MYTHCOMICS: "GRAVE REHEARSAL" (STRANGE FANTASY #7, 1953)

One problematic if minor aspect of the 1953 horror-tale “Grave Rehearsal” is the meaning of the title “Grave Rehearsal.” The phrase sounds like it’s meant to be a pun, but if so it’s an obscure one. Sometimes one encounters the phrase “grave reversal” in a context to denote reversals in the business world, but it's not the sort of commonplace construction that appeals to punsters. If the title is not a pun, the title would seem to be describing something about the story. The splash panel teases the reader with an event seen later in the story: a feminine dominatrix-type ordering a middle-aged man to be hurled into a grave full of mud. Possibly the unknown author of the story conceived of this scene as a “rehearsal” for the villain’s later, more murderous assault upon the protagonist. Further, given that psychological pontifications infused American culture throughout the 1950s, there's a slim possibility that  the author had heard some theory about the psychological appeal of mud-baths: that they allowed the participant to relax as if he were "rehearsing" his original sojourn in his mother's womb-- or even that the bath's relaxing effects presaged the ultimate relaxation of the grave.

“Rehearsal” also interests me in being a tale where it takes a little work to figure out who is the narrative’s centric presence. The dominant pattern in horror-stories is to place the emphasis upon the narrative’s most monstrous figure, while any lesser heroes—or demiheroes, to use my preferred term for victim-types—are subordinate presences. Thus Dracula is usually the star of any story he appears in, while Jonathan Harker, not so much. There are famous characters whom I would regard more as demiheroes than as monsters, such as Victor Frankenstein. But “Grave Rehearsal,” while nowhere near as famous as these luminaries, does maintain an interesting narrative tension between the story’s monster, the lovely Madam Satin, and its foolhardy worm-who-turns, B.S. Fitts.

Even before we meet the capriciously named Mister Fitts, the opening caption informs readers that Fitts is an “egomaniacal yellow tabloid publisher,” and that he’s about take one crucial step that takes him from “journalistic mud-slinging” to “health resort mud bathing.” This step only takes place, though, because Fiits is given to throwing fits, as is seen in the first three panels in the story. He castigates an assistant for daring to run “decent news stories” instead of sensational fodder to attract Fitts’ desired readers—whom he significantly calls “swine.” Then Fitts promptly has a heart attack.

Though the publisher accepts his doctor’s verdict that he Fitts must learn how to relax, he has no idea how to proceed. Then he gets a providential package from a health institute in the country of “Transvania.” A letter enjoins Fiits to find relaxation in smearing the muddy contents of the package  upon his face—and Fiits, also prone to fits of irrational enthusiasm, does so. He’s so pleased by the results that in no time he’s in Transvania, meeting Madame Satin as she conducts him to her resort.

The next day, the good Madame enters Fiits’ room with two helpers and that iconic weapon of the domme, a riding-crop.  The helpers strip the enraged publisher of most of his clothes, transport him to a graveyard, and fling him into a grave filled with mud. To his surprise, Fiits, though intimated by the Madame, finds that he experiences “heavenly ecstasy” as a result of wallowing in mud (as one caption tells us) “like a contented hog.” Madame Satin informs Fitts that the mud has marvelous curative properties, but she chooses not to share the secret with the world (thus making her the obverse of Fiits, who reveals every secret he uncovers to a sensation-hunting public). She claims to live solely off endowments by wealthy clients. Fitts, possibly desperate to protect his newfound lease on pleasurable life, makes Satin his sole life insurance beneficiary.

The impulsive publisher then suffers donation-remorse, but it’s too late. Satin’s real agenda is to murder him by burying Fitts alive, as she’s done with her previous beneficiaries. (Apparently in Tranvania, the police don’t ask too many questions about multiple vanished businessmen.) However, Fitts gets the last laugh, sort of. Once he dies, he becomes a ghost, able to see all the other unfortunate specters haunting the graveyard. Fitts then galvanizes the other ghosts by appealing to their sense of injustice, and together they muster the power to capture Madame Satin and sentence her to her own premature burial. For the final touch, back in America the late Mister Fiits invisibly looks on as his journalistic subordinates receive the full story of his demise and vengeance. The final words of one reporter: “Trust B.S. to file a sensational yarn, even after death.”

A few commentaries on this odd story have viewed the mud-baths as scatological in nature:  that what the publisher really wants to wallow in is shit. Given that the character’s initials  quite probably connotes “bullshit,” this is a logical conclusion, though it doesn’t take in everything interesting about “Rehearsal.”

What makes “Grave Rehearsal” a mythic story is the way in which it opposes two modes of existence, which, after Jung, I’ll call “the extroverted” and “the introverted.” In the first few pages of the story, Fitts is an extroverted type, in that he is an unscrupulous exploiter concerned only with making money through “mud-slinging” to readers he considers “swine.” Extreme extroversion, however, puts his life at risk, at which point Madame Satin inexplicably seeks him out. Given the speedy effects of the mud-sample, apparently the soil of Transvania really has some magical properties (not unlike the virtue the Original Vampirefound in his “native earth"), and Madame Satin knows in advance what over-active businessmen really need. She turns Fitts from a subordinator to a “sub,” calling forth his inner masochist, even though his syndrome goes no further than his embracing a sort of womb-like “ecstasy.”  Significantly, Fitts belatedly tries to jump off the sub-train by realizing he’s given away a little too much, though by that time it’s too late for him to keep his life. Contrary to her appearance, Madame Satin is even more of an exploiter than Fiits, being willing to kill multiple victims in order that she can live the good life. Yet once he’s dead, Fitts expresses his alpha-male power much as he did in life: stirring up resentments in the other spirits just as he used to stir up his customers’ desire for titillation—and he even makes his own death into grist for the sensation mill. It’s because of this belated act of extroversive will, overcoming his own desire to return to the womb, that makes Fitts, rather than his exotic murderess, the star of this particular mythcomic.