Friday, February 2, 2024

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #31: "THE DEATH EMERALD," FEATURE COMICS #64 (1943)

Murder is all in the family in this story featuring "Zero, Ghost Detective," an occult detective who, so far as I can tell, had no special powers.



 In this opus, a man named Vern Hornsby acquires a cursed emerald from the tomb of "King Zut." Under circumstances never explained, Ann Hornsby perishes-- one assumes due to some curse on the jewel, though this isn't specified-- but her spirit appears before Death Himself, who believes the emerald belongs to him. Ann petitions Death for her life, and Death says okay, as long as you bring me the gemstone.



Vern stops by Zero's house to ask for help. The spook-consultant tells Vern to go home, and then possibly has a psychic hunch and follows Vern home. There Ann shows she's more than willing to strangle her brother-- possibly because she blames him for getting her killed? Zero shows up, claims he has the emerald, and runs, forcing Ann to chase him. (If she's a spirit, why does she have to chase him on foot?)



Zero purposefully leads Ann to a graveyard, which doesn't seem to work out that well at first. Ann summons other spirits from the graves to overpower the ghost detective. Providentially Vern, who still has the emerald, is able to follow Zero somehow, and he arrives to toss the emerald into the hands of the gathered ghosts. They all fight over it, apparently because they think it will give one of them renewed life, even though Death didn't make the offer to any of them. Ann yells that they can't all have it, and all the specters disappear. Zero, having read the script, figures out that someone (read: Death) called the unquiet spirits back to the otherworld, and apparently the emerald goes with them. Vern is freed of his curse, but though Death gets his jewel, Ann doesn't get credit for the recovery, and she reflects that "I may wait another million years for another chance." (Why would she think there would be even THAT much chance, I do not know.)

The story barely makes any sense, but it's interesting in that it inverts the usual structure of a "cursed object" tale. Usually it's the person who swipes the forbidden item who perishes first, as with the assorted legends around Tutankhamen, a.k.a. "the original King Zut," and then after the infidel perishes, the curse pursues other members of the transgressor's family. Here, the transgressor's relative dies first, and then further evil befalls the transgressor. Since it's not specifically said that the curse kills Ann, one reading could be that Ann's death is just a coincidence that puts her in the hands of the death-god, who then uses her as a puppet for his ends-- in which case there's really no literal death-curse on the emerald itself. If anything, the unknown raconteur may have borrowed more from Wilkie Collins' MOONSTONE, in which sinister Hindu priests commit murder to recover a gemstone sacred to their religion.

An additional curiosity is that the writer refers to a "danse macabre" in the opening caption and in one panel of page 3-- and the first caption attributes a musical work, the Danse Macabre, to someone named Edward Maddwell-- when in fact the only composer famous for such a work is Saint-Saens. It's rather weird to toss out a learned attribution in a lowly forties comic book, and even more so when the tosser-outer gets it WRONG.


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