Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: George Roussos, Ned Pines, pre-code horror

La Llorona and other Pre-Code Terrors in The Unseen #9, Up for Auction

Vengeful folklore legend La Llorona makes a rare and early U.S. comic book appearance in 1952's Pre-Code Horror classic The Unseen #9.

Best remembered for titles such as Exciting Comics and Startling Comics, and for the pulp and comic versions of Captain Future, publisher Ned Pines put out 1211 comic book issues across 117 titles from 1939 to 1959, using imprints including Better, Nedor, and Standard.  As those numbers imply, many of those titles were short-lived, and like many comic book publishers, Pines was quick to surf trends looking for a hit.  While Pines didn't dive as deeply into the horror genre as many of his competitors did, his titles Adventures into Darkness , Out of the Shadows and The Unseen were all memorable for their combination of some luridly great covers and a classic take on horror on the insides.  There's a particularly interesting example of this in The Unseen #9, which contains what appears to be the earliest U.S. comic book appearance of Latin American folklore figure La Llorona in a feature titled The Wailing Woman drawn by George Roussos. An issue of a memorable Pre-Code Horror title that contains a story of an extremely popular supernatural figure rarely seen in U.S. comic books, there's a copy of The Unseen #9 (Standard, 1953) up for auction in the 2022 July 3-4 Sunday & Monday Comic Books Select Auction #122227.

In an informative 2021 Library of Congress blog post series about the subject, folklorist Stephen Winick notes, "In Latin America, in Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S., and especially in Mexico, no ghost story is told as often, discussed as enthusiastically, or interpreted as widely, as the legend of La Llorona. "La Llorona" literally means "the weeping woman," so it's not surprising that the main characteristic shared by all stories of "La Llorona" is that she weeps. Other than that one defining trait, the specter known as "La Llorona" varies widely: many stories are told of what she looks like and what she does, and even more are told of how she came to be such a doleful spirit."

Winick further points us to Bess Lomax Hawes's paper La Llorona in Juvenile Hall, which describes the framework for typical La Llorona stories, and this is also very similar to what artist Roussos has used in his brief one-page story in The Unseen #9.  The paper says that "La Llorona typically appears as a malevolent spirit, either a harbinger or a direct cause of misfortune to the living. Sometimes she takes the form of a "dangerous siren," tempting a solitary male late at night by confronting him as a pitiful, woebegone figure hidden under a rebozo. When offered assistance, she turns on the solicitous gentleman the face of a skeleton or a wild metallic horse's head or no face at all. Sometimes she is observed simply roaming about at a distance, or most typically, she is heard weeping and shrieking through the night. A chance meeting with her is dangerous."

The beginning of Roussos' story explains that La Llorona was betrayed by her fiance when she was a young girl in Mexico City. She killed him in a jealous rage, and was then executed herself, giving rise to the malevolent spirit that Bess Lomax Hawes describes.  The rest of the issue contains a classic assortment of Pre-Code Horror material ranging from werewolves to a man who controls a legion of rats.  Of course, La Llorona as a supernatural figure has seen even more awareness since being the subject of a 2019 film. But this brief La Llorona story is a rare gem, and there's a copy of The Unseen #9 (Standard, 1953) up for auction in the 2022 July 3-4 Sunday & Monday Comic Books Select Auction #122227.

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