Third time's a charm...
This twice-up page first caught my eye when I saw it on eBay about 8 years ago. I loved all the ink on the page, the serious & sweaty faces, the dramatic POV in each panel, the tortured tree shapes, and every aspect of the page, really. Ingels typically distorts his figure proportions and the perspective of his backgrounds, which can sometimes look goofy to me, but the freakish wingspan of the silhouetted character in the first panel and the abstract swirling wreckage in the final panel, really heightened the tension and creeping horror of the page and I thought about bidding on it.
But I'd never been interested in Ingles before, despite my love of so many of the other EC artists, especially Frazetta, Williamson, Wood, Kurtzman, and Torres, and I felt proud of myself for being disciplined for not spending money on an artist I had just taken a shine to rather than sticking with the ones I've been smitten with for years.
But the page haunted me... Intrigued, I picked up the Tales from the Crypt Vol. 1 hardback, which reprinted this story, and I loved it. Then I started buying the more recent B&W hardbacks reprinting EC stories all from one artist, and I dove in. I wound up getting 4 Ingels hardbacks --- I couldn't get enough. I realized that Ingels was clearly a huge influence on both Frazetta and Wrightson, two of my greatest heroes, and this page in particular remained my favorite even as I read a hundred of his stories (Maybe I just imprinted on it because I saw it first, but I think I would have loved it in any case lol.)
So when the page appeared at Heritage a couple years later, I decided to go for it. But my wife had tickets to the symphony during the time of the auction, so I set what I thought was an aggressive proxy bid and turned off my phone...only to find out afterwards that I was the underbidder.
Amazingly, I was given yet another chance recently when this page surfaced on ComicLink, and this time I was clear-headed about my desire (need?) for it, and I had no other commitments at the auction closing time.
And I finally added it to my collection.
Thanks for taking a look! And for reading this far...