Witching Hour #10

Witching Hour #10 (On Sale: June 18, 1970) has a nice cover by Neal Adams. Looking back on all these old cover by Adams, I am amazed at how much of the interior story art he is able to capture in his work, in this instance, how Alex Tothian the woman in the doorway appears. Masterful work.

This issue is a festival of fine artwork, featuring two of my favorite artists of the period, with  vastly different styles.

We begin with a three witch framing sequence drawn by Alex Toth and Bill Draut. Morded and Mildred are upset with the younger Cynthia as some of their things have been ruined and it is almost the Witching Hour. They find Cynthia and before they can finish complaining, the clock strikes midnight and Cynthia starts telling a tale.

Our first story is a modern take entitled "A Warp in Time... Loses Everything" and contains some stunning artwork by Gray Morrow in only his second story for DC. Psychiatrist Stanley Owen is being herded out of the office of psychiatrist Bernard Angst and placed into a padded cell after he was found on the streets screaming about being trapped in a time warp.  

As he leaves his office later in the day, Angst is still chuckling about poor Stanley when suddenly he slips into a time warp! In it he sees the Midnight Flyer, a train that disappeared 60 years ago, the Lost Legion of French fighters, the Flying Dutchman, his college roommate who fell from a town and whos body was never found and his own missing daughter. He finds an old man and lashes out at him with a staff he was carrying. 

He ends up on the street with the staff and is taken by police to yet another psychiatrist and is also locked up in a padded cell. As the Doctor leaves his office for the night he picks up the staff and opens the door to a time warp! 

The framing sequence continues with Morded and Mildred deciding to tell a tale together.

But first we have a one-page text story, "I'll See You in my Dreams..."

Then we have "Hold Softly, Hand of Death" by Gerry Conway and Alex Toth. Toth's work on this story is amazing. We find Pierre Lebas in Marseilles, a lonely man who spends his days alone, staring out to sea and lost in memories of his youth. He was a dashing young man, irresistible to the ladies, but cruel and heartless. One night, while walking on the beach, he sees a beautiful woman at the top of a cliff, but she vanishes before he can encounter her.

Days later after he brags bout how he destroyed a man who dared to keep a beautiful woman away from him, when suddenly the lights go out and the glass doors swing open to reveal a woman, the woman Pierre had seen on the cliff many nights before. When the woman take her up to a room to compose herself, Pierre follows and confronts the woman, who has haunted him since the night on the beach. He tells her he is infatuated by her, but she denies being the woman he saw on the cliff.

HE leaves her and dances with other woman at the party, but he can see her silhouette in the window, looking sown on him. He dumps the woman he is dancing with and the hostess of the party asks if anything is wrong. When he asks why the young woman who came in from the rain is not joining them, the hostess remarks how charming and clever he is to invent a woman coining in from the rain. He looks up and the window is empty.

In the following days, Pierre sees the woman everywhere, but always is unable to catch up to her. Then, one foggy night he sees her up on the sea cliff and confronts her. She tells him that she is not for him, that she does not belong to him. He tells her that he loves her and moves to take her, only to see her fall back over the cliff. Her body never found, he has carried her image in his heart ever since, a lonely old man.

One day, confined to a wheelchair, he sits at the top of a sea cliff in Marseilles, staring out to the sea. When he does not show up for dinner that night, the locals go up to the cliff and find his empty chair. His body was never found. Perhaps it is she who came back and perhaps it is true that he claimed a love that knew no end.

In the final framing sequence Cinthia, so upset by the sister's downer story, uses a temporary fountain of youth on them to turn them into children and promises to send over Sugar and Spike to play with them. 

We end with a one-page "Realm of the Mystics" on Yama Raja, the Indian King of the Dead, which is drawn by Jack Sparling.

The entire issue is reprinted in Showcase Presents: The Witching Hour Vol. 1 TPB.

Edited by Dick Giordano.