'Inside the Furnace' though... what kind of 1950s horror comic might this be? There is something strangely unsettling about the name. After all, no-one would like to be actually be inside a furnace - certainly not while it is lit anyway. Perhaps there is something in the furnace, some cursed thing eager to get out? The threat in the title 'Inside the Furnace' is undefined, but certainly there. 'Inside the Furnace' sounds like a horror comic from a dream. These dream-comics occasionally pop up in my nocturnal wonderings, one I've mentioned before called 'Forbidden Mysteries' showed an old man fishing off a pier at night, and another called 'Occult Tales' showed Spiderman battling a monster at sunset. There was another one too, called 'Dead of Night' (this was a real title for a comic put out by Marvel in the 1970s) and had a picture of a wood just before twilight, a bloated dying sun hanging heavy through the winter branches.
I entertain myself with the history of these mysterious non-existent comics. I imagine them produced by a company called 'Drumduan Comics', (named after the road I lived in where I first came the concept of horror comics when I was ten years old). I imagine the stories in 'Forbidden Mysteries' as something odd and unsettling, and slightly surreal, as much as the dream it came from. I imagine this mysterious company vanishing at the end of the 1950s when the comics code came in and destroyed the horror comics market, only to re-emerge in the 1970s, with new, equally obscure titles, before a final blaze of glory in the early 1980s, with a run of lurid comics whose titles may have been inspired by the video nasties of the time; 'Buried Alive!', 'Eaten Alive!'. In my imagination the names may change, the history of Drumduan Comics is unsure and transient, a haunted untrustworthy thing. Occasionally I imagine Drumduan Comics appearing briefly in Mexico in the 1960s under the name 'Noxis-Nibris imprints'. It is never known who runs this company, nor who works for the company. Their comics appear are whispered of at comic marts, unbelievably rare things that people suspect may not even exist, a four-colour urban legend. People remember them, but no-one ever seems to possess a copy (some parallel here with Nigerian horror films that people swear exist but have never seen.... though you can see video cassette covers on the internet...). Perhaps one of these comic collectors tracks an address down, not an American one, or a Mexican one, but one in a small town in northern Scotland. He may go there, and find the street on which he might find a clue to the origin of Drumduan Comics, and only to find...
...but here my imagination fades out. I don't know what he would find. I can see a road, leading into a vast forest on the hill (echoes of the 'black woods' that looked down on my bedroom when we lived in Forres) and the road just petering out. There are rumours, perhaps, of a blackened burnt out factory, but that's all I have, and the history of this purely imagined comics company continues to remain unknown.
'Inside the Furnace' sounds like it might have been one of the titles published by 'Drumduan Comics', perhaps a short run, only five issues, sometime in 1954.
Perhaps one day, as I have long intended to, I may turn the dreamt of and imagined covers of these comics into paintings, and if I do, I might have one them titled 'Inside the Furnace'.
