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?
13 comments:
Hi Red (and Marti)
These issues are as emblematic of the early Bronze Age as any superhero comic. Showing the influence of Universal and Hammer movies as well as the early 70s zeitgeist they were gothic and gritty. I dip into them now and again enjoying the shadows, the darkness, the art.
But however interesting they are, they don't have the familiarity and continuity of superhero comics. Which means they have to be read purely on their own merits - something I'm not always patient enough to do.
Interested to hear recommendations here for the best stuff.
I love the covers of horror comics, and there are some nice examples here. I've picked up a number of them just for the cover, but haven't read much inside. I think of Wrightson, Adams, Kaluta for great covers. That Madhouse looks like Gray Morrow, another guy that I like his covers better than the interiors.
Who designs the best monsters? I'd say Wrightson and Kirby are great at that. You believe in them. Neal Adams isn't good-- his monsters look cartoon goofy instead of scary. Perhaps because he's such a realist, he's not so good at imagining monsters.
Garett - Ditko. At least in the sense that he made the everyday look creepy.
Colin B- Hi pal! Good point about the difference between superhero books and the horror books. Even one part Spider-Man tales have threads running forward and backward, while most terror tales are totally self contained. As for recommendations, this is one area where the Overstreet Price Guide is helpful. You can look up a given title and see what creators did which issues, and pick accordingly.
Garett- that cover may be Morrow, not certain. But I have an issue of Madhouse (not that one, unfortunately) that has a couple of Gray Morrow stories and cover as well. Nice stuff indeed.
I loved horror comics when I was a kid. They were my favourite kind of comic.
For DC, I loved House of Secrets and House of Mystery. My DC faves though were The Witching Hour, The Unexpected and Ghosts. The latter because all the stories in it were true. I knew they were because it said so on the cover and, as we all know, they wouldn't have been allowed to lie about a thing like that. Meanwhile, Weird War Tales floated my boat and was the only comic that ever managed to make me interested in war stories.
I also loved Charlton horror mags, especially The Many Ghosts of Dr Graves and Midnight Tales. As well as their quirkiness and the reassurance they provided that Steve Ditko hadn't died after leaving Marvel, Charlton had the benefit of a bucketload of fabby covers by Tom Sutton, one of the truly great cover artists of the Bronze Age.
Other than Tomb of Dracula, Marvel never really seemed to get the hang of horror comics. Their psychological attachment to super-heroes seemed to make it impossible for them to do horror properly.
In Britain, there was a girls' horror comic called Misty. I've never read it but it seems to have acquired a somewhat legendary status amongst comics fans.
When it comes to other companies, I had one issue of Warren's Vampirella, which was a decadent but beautiful comic and one issue of Skywald's Nightmare which was far too bloodthirsty and gruesome for my liking.
Favourite horror artists of that era: Alex Nino, Gerry Talaoc, ER Cruz, Nestor Redondo, Tom Sutton, Rico Rival, Alfredo Alcala and Bernie Wrightson, as well as some others I've no doubt forgotten.
I'm not really into horror, but I've been meaning to check out the old EC comics, but just haven't gotten around to it yet. I've read Doorway to Nightmare; it's pretty good, though Madame Xanadu doesn't get much character development. I've been meaning to check out her solo series--that's another one in my "to read" pile!
Sorta like Mike, I collected the early appearances of Madame Xanadu in Doorway to Nightmare and The Unexpected. I also picked up a couple of the recent House of Mystery trades, and some of the EC reprints as well. They're groovy.
But I didn't collect horror books when I was young, and more generally I don't dip into them now without a reason. That being said, I always have the hope of finding a gem of a story in the ones I do get, and love it mightily when it does.
Probably like everyone, I enjoyed the EC atomic-age stuff.
Bronze Age - the only thing I took somewhat of an interest in was Dracula if drawn by Colan. Even then, some of the plots were not very captivating.
I also enjoyed some of the bronze age Batman stories that were somewhat horror oriented as I recall, like The Demon of Gothos Mansion. Neal Adams was the artist which did not hurt. (Bronze or silver?)
I have just read through "Marvel Firsts from the 1970s" (free at the library!) and the horror stories like Werewolf were not my style. HOWEVER, there was a B&W reprint of the Man Thing's origin (from a magazine) and I found that quite enjoyable.
I tend do like Red and if I were to stumble over some well-drawn D.C. horror from the 70s, why not pop a few bucks and take a chance?
Steve DC- "Ghosts" featured real stories? Cool, I didn't know that. I always wondered about Gold Key and Ripley's "Believe it or Not" stories, though.
Nice list of artists you added, too. One big plus to DC's two "House" books was the general high quality of artwork found within.
Charlie- "Demon of Gothos Mansion" was, I believe, a Bronze age story. Art was by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano, and it was terrific.
And you should, if the chance arises, pick up a few random horror books- often the story and art will be a welcome surprise. That "Madhouse" book mentioned above was such a spontaneous purchase at a local flea market. Aside from the Gray Morrow stories, there were a couple other artists included that were quite nice, but I'd never heard of. Always good to learn some more comics lore...
"The Demon of Gothos Mansion" was in 1970 (Batman #227), which most comics historians would consider the early Bronze Age. The cover was a homage to Detective Comics #31 (1939). And, yeah, a lot of 1970s Batman stories were horror oriented. The Man-Bat stuff in Detective #400, #402, and #407. The werewolf story in Batman #255, and a vampire story in Detective #455.
In the 1950s, Marvel published horror/science fiction/fantasy anthologies: Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales, Journey Into Mystery. They were watered-down imitations of EC comics like Weird Fantasy and Incredible Science Fiction. In the early 1970s, some of them were reprinted in Where Monsters Dwell and Where Creatures Roam.
In the Silver Age, the trend was away from one-shot stories, and toward series with continuing characters. And the superhero genre was booming. Marvel's anthologies changed their formats accordingly: Captain America and Iron Man strips in Suspense, Thor in Journey Into Mystery, Hulk and Sub-Mariner in Astonish, and Doctor Strange and Nick Fury in Strange Tales. In 1968, Marvel got out from under that restrictive distribution deal, so they cancelled the anthology titles, and each of those heroes got his own self-titled comic.
Similarly, DC's House of Mystery became a superhero comic for a while in the mid-1960s, with Dial H for Hero as the lead feature and Martian Manhunter as back-up. In the Bronze Age, it returned to the horror anthology format. In the early 1980s, it had a series, I...Vampire as its lead feature.
Warren's B&W magazines, Eerie and Creepy, were very similar to classic EC comics, and used some of the same artists, e.g., Reed Crandall and Al Williamson. The full-size magazine format allowed them to bypass the Comics Code, and publish real horror stories, with shock endings.
DC's Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love may have been aimed at the audience that read gothic romance/suspense paperback novels. But those were mostly young women, who, as a general rule, did not read comics. DC changed the title to Forbidden Tales of the Dark Mansion, but it did not last long in its later incarnation, either.
Excellent discussion. I have nothing much to add except I learned a lot today. Thanks TC, Steve, Red, Selenarch, CH47, Colin and all the rest. I definitely liked some issues of various horror mags but I have no knowledge of the history and evolution of the genre. I think DC tried to merge the horror with superheroes with the Phantom Stranger and Spectre stories. We will have to explore those at some point.
One story that sticks with me was a Ditko tale reprinted in Creatures on the Loose or Monsters on the Prowl or some such Marvel book in which a burglar insisted on opening a locked door in a pawn shop hoping to find treasure but was instead met face to face with Medusa. Freaked me out as a six year old.
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