Redartz: Most likely, if we were to take a peek inside our longboxes, check our bookshelves, or open up our tablets, we would find a wide variety of superhero comics. Tales of adventure and daring, loaded with characterization, drama and fancy costumes. If we delve a bit deeper, we might find some humor comics. Maybe some Archies, or some vintage Charlton/Gold Key tv funnies. And if we keep going, way into the back of that longbox, we just might find some horror books.
Horror comics have a very long history, going way back to the late Golden Age. In the 50's, they had a veritable Renaissance in the form of EC Comics. "Tales From the Crypt", "Haunt of Fear", "Shock Suspenstories"; these books and others kept countless kids wide-eyed at night. Filled to the grim brim with work by such comics masters as Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, and Graham Ingles, those classic EC's still command a big following even today.
Ah, but this isn't "Back in the Atomic Age"! And, even though EC Comics never made it out of the 50's ( with the exception of Mad, which is another story), the horror genre (and it's sister the science fiction genre) kept on going. Going, that is, right through the 60's and well into our beloved Bronze Age.
Although those books tended to get overshadowed by the superhero comics, the horror comics still attracted some big creative names. At Marvel; think of all those Kirby and Ditko monster tales from the early 60's. Stories that many of us discovered in 70's titles such as "Uncanny Tales", "Vault of Evil" and "Where Creatures Roam". Anthology titles, featuring several short stories by various creators; some all reprint, some with new stories included. Indeed, as the Bronze age dawned, some great new stories were being produced at the 'House of Ideas'. Steranko had an incredible story in "Tower of Shadows" #1. There was work by Wrightson, Wood, Adams, Buscema, and many others. All 'hidden' away in the dark corners of the horror comics shelf.
Oh, and DC was even more 'horrific'ally inclined. They had quite a few such titles in the Bronze age: "Unexpected", "Witching Hour", and the twin pillars of "House of Secrets" and "House of Mystery". And DC went way beyond Marvel in continuing new chillers, all through the seventies you could find them. Alex Toth, Alex Nino, Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson, all the top names of the comics field brought ghastly life to the stories in those books. Adams and Wrightson, in particular, seemed to have a lock on cover art for those DC horror titles. There's more beautifully eerie artwork on display there than in Rod Serling's Night Gallery!
Meanwhile, the other comics publishers of the era were busily putting out packages of fright-fraught fun. Charlton ("Dr. Graves", "Scary Tales") , Gold Key ("Twilight Zone"), even Archie ("Madhouse", "Chilling Adventures in Sorcery"). At any spinner rack you haunted, you could count on finding sevefral horror books lurking within.
Some were excellent, some were fairly dreadful. But they were always fun, and ideal for a late night sleepover with flashlights after the parents were asleep. I didn't pick up many of them at the time, though. My loss. I now love to grab them up, often found on the cheap in quarter boxes. We often talk of books which "the cover made us buy"; well, there are many fine examples of spookily spectacular art to be found throughout the Bronze age. Now let's open the vault and have a look at some...
Although I'm late warming up to this genre, I love anthologies, and these are fun reading and often inexpensive as well. Hard to argue with all that. How about you? Any mavens of the macabre among you?
