dead. No mention is made of Lorna's mother or any maternal relations, but clearly Granny is the only woman in her life. Lorna immediately feels indignation against all men like her granny does, and begins destroying her male dolls while Granny cackles triumphantly.
By the next page Lorna's a young woman and Granny's dying, but the old bat hates men so much, she won't even call for the local male doctor. Strangely, despite having converted Lorna to her man-hating religion, Granny waits till she's on the death-bed to reveal a greater secret, that she's concealed a book of witch-magic behind the fireplace. Granny also warns Lorna of some unspecified "danger" but kicks the bucket before telling Lorna what it is.
Lorna, who unlike her granny has never had a man romance her, throws all of her libido into becoming a self-taught witch. A stranger comes to her door, seeking shelter, and Lorna decides to try her magic on him. She kisses him while mentally reciting the Latin phrase "dies irae et dies ilia"-- which, rather comically, is taken from the first lines of a popular Roman Catholic hymn, and simply means "day of wrath and day of doom." The man is transformed into a crawling victim of the evil spell, and Lorna kills him, not by stomping on him, but crushing him in the pages of her magic book.
Lorna's next act is to bid farewell to the local yokels by driving her car at a road-crew like the one she and her granny met years ago. She apparently injures no one in that incident, but this act sets her on a whirlwind tour of man-hating murder, wherein a caption tells us that "Lorna wandered the world over, always hating men-- and living off them!" Page six makes her modus operandi clear: she charms men into spending money on her, and then kisses them, transforming them into worms. On this page the mature Lorna is finally seen performing the trample-fetish on one of her victims.
Lorna also keeps traveling to avoid being suspected by any local cops, and it's clear that she "squishes" more than a few more lovers, though for the climax to work, she must leave a lot of them alive, to suffer their fate. Then, Lorna's normal libido finally overtakes her perverted habits. She dates a square citizen named Dan, falls in love with him, but refuses to let him kiss her magically tainted lips. He steals a kiss when she's sleeping, and he devolves into wormdom. Worse, when Lorna wakes up she steps on poor old Dan. Distraught, she takes poison to punish herself. But the worms that she didn't squash have waited to have their turn.
I should point out that though I naturally saw the phallic implications of the worm-forms, other online fans have been more imaginative. One pointed out that killing the first victim between the pages of the witch-book might also count as getting crushed within the female "danger zone" (my term), while another fan thought that the sight of the worms swarming all over dying Lorna might be construed as "killer sperm," finally having their way with the man-hater.
While "Crawling Evil" is obviously too brain-fried a story ever to be popular with most comics-fans, it may be the source of a considerably inferior spoof by Daniel Clowes, "Crawl, Worm," seen in an inset picture on the cover of a 1988 LLOYD LLEWELLYN comic. Clowes' story is markedly inferior to the original Iger Shop tale in every way, except that Clowes is much better at being superficially supercilious.
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