The Creepiest Comic Book Character of All Time

March 25, 2012

If you're disturbed by the empty stare of puppets, that's normal. Ventriloquist dummies have had more murderer fingers inside them than JonBenet Ramsey. The most well-known dummy of all time is Charlie McCarthy, a fancy corpse-faced block of wood that starred in several films and TV shows with its puppet master, Edgar Bergen.

In the '40s, the Charlie McCarthy doll even had its own comic book, only Edgar's hand was nowhere to be found. No explanation for this was ever given. The dummy wasn't carved out of radioactive wood or operated after a ventriloquist fisted a genie. And it wasn't set in a world where puppets were alive. No, everyone else in the comic was a normal human, and Charlie walked stringlessly among them like a dark plague's harbinger. The fact that they spoke to him in anything other than panicked shrieks bothered the shit out of me, so I've rewritten Charlie's adventures here.

You might think it's unfair to call Charlie McCarthy The Creepiest Comic Book Character of All Time after I've changed all his dialogue to be about baby circumcisions. That's why:

In the following comics, not a single word of Charlie McCarthy's dialogue has been altered from the original. He really was this creepy.