Good Lord! (Choke!): My Life in Comics (Thus Far)

By Eric S. Caruncho The smell of frying bananas (or hearing the Beatles’ “I Should Have Known Better”) always takes me back to a specific time and place: that summer when I was nine and I discovered the comic book rental place just a short hop from our old house. In those days, there were parlors where you could rent comics for five centavos a read, and the one I frequented was right next to a banana cue stand and a jukebox blaring the hits of the day (hence the smell and sound associations). The place was usually packed, with students goofing off and catching up on the latest issues of “Aliwan” or “Pilipino” comics, but the wizened old man who ran the place also had a pile of English-language comic books.  This was where I discovered Batman (still making the transition from “Detective” comics to his own title) and Superman (ditto from “Action”), as well as the Justice League of America and the Legion of Superheroes. Actually, I only kept up with the DC titles to fit in with my peers.  Marvel was always more my speed: the Mighty Thor, Spiderman, Namor the Submariner, the Incredible Hulk and my favorite, Doctor Strange, then being drawn by the immortal Steve Ditko. After they had made enough for him, the old man was willing to part with certain titles for ten centavos each, and this was how I came into possession of “The Incredible Hulk” No. 1 (doubtless worth something on eBay today if only  I still had it). Anyway, I soon began amassing my own collection, mainly titles acquired by harassing my grandfather into taking me with him on his daily run to the dental laboratories on Florentino Torres (he was a dentist) so we could pass by the magazine stands on Avenida Rizal and I could wheedle him into buying me one or two new comic books. One day, however, I struck gold.  While playing in the attic of my grandfather’s house, I stumbled upon treasure: a hidden stash of EC comics dating back to the 1950s—before the Comics Code Authority enforced its stamp of approval (i.e., censored) all comic books finding their way into young hands. It was a revelation.  Not only was the artwork in “The Vault of Horror”, “Tales from the Crypt” and “The Haunt of Fear” distinctively graphic and grisly, but the pre-code stories were dark and cynical in a way that I had never encountered in the sanitized offerings for normal boys and girls. I had always been a fan of the Universal horror films, which were afternoon matinee staples on TV then (“Frankenstein meets the Wolfman”), but the EC stories went much further. Case in point: “The Basket”, featuring a village hunchback who always carried a basket on his shoulder.  He has violent mood swings, however: sometimes gentle and playful, other times insanely violent.  The villagers soon notice than when he’s in a good mood, he carries the basket on his right shoulder, and when he’s bad, the basket is on his left shoulder.  Inevitably, they discover the reason: the man has two heads, and two personalities—the basket merely hid one or the other. “Good Lord! (Choke!)” was the horrified reaction on the final panel of nearly every EC story. Another story put a new twist in the classic horror story “The Monkey’s Paw”: a woman loses her fiancée in an accident.  She makes a wish on a magical object to bring him back from the dead, and it works.  But her fiancée continues to decompose, until she can’t take it anymore.  She takes a kitchen knife to him, and in the final panel, the neighbors break into her apartment to find her frenziedly hacking her fiancée into tiny pieces, each still writhing with life! “Good Lord! (Choke!)” Many many years later, I found myself working in the same newspaper as Nonoy Marcelo.  He had a side project going at the time, producing two titles for a venerable local comic book publishing house which he managed to convince to try something new. The idea was to produce two “wakasan” titles—one horror and one romance. I recognized a fellow EC aficionado in Nonoy when, apropos of nothing, he happened to utter the immortal line “Good Lord! (Choke!)”, and “Argh!” Comics, the horror title he conceived, had a distinct EC flavour to it, but with a modern twist. The idea behind “Argh!” was to employ the talents of some of the artists who gravitated around Marcelo’s peculiar genius, among them Jose Tence Ruiz, Ludwig Ilio, Dante Perez and Roxlee—distinctive illustrators all. I was press-ganged into producing a couple of scripts for “Argh!”.  I was of course thrilled to be working in comics—a childhood dream fulfilled—but apprehensive about never actually done it before. How hard could it be? Drawing on my recollections of the EC stories (which I soon discovered had been indelibly stamped in my brain), I managed to assemble a cast of putrid protagonists in two twisted tales of revenge from beyond the grave! In the first one, “Salvage”, a pair of rogue cops make a habit of dumping their salvage victims in the same garbage heap.  One night when they’re disposing of a fresh kill, a grisly decayed hand suddenly breaks out of the muck.  The dead are rising to wreak their terrible vengeance on their killers. “Good Lord! (Choke!)” In the second one, whose title escapes me now, the lead singer in a struggling punk rock band makes the classic deal with the devil for fame and wealth, and his band soon rises to the top, with the attendant sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.   But soon, the devil wants his due, and our hero soon finds himself being dragged into the flaming pits of hell. “Good Lord! (Choke!)” I was paid the princely sum of fifty pesos per page for my literary efforts, but the thrill of finally seeing my name in a title panel was the real reward. Sadly, “Argh!” was either 30 years too late, or perhaps 30 years ahead of its time.  It ceased publication after only two issues, both of which are doubtless worth something on eBay today—if only I had a copy.