By RON WILBUR (Eros Comix; 1990)
“Revelry in Hell” is a notorious pulp novella by Donald Graham (a.k.a. Donald G. Cormack) that was initially published in the April-May 1939 issue of UNCANNY TALES. Called “the most sadistic torture story ever featured in the horror pulps” by author/historian Robert Weinberg (who was extremely well versed on the subject), it was adapted into a one-shot comic in 1990 by the adult-oriented Fantagraphics offshoot Eros Comix.
The scripter and artist was the late Ron Wilbur (1954-2016), who packed as much nudity and miscellaneous ugliness as possible into his 26 pages. Wilbur’s adaptation, presented in anatomically oriented black and white artwork that often resembles the covers of 1970s era smut novels (as rendered by artists like Robert Bonfils and Demulotto), may appear to embody all the excesses of 1990s smut publishing, but it actually harkened back to the conventions of 60 years earlier; this is to say that Donald Graham’s story, extreme though it may have been, wasn’t at all unusual in the retinue of 1930s pulp fiction.
Nearly all the elements that typified such fare—human oddities, evil old men, a mad doctor and much excess sadism—were present in this “story of a macabre atrocity that swept a girl’s school with Hell’s blackest passions!” Among the instructors at said girl’s school is the fetching Nancy, who’s understandably upset upon finding the corpse of one of her students stripped naked and mounted on a snowman.
Among those summoned to attend to the traumatized Nancy are the creepy Dr. Wayne and the strapping Dr. William Rand, who on his drive home happens upon a woman being whipped by a horrifically deformed individual. The latter flees and his not-long-for-this-world victim murmurs the words “The carnival…of…passion and…pain!” Venturing further into wilderness, Rand finds the “carnival” she spoke of, which is actually Dr. Wayne’s private sanitarium. There “every malformed freak of nature in Satan’s galaxy of madness and mind-roiling horror” resides, in addition to some lecherous old coots who pay money for the privilege of divvying out various methods of torture to a bevy of enslaved young women, whose ranks are soon joined by the kidnapped Nancy.
Trashy, exploitive and misogynistic are words that aptly sum up REVELRY IN HELL. The fact that the material is presented by Ron Wilbur without excuses, apologies or late 20th Century addendums (meaning it was not “updated for a modern audience”) can, depending on one’s point of view, be viewed as either a notable attribute or a major drawback.