One thing that strikes me about these is how lacking in oomph the covers were. Even when there's some well-rendered imagery, such as on the
Weird Mystery issue (and the almost identically-composed one on
The House of Mystery--someone clearly had a formula concept), or a clever situation, as with the
House of Secrets, the busy-ness of the covers tends to dampen the effect. Happily, covers tended to improve by not long into the next decade, even among the most "mainstream" of comics. (Even in the '70s, it was notable to me at the time that the handsomest covers seemed to gravitate to the magazines with the weakest contents, such as
House of Mystery and
Ghosts.)
But I didn't care...if the comic I was looking at had the potential for some interesting horror fiction and art, I was game.
Weird War Tales was one of the earliest of horror comics I was able to purchase, and when compared, as I would soon see, to the other DC horror titles it seemed to deliver the horror goods far more often than the traditional horror titles they had. The twist endings the stories tended to have would've been (and are) a bit obvious to more sophisticated reader, but even when they were telegraphed even for me as an 8yo, I tended to enjoy them. (And as one can see below, the "Weird" tag seemed to do well for DC in the recessionary '70s, and thus the creation of
Weird Western, the first home of Jonah Hex--I borrowed friends' copies to read that one--and the shortlived addition of
Weird Mystery as a title to the DC stable...and, even weirder, of the word Weird to the title of the venerable
Adventure Comics for some issues headlined by the supernatural quasi/antihero character the Spectre--also please see below). The ferociously antiwar attitude the writers and artists were allowed to express in
WWT didn't hurt my feelings (and between the three popcult prongs of
WWT and the television series
The World at War [the Granada documentary series was first being syndicated to US stations then] and
M*A*S*H, my sympathy for the pacifist position was no doubt bolstered).
Meanwhile,
Ghost Manor as a Charlton "book" looked (and as many commenters note, smelled) different (they used an odd sort of press and inks, apparently more appropriate for stamping the likes of cereal boxes), but they did some interesting things at Charlton...they let their artists have more leeway, for less pay, and perhaps most importantly were apparently the first to import Japanese horror
manga stories, in translation of course, for US readers, in issues just before and perhaps even including this one. Note that both
Ghost Manor and
The House of Mystery (below) double dog dare you to knock the battery off their...eaves. (Old popcult advertising reference/joke.)
The House of Mystery was, in 1951, DC's first answer to EC's apparent spike in popularity with their new horror titles, which had first appeared the previous year. DC's horror comics weren't as well-drawn nor quite as devoted to black humor, but tended to be reasonably good, derivative horror and suspense tales, particularly when compared to some of the particularly lurid imitators of EC, from Dell on down, which lacked the originals' relative wit and sometimes very real sophistication. When the Comics Code was established (see that seal of approval at far right on the cover), DC turned
HOM into a vaguely science-fictional/superhero comic...until the late '60s, when it again became a horror anthology, with the addition of a Zacherle/Elvira/EC-style "host," Cain, to introduce stories and generally add an attempt at humor to the "book." (Cain's face can be seen on the left, on the banner across the top of the cover.) Sadly, the stories in
HOM tended to be very bland indeed, much moreso than they had been even in the pre-Code issues of
HOM.
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And if you wanted evidence of how much better the early '50s DC horror stories had been, simply dip into this issue of
The Witching Hour, which supplemented its relatively bland new stories with several 1950s reprints, which have a certain vigor missing from the (almost literally as well as utterly figuratively) bloodless new work. One model-esque and two haggish witches were the "hosts" in this "book"--the reprinted demon in the mirror story involved a psychic investigator sort who probably would've gotten his own book in less censorious circumstances back when, and it was, as I recall, very good fun.
Marvel, for its part, wasn't even trying to present new horror stories per se in their "standard" color comics in the 1970s, choosing instead to reprint the Atlas and Timely EC-imitation horror comics from those two ancestors of Marvel, and in new work concentrating on outre heroes/antiheroes, such as their version of Dracula and a rather Peter Parkeresque fellow (with a bit less pointless self-pity) who began turning into a werewolf at the appropriate phases of the Moon, mostly in his "book"
Werewolf-by-Night...Dracula or, as in this first issue I bought, Frankenstein's behemoth might make a crossover/guest appearance. (Marvel had published in 1973 two issues of a digest-sized fiction magazine called
The Haunt of Horror, edited by Gerry Conway [who's since made a fairly prominent Hollywood career], but discontinued that and took the title for a black and white, 8.5 x 11" horror comics magazine they published for some years, in imitation of Warren's
Creepy,
Eerie and
Vampirella b&w comics magazines...the latter for their part [not!] the first sustained effort to reach out to the horror comics audience, starting at the turn of the '60s, which had been abandoned by the other comics publishers.)(
Correction: The Warren horror comics magazines began publishing in 1964; Dell Comics had stepped into the void first, with the initial issues of
Twilight Zone in 1961, and
Ghost Stories in 1962--founded after Whitman decided not to co-publish with Dell, and started their own Gold Key line, which took
TZ among many other licensed properties away from Dell Comics...Gold Key added
Boris Karloff's Thriller and
Ripley's Believe It or Not: True Ghost Stories to their line later. Dell also added more horror titles in the '60s.)
The House of Secrets was another title DC had launched in the early '50s to catch the horror wave, and which had been returned to its roots (with a "host" added) in the late '60s...otherwise very much like
HOM, as well, in its bland competence in the 1970s (the bits presented about and featuring the host, Abel, brother to Cain and rather bullied by him, unsurprisingly, were rather more memorable than most of the stories offered...another host was Eve, who was not their mother, but I'm sure was just as gleefully meant to tweak the reactionaries among the Old Testament religions as the brothers were).
Meanwhile,
Weird Mystery Tales, a relatively shortlived "book," did introduce the one "host" who was less cartoonish than actually in the spirit of horror, "Destiny," who somewhat suggested Death the Reaper, as he wore a monk's habit with hood that always obscured his face, and carried the book of, well, destiny with him at all times...the other, more comic-relief hosts were portrayed as resentful of and a bit intimidated by him. Given that "mystery" in these titles always meant horror, at least in this period, the notion that it was weird horror seemed a bit redundant...particularly when compared with DC's much weirder humor, with a horrorish edge, comic,
Plop! (another title of which I read others' copies, including those at a barbershop I was brought to by my parents).
Now, the Spectre was a badass. A murdered cop who was returned to this plane of existence to right wrongs and the typical superhero kind of tasking, he was, as a ghost, almost a minor god, capable of much more than even Superman, and therefore a bit difficult to write...because what, short of Cthulhu's masters, could stand up to or would interest him for long? Particularly as he was almost certainly the moodiest, for fairly obvious reasons, of DC's 1970s superfolk. As a result, the Spectre tended to go away and come back for stretches in the history of DC's publishing, having first appeared back in the early '40s as a somewhat less near-omnipotent figure.
Adventure tended to be a "book" devoted for various stretches to superheroes who were being "tried out" for books of their own, or who were kept even if they didn't seem to sell well enough in their own title; the original DC Sandman had been one of the early stars, and Aquaman was the usual headliner in the months around the Spectre in this period. Note, as mentioned above, the addition of "weird" to this issue's title, perhaps to sell to the horrorists out at the spinner racks such as myself. I don't think that was the decider for me, but it didn't hurt. (I also preferred the rather obscure DC hero team The Challengers of the Unknown to such better-known groups as Marvel's Fantastic Four, since the Challengers were basically psychic investigators running across supernatural phenoms, vs. the rather colorful aliens the Marvel teams seem to always have to deal with.)
Tomb of Darkness, a successor title to the very similar
Beware!, was easily my favorite Marvel reprint "book" devoted to the Atlas/Timely EC-style horror comics of the early '50s...and as with the reprints featured in
The Witching Hour and other DC books the stories had a punch and a vigor that the new stories, including in Marvel's outre hero books, tended to lack. It is because of
TOD that I was first able to see what ghostly skeletons passionately kissing looked like, and for that I am grateful. (Teeth rubbing together, as you might guess.)
Whitman/Gold Key's
The Twilight Zone was the only horror/outre (with a bit of cod sf) title from them I would see (even the
Boris Karloff title, originally a spinoff from the television series
Thriller, didn't show up on my primary newsstand)..and if Dell had any such titles at the time, I (and my local drugstore, thanks to the lousy distribution comics were getting in the early 1970s) missed them entirely...I was lucky when I'd find two successive issues of Batman or Hulk/Submariner comics at their newsstand (I'll not quite consider Harvey's Caspar the Ghost or Archie's Sabrina the Teenaged Witch comics relevant here...I certainly didn't then). Rather as with the
Weird DC titles, the scripting of
TZ comics was rather less bland (not vastly so, but somewhat) than that of the
Houses' new stuff, even if the art was often rather perfunctory in the Gold Key comic.
Last and least among my childhood reads in this arena,
Ghosts irritated me for being "true" stories about the supernatural, which I most firmly (then as now) did not believe to exist. The magazine tried to get around this, to some extent, by such stratagems as this issue's "The Nightmare That Haunted the World" being about how Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein, but other stories tended to either endorse the reality of the supernatural, or, worse, be incredibly mealy-mouthed about it. Didn't buy too many (possibly not any) more issues of
Ghosts...but, then, I never did buy any issues of
Creepy or
Eerie or the other larger-sized horror magazines, either, finding the borrowed copies dull, dull, dull, even when the art was interesting (and they were, of course, more expensive, as well...my allowance was sporadic and often driven by specific purchases, such as of more text-heavy books).
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