Number 2287: Ghost of the geek

The word “geek” has changed its meaning over the past couple of decades. Now its primary use is as a person who is “an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity; computer geek.” (from Merriam-Webster.com). It can also mean a socially inept person, or, in this story, a guy who works for a carnival and does outrageous things like bite the heads off live chickens. On page 3 panel 6 the geek, Walter Bascomb, is about to take a bite, but is shown in the act of choking the chicken (which has a double meaning I won’t go into here). Ugh! The disgusting cruelty was made popular by the 1946 novel, Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham, which spawned a film noir classic starring Tyrone Power, and even a graphic novel by Spain Rodriguez.

That is the long way around describing a story of revenge from beyond the grave. It was published by ACG in 1954, while it was making the short-lived transition to what they called shock stories, the EC comics type of horror stories. “Terror Under the Big Top” retains an element of the more common ACG story, a ghost haunting a loving couple, and the ghost committing murder. In an EC comic it would not be a ghost, but a walking, rotting corpse returned from the grave committing the murders. The shock stories were killed by the Comics Code, which came along less than a year later.

The story is drawn by Kenneth Landau, and appeared in Forbidden Worlds #27 (1954):

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