SUPERNATURAL THRILLERS featuring THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN RIDES AGAIN – Ben’s Horror-Comic-Athon October 2018 #17
In the spirit of Halloween, Ben is reading one horror comic every day. Will they keep him up? Or will they put him to sleep? We’ll find out…
It’s October 17th. This time, the SEQUEL to a comic book I wrote! Well, sorta kinda. I once wrote an adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. So sure, it’s not my ORIGINAL story, but here’s Marvel’s sequel to it…
ENTRY SEVENTEEN:
SUPERNATURAL THRILLERS: Marvel Comics; Gary Friedrich, writer; George Tuska and Jack Abel, artists; published 1973
“He haunts the midnight hills–TODAY!”
So like everyone else out there, I was hoping to eventually find a version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow where the part of the lanky, superstitious, self-absorbed school teacher is taken by a cocky, tough as nails private detective.
Ichabod Crane by way of Magnum, P.I.
This, my friends, is a convoluted story. Duke Durbano tells the story of the headless horseman to the daughters of his best friend who just died thinking he had seen the headless horseman. Serves the story well by giving us exposition. But it also makes him look like an idiot.
Then he talks to his love interest about the headless horseman his best friend was said to believe he saw. His love interest? His best friend’s widow.
Meanwhile, bad guys were hired to kill Duke and the widow. With a bomb. That’s shaped like a brick that they threw through a window. Duke survives and chases them down, but their boss, who killed that best friend because he was meddling, doesn’t want to pay them for doing the job, so he dresses up as the Headless Horseman and causes them to go off the road. And he scares Duke into the hospital.
Duke discovers that the boss has a GLOWING HEADLESS HORSEMAN costume in his office. (Yeah, Duke does some breaking and entering to find this out.) After he finds this out, he drives back to his best friend’s widow/current love interest’s house and drives through Sleepy Hollow because it’s the quickest way . . . but he’s confronted and driven off the road by, you guessed it, the Headless Horseman.
And yet, he survives his car diving into the river on the bridge. And then . . . the police tell him the boss couldn’t have done this . . . because he died the night before.
It’s a quick and goofy wrap up to a not so quick and goofy story.
But it was still better than Sledge Hammer.
You can read the rest of this series here: Ben’s Horror-Comic-Athon October 2018
While Ben’s not podcasting daily for the entire month, The Comic Book Time Machine will be going daily for a week at the end of October. Don’t miss our WEEK OF WEIRD, as we explore some weird comics from October 25-31!
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