Golden Age Comics meets Old Time Radio!
Here’s another story from The Unseen, a pre-Code horror comic that I mentioned a few posts back. Wealthy stockbroker Mark Denton is murdered by his wife and her lover. But when his spirit arrives at the river between this world and the next, the ferryman grants him a boon: to return to this world and exact vengeance!
The story’s idea was novel enough that I felt like sharing it, and since it’s public domain, it wasn’t too hard to find online. But then I had another idea!
I fell into the habit a while back of listening to old radio plays while folding laundry. One episode is just the right length for a load, and they are really a lot of fun. So why not adapt this story into a script for a radio play? Not only is that a medium more suitable for a blog, but I’d also been reading another comic collection: Charlton Comics’ thriller anthology series The Mysterious Traveller. And guess what? The Mysterious Traveler is also an old radio show!
And so I adapted the story to be a Mysterious Traveler radio play. It was a good exercise trying to convert the visual elements of a comic story into sound and narration – or words about sound and narration, to be exact. But you can read both versions, and decide how well I did.
- The Vengeance of Mark Denton: A Mysterious Traveler radio play at Ephemera
- The Vengeance of Mark Denton from The Unseen no. 10 (May 1953) at Comic Book Plus
And if you are curious about The Mysterious Traveler:
- Here’s the entire run of the Charlton Comics series at Comic Book Plus
- Here are 77 episodes from the radio show, at Internet Archive
- And here are some scripts for the show, which I used to guide me while adapting, from The Generic Radio Workshop
Enjoy!
Images from “The Vengeance of Mark Denton,” The Unseen 10 (May 1953). Pencils by Art Saaf, Inks attributed to Mike Peppe. Source: Comic Book Plus.
Multo (Ghost) 