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Zombie Factory: 27 Tales of Bizarre Comix Madness from Beyond the Tomb
Shambling their way from forgotten moss-covered crypts and freshly dug graves, they haunt the pages of the most notorious monster magazines of the 1970's. These are the forgotten zombies of horror comics and like their cinematic brethren they have a taste for warm, moist flesh - YOURS!
Now, for the first time in over thirty years, IMP proudly unearths these gruesome tales from the pages of TERROR TALES, TALES FROM THE TOMB, TALES OF VOODOO, and THE WITCHES' TALES to release them on monster and comic fans alike.
"Nightmares and art meet in classic form. . . these comics will show you the meaning of fear!" -- Frank Schildener, THE RIGHT HAND OF DOOM: A STUDY OF HELLBOY
196 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2007
13 people want to read
About the author
Patrick O'Donnell
53 books26 followersPatrick O’Donnell is the product of two young Irish immigrants. He was born and spent his early childhood in the great city of Chicago.
He lives with his wife, kids, and 3 dogs. O’Donnell has published self-help books under different pen names and made Amazon’s “Best Sellers List.” Hobbies include physical fitness, travel, riding motorcycles, and shenanigans.
He lives with his wife, kids, and 3 dogs. O’Donnell has published self-help books under different pen names and made Amazon’s “Best Sellers List.” Hobbies include physical fitness, travel, riding motorcycles, and shenanigans.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 11, 2010
I apologize if this is a bit long-winded but I want to set the scene. When I was a kid, reading horror comics was both fun and an exercise in frustration (I'm speaking here specifically about horror anthology comics, although a lot of what I say would also apply to Marvel's horror-hero titles like MAN-THING or GHOST RIDER). I mean, I loved comic books and I loved horror movies and monsters and such. And I loved reading short stories in scholastic scope anthologies from the bookmobile (this was the mid-late 70s). You got comic books from 7-ELEVENs and other convenience stores (do people still call them that?) off of wire racks and no two stores ordered the same things and rarely ever ordered the same things 2 months in a row, so you were lucky if you could follow a series (comic shops DID exist, I'm sure, in college towns and big cities, but not in suburbia - I didn't see my first comic book shop until sometime in the early/mid-80s). Occasionally you could find some at a flea market or packaged into 3-packs in plastic bags (Charlton and Gold Key were good for this) or trade other kids for some (because, y'know, they were growing up and didn't want comic books anymore). Subscribing was financially out of the question. This variability of access was what made anthology horror comic books like HOUSE OF MYSTERY special - it didn't matter if you missed an issue, because they were all just unconnected stories - so you were getting bang for your buck.
Now, at this time, you had some pretty limited choices. EC Comics had crashed and burned decades ago, leaving in its wake the Comics Code Authority which set the terms for very anemic horror comics. DC had HOUSE OF MYSTERY, HOUSE OF SECRETS, and THE WITCHING HOUR and a handful of others, and the contents were usually the same: good art, weak to lousy stories that almost always involved just desserts for villains and rarely a monster to speak of (ghost were plentiful). Charlton and Gold Key, with titles like CREEPY THINGS, GHOST MANOR OF DR. GRAVES, TWILIGHT ZONE or BORIS KARLOFF'S TALES OF MYSTERY were similar, if somewhat weaker. Oh, occasionally any particular title had a cool story or neat monster but it was all mostly weak tea.
See, you had to go to the magazines for real horror comics. And horror comic magazines meant, usually, CREEPY or EERIE magazine by Warren publications. Yes, they were pricier and yes, harder to find (you had to find newsstands that carried them - newsstands back then were abundant but difficult to access. I spent my childhood with a weather eye scanning storefronts as we drove through town, looking for likely suspects) but boy was it worth it. Great art, magazine-sized reproductions, and stories with monsters and killers and curses and demons and all the like - stories that might actually scare you or surprise you or give you nightmares (and maybe titillate you as well). Because, you see, magazines were not comic books and thus did not have to conform to the castrating Comics Code. Stores couldn't care less what you bought, so if you could find a copy of CREEPY or EERIE on the stands...ahhh, heaven and an afternoon well-spent!
Of course, in retrospect, Warren Publishing had competitors (although they probably had the best distribution). I never saw any Skywald horror mags when I was a kid that I can remember (I'll be taking a look at their output when I review Skywald!: The Complete Illustrated History of the Horror-Mood and the Complete Saga of the Victims eventually) but rarely, usually at a supermarket for some reason, I'd come across a title from Eerie publications (not to be confused with Warren's EERIE magazine). I think I owned one or two but they were notorious in my mind - here were horror comics that you really had to hide from your parents because they were all about blood and horrifying images. The stories were crappy, the art usually equally so. I distinctly remember a story set in a futuristic world where the populace won some lottery and were sent to "paradise" which was down a long hallway where...they were fed to giant spiders. And the last few panels showed those giant spiders FEASTING, man! Not just the usual single panel that CREEPY would give you of the "moment of horror" (usually taking place seconds *before* the actual violence - someone caught in the clutch of a creature or ghoul, or maybe vampire teeth *juuuuust* beginning to sink into flesh, or a silhouette of a, *choke*, mangled corpse) but extended glimpses of tearing flesh, flowing blood, severed limbs and screaming faces. Yes, Eerie Publications, with titles like WITCH'S TALES or TALES OF TERROR, were unsavory, unwholesome, nasty stuff and they made you nervous to read because, y'know, what *else* might be on the next page?
So when I saw this book (and the eventually-to-be-reviewed The Weird World of Eerie Publications: Comic Gore That Warped Millions of Young Minds) I just knew I had to have them - seeing the covers touched off old memories of those grungy, illicit comic magazines and I wanted to look at the artifacts again, examine them with an adult's eye.
So here you get a sampling of stories from WITCH'S TALES, TALES OF TERROR, TALES OF VOODOO and TALES FROM THE TOMB published (and re-published, more on that in a moment) between 1970-1978. The book itself is in black and white so, unfortunately, a key element of the Eerie publishing approach is not apparent. The comic magazine stories were in b&w, yes, but the covers, those gloriously ludicrous, dementedly over-stuffed, absurdly lurid COVERS were in bright primary colors (because Eerie knew that the cover is what would get a kid to plunk down his 75 cents)! And you only get the actual front and back cover of this book itself to see some reproductions, and a single b&w illo inside. If you'd like to take a good look at some, you can check them out here (ahhh, the wonders of the internet!), but be prepared to have your mind boggled and your soul seared! Here's a typical cover: in a crypt, a mummy is about to hammer a stake into the heart of a blood-drooling vampire while other vampires hold back a feral vampire woman *or* a werewolf holds aloft a decapitated head (spilling gore, natch!) from its victim while a vampire woman approaches from behind with an axe. The cover of this volume shows a hunchbacked, eye-patched ghoul pumping acid or something like it into the dissected bodies of monsters. Monsters, blood, dissection, gore. That should give you the idea.
Lurid - that's the word for these comics. Lurid, exploitative, sleazy, juvenile, pandering. Charming in their grotty, witless way - who couldn't understand the child's automatic desire to see monsters fight? Charming, oddly, in their leering crudity and desire to "show you the goods" as well. Cut-rate storytelling, cut-rate art. Eerie Pubs definitely set themselves to bring back the EC horror comic approach full-bore, using the magazine's exemption from the CCA as an excuse to pick up where Gaines and company left off - just at a lower quality all around. Or did they?
(if you just want to know if the book is any good, skip to the end - things get a little detailed and spoilery from here on out)
Here's the first interesting thing - artwork. The introduction mentions that Myron Fass, the publisher, used to take old Golden Age and "pre-code" (circa 1950s) comics he owned and have them redrawn to make them bloodier. Very few of the stories have art credits (noted are Clemon, Oscar Fraga, Reynoso - the best stuff here, he has a style similar to Rick Veitch in some panels. The artist of "A Cup Of Death" kind of looks like Jerry Grandenetti) but the overall styles vary between hackwork and a staid-if-workmanlike Golden Age look, with an occasionally more modern approach. The touch-ups to old panels are usually painfully obvious - blood droplets fly like flop-sweat, tongues and eyes protrude during stranglings, knives or swords that previously rested on flesh now sever limbs, previously dry bullet wounds spout blood and brains. In cases of new artwork, lurid excess is the key, especially in splash pages. In "A Corpse For A Coffin", the splash shows one man decapitating another with an axe in a graveyard. The head flies into the air, trailing neck-bones and blood, the eyes flying from their sockets, knocking away glasses, and the tongue shoots from the mouth. This is a teaser - the same event is illustrated again from another angle when it actually occurs at the end of the tale ("Swamp Monsters" presents us with the same tableau but ups the ante by setting it in a human abattoir replete with stacked limbs and cuts of flesh). "The Devil's Zombie" has a reaper-figure standing in a swamp brandishing a sickle; the waters at his feet filled with bobbing heads, one of which is impaled on the end of the sickle like a large piece of fruit, eyes dangling from sockets. "Voodoo Terror", in which a man is tortured by voodoo doll, has a splash page in which the fat victim, wearing underwear, is literally flying to pieces - his elbows and knees are severed by explosions, one eye flies from his head, and fingers and toes break away as well, all in a welter of blood - this then happens again in the panels of the story itself, reducing the man to a pile of human wreckage. You get the idea. Occasionally, some eerie work shines through ("The Walking Dead" has some nice spooky panels)
As Fass used to print and reprint (and reprint!) stories throughout the line of magazines, issue derivation is not given, just a general list of sources. There are no writing credits and occasional spelling errors - "you're chocking me", "what do you want, mone?", "his tremendous fingers" - I assume they meant tremulous or trembling. "Nightmare Mansion" has a character whose name changes from Pat to Timothy and a splash page that shows an explosion for no discernible reason. Some pages of "Eerie Bones" seem to be missing entirely, or is it just bad writing?
...Ah yes, the stories themselves...
A mixed bag. In some sense, it's business as usual - criminals get their just desserts (just much bloodier desserts) for their actions, bodies haunt their murderers, dead people don't realize they are dead, voodoo and witch doctors cast curses, etc.. In another sense, the willingness to push the envelope (either back in the 40s/50s or in the actual 70s) does provide an interesting breath of fresh air to overly familiar tropes - they're not *better* stories because of the liberal hand, just less familiar (for example, "A Jury of Skeletons" isn't very good but it sets its story in the Nazi death camps, not something you saw too often. "The Strange Friend" has a typical EC storyline but ends it in an atypical way).
The initial offering is boring and underwhelming - "Living Corpse" just condenses Universal's THE MUMMY into 6 pages, and only one night watchman dies (off panel, no less!). "Skull In A Box", "The Head Shrinkers", "The Horror Doll" and "Terror Of The Dead" are the usual voodoo/witch doctor/native curse stories ("Skull" has the evil-doer fall into the propeller of a ship - something you'd never see in THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY!). A few of the stories have an almost fable-like quality ("The Old Crones' Voodoo" features a magic flute and witches sealed in a cave for 400 years, "The Walking Dead" has a man return to his old haunts where he lived as a street urchin, only to be murdered by his grown friends).
On the fable tip - check out this intro - "No person dares to think what foul and unnatural horrors lurk beneath the black surface of the earth awaiting to crush human life between their slimy fingers... yet of all of these monsters, none are so appalling, so terrifying as THE SLIMY MUMMY!" The titular mummy is a giant, murderous bandit named Toro, revived after death by disgruntled criminals to run rampant in some ancient village ("Rawr-r-r-r-r-r-r-rowr", goes the slimy mummy, "A-a-ar-r-r-h-h-h!" he goes). Another flying decapitation and impalement in a pit of spikes occur before the day is saved by the sudden appearance, in a flash of lightning, of "The White Giant Of Peace" who, in blatant contradiction to his name, beats the mummy's brains in ("The White Giant" looks like a Jack Kirby drawing of The Golem). Interesting folklore occasionally creeps in - "Nightmare Mansion" uses an old Celtic tradition to have the protagonist literally "sweep" evil away with a broom.
There are occasional "against the grain" moments. "A Corpse For A Coffin" (despite it's tasteless splash page previously described) has an almost Ray Bradburyesque frame as a coffin pines for an occupant, and the typical EC "revenge from beyond the grave" tale set in the Gothic south, "Hands Of Terror", has an oddly poignant and surprisingly poetic last panel ("and so they slept").
An old EC story is rewritten in "Careless Corpse" as a man dies in a car accident but doesn't know it and so wanders home. The EC story retained the mystery by showing us only the dead man's POV, but in this case, as might be expected, mystery is out the window as the dead man's pulped, shredded face is on display always (when everyone flees from the trolley that he boards, he simply drives himself home!). Catching his wife cheating on him, he kills his rival and the wife passes out ("Fainted! Well, I'll take care of her later. No fun in killing an unconscious woman!" - as dubious as the morality of that statement may sound, it's worth noting that women are rarely killed here and there's no sex that I can recall. Sexy women occasionally, but no sex).
Regarding sexy women, let me offer up "The Devil's Zombie", in which a murdering gigolo (brutal dialogue as he strangles his ugly but wealthy fiancee - "Henry you're choking...what are you doing?" "You get the idea" he says dryly) runs afoul of a siren hottie he thought he hit with his car out in the swamp - turns out she's the Devil's daughter (or Death, the story doesn't seem to care to make a distinction) and so the last panel shows him enslaved, heavy-lidded with little horns of his own. This has the feel of some strange, low-budget horror film from the 60s that might show up at a drive in, on late-night TV or released on the Something Weird DVD label. In fact, the overall tone of a lot of these stories are like cheap movies from 40s studios like Monogram or PRC, or the sleazy 60's exploitation product of Herschell Gordon Lewis or Andy Milligan. "Voodoo Terror" features a living dead man (who looks like the classic Crypt Keeper comic design) taking revenge on a business rival, only to find that the synthetic blood that unexpectedly brought him back to life has been used extensively for the last decades, and so the dead rise en masse in the last panel, recalling the feeling of the old film CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS.
In fact, "A Ring Of Corpses" also feels like CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS before veering into a TWILIGHT ZONE-like fable as a crazy man plays a magical trumpet and raises an army of the dead, who swarm over a small city, killing inhabitants ("You have sinned. You die." "All in city must die" "I come for you, your grave awaits") until the angel Gabriel (we assume, looking very much like he did in that Jack Klugman episode of TZ) shows up to end the mess.
Some of the stories are just silly - "Give Me Back My Brain" has a doctor renege on a deathbed promise to return a dying man's brain to an ancient tomb where he stole it from a god (how he got it into his head is never mentioned). Said doctor switches the brain ("Hello Dean Baxter! I wonder if you could do me a favor? I need a brain...just any old brain will do" "I think we can manage that for our most brilliant graduate!") and pays a disgraced surgeon to put it into his own head (so much for the seat of consciousness) but then the Egyptian God shows up to take it back. "The Headless Ones" has such an absurd ending that I can't reveal it, but suffice to say I couldn't stop chuckling. "Naked Horror", which features a bandaged man (with an assumed hideously mutilated face) is the most blatant "give them the goods" tales I've ever encountered - there's no real story, just set-up and pay off. Sometimes the silliness works to an advantage - "Eerie Bones" (who couldn't love a title like that?!) has a giant skeleton dug up near an ancient temple in the jungle. The skeleton comes alive and wrecks havoc until it is crushed to death by a python. Really. The panel of the skeleton wrestling with the python, using its own leg bone as club, is some kind of gonzo wonderful kid's fever dream of cool.
Some final notes: surprisingly for the EC lifting, these stories have no horror hosts except in two cases. "The Zombi's Bride", which looks like a Golden Age tale, is hosted by "The Witch Doctor" and the narration of "Swamp Monsters" claims to be from the unseen host "The Nameless One". The book wraps up with a short, surprisingly even-handed essay (that needed some proofreading) on the founding of the Comics Code Authority.
So, is it any good? Hard to say, really. I was initially a bit put out by the lurid, pandering tone of the stories but eventually was able to see them for what they were, which isn't much, but is kind of interesting. I'd say that if you're a casual horror fan or fan of horror comics you probably don't need to read this - there are no lost gems lurking here. On the other hand, if you're a fanatic about the history of your field of interest or have some nostalgic connection to the originals (like me in both cases), it's probably worth checking out.
Now, at this time, you had some pretty limited choices. EC Comics had crashed and burned decades ago, leaving in its wake the Comics Code Authority which set the terms for very anemic horror comics. DC had HOUSE OF MYSTERY, HOUSE OF SECRETS, and THE WITCHING HOUR and a handful of others, and the contents were usually the same: good art, weak to lousy stories that almost always involved just desserts for villains and rarely a monster to speak of (ghost were plentiful). Charlton and Gold Key, with titles like CREEPY THINGS, GHOST MANOR OF DR. GRAVES, TWILIGHT ZONE or BORIS KARLOFF'S TALES OF MYSTERY were similar, if somewhat weaker. Oh, occasionally any particular title had a cool story or neat monster but it was all mostly weak tea.
See, you had to go to the magazines for real horror comics. And horror comic magazines meant, usually, CREEPY or EERIE magazine by Warren publications. Yes, they were pricier and yes, harder to find (you had to find newsstands that carried them - newsstands back then were abundant but difficult to access. I spent my childhood with a weather eye scanning storefronts as we drove through town, looking for likely suspects) but boy was it worth it. Great art, magazine-sized reproductions, and stories with monsters and killers and curses and demons and all the like - stories that might actually scare you or surprise you or give you nightmares (and maybe titillate you as well). Because, you see, magazines were not comic books and thus did not have to conform to the castrating Comics Code. Stores couldn't care less what you bought, so if you could find a copy of CREEPY or EERIE on the stands...ahhh, heaven and an afternoon well-spent!
Of course, in retrospect, Warren Publishing had competitors (although they probably had the best distribution). I never saw any Skywald horror mags when I was a kid that I can remember (I'll be taking a look at their output when I review Skywald!: The Complete Illustrated History of the Horror-Mood and the Complete Saga of the Victims eventually) but rarely, usually at a supermarket for some reason, I'd come across a title from Eerie publications (not to be confused with Warren's EERIE magazine). I think I owned one or two but they were notorious in my mind - here were horror comics that you really had to hide from your parents because they were all about blood and horrifying images. The stories were crappy, the art usually equally so. I distinctly remember a story set in a futuristic world where the populace won some lottery and were sent to "paradise" which was down a long hallway where...they were fed to giant spiders. And the last few panels showed those giant spiders FEASTING, man! Not just the usual single panel that CREEPY would give you of the "moment of horror" (usually taking place seconds *before* the actual violence - someone caught in the clutch of a creature or ghoul, or maybe vampire teeth *juuuuust* beginning to sink into flesh, or a silhouette of a, *choke*, mangled corpse) but extended glimpses of tearing flesh, flowing blood, severed limbs and screaming faces. Yes, Eerie Publications, with titles like WITCH'S TALES or TALES OF TERROR, were unsavory, unwholesome, nasty stuff and they made you nervous to read because, y'know, what *else* might be on the next page?
So when I saw this book (and the eventually-to-be-reviewed The Weird World of Eerie Publications: Comic Gore That Warped Millions of Young Minds) I just knew I had to have them - seeing the covers touched off old memories of those grungy, illicit comic magazines and I wanted to look at the artifacts again, examine them with an adult's eye.
So here you get a sampling of stories from WITCH'S TALES, TALES OF TERROR, TALES OF VOODOO and TALES FROM THE TOMB published (and re-published, more on that in a moment) between 1970-1978. The book itself is in black and white so, unfortunately, a key element of the Eerie publishing approach is not apparent. The comic magazine stories were in b&w, yes, but the covers, those gloriously ludicrous, dementedly over-stuffed, absurdly lurid COVERS were in bright primary colors (because Eerie knew that the cover is what would get a kid to plunk down his 75 cents)! And you only get the actual front and back cover of this book itself to see some reproductions, and a single b&w illo inside. If you'd like to take a good look at some, you can check them out here (ahhh, the wonders of the internet!), but be prepared to have your mind boggled and your soul seared! Here's a typical cover: in a crypt, a mummy is about to hammer a stake into the heart of a blood-drooling vampire while other vampires hold back a feral vampire woman *or* a werewolf holds aloft a decapitated head (spilling gore, natch!) from its victim while a vampire woman approaches from behind with an axe. The cover of this volume shows a hunchbacked, eye-patched ghoul pumping acid or something like it into the dissected bodies of monsters. Monsters, blood, dissection, gore. That should give you the idea.
Lurid - that's the word for these comics. Lurid, exploitative, sleazy, juvenile, pandering. Charming in their grotty, witless way - who couldn't understand the child's automatic desire to see monsters fight? Charming, oddly, in their leering crudity and desire to "show you the goods" as well. Cut-rate storytelling, cut-rate art. Eerie Pubs definitely set themselves to bring back the EC horror comic approach full-bore, using the magazine's exemption from the CCA as an excuse to pick up where Gaines and company left off - just at a lower quality all around. Or did they?
(if you just want to know if the book is any good, skip to the end - things get a little detailed and spoilery from here on out)
Here's the first interesting thing - artwork. The introduction mentions that Myron Fass, the publisher, used to take old Golden Age and "pre-code" (circa 1950s) comics he owned and have them redrawn to make them bloodier. Very few of the stories have art credits (noted are Clemon, Oscar Fraga, Reynoso - the best stuff here, he has a style similar to Rick Veitch in some panels. The artist of "A Cup Of Death" kind of looks like Jerry Grandenetti) but the overall styles vary between hackwork and a staid-if-workmanlike Golden Age look, with an occasionally more modern approach. The touch-ups to old panels are usually painfully obvious - blood droplets fly like flop-sweat, tongues and eyes protrude during stranglings, knives or swords that previously rested on flesh now sever limbs, previously dry bullet wounds spout blood and brains. In cases of new artwork, lurid excess is the key, especially in splash pages. In "A Corpse For A Coffin", the splash shows one man decapitating another with an axe in a graveyard. The head flies into the air, trailing neck-bones and blood, the eyes flying from their sockets, knocking away glasses, and the tongue shoots from the mouth. This is a teaser - the same event is illustrated again from another angle when it actually occurs at the end of the tale ("Swamp Monsters" presents us with the same tableau but ups the ante by setting it in a human abattoir replete with stacked limbs and cuts of flesh). "The Devil's Zombie" has a reaper-figure standing in a swamp brandishing a sickle; the waters at his feet filled with bobbing heads, one of which is impaled on the end of the sickle like a large piece of fruit, eyes dangling from sockets. "Voodoo Terror", in which a man is tortured by voodoo doll, has a splash page in which the fat victim, wearing underwear, is literally flying to pieces - his elbows and knees are severed by explosions, one eye flies from his head, and fingers and toes break away as well, all in a welter of blood - this then happens again in the panels of the story itself, reducing the man to a pile of human wreckage. You get the idea. Occasionally, some eerie work shines through ("The Walking Dead" has some nice spooky panels)
As Fass used to print and reprint (and reprint!) stories throughout the line of magazines, issue derivation is not given, just a general list of sources. There are no writing credits and occasional spelling errors - "you're chocking me", "what do you want, mone?", "his tremendous fingers" - I assume they meant tremulous or trembling. "Nightmare Mansion" has a character whose name changes from Pat to Timothy and a splash page that shows an explosion for no discernible reason. Some pages of "Eerie Bones" seem to be missing entirely, or is it just bad writing?
...Ah yes, the stories themselves...
A mixed bag. In some sense, it's business as usual - criminals get their just desserts (just much bloodier desserts) for their actions, bodies haunt their murderers, dead people don't realize they are dead, voodoo and witch doctors cast curses, etc.. In another sense, the willingness to push the envelope (either back in the 40s/50s or in the actual 70s) does provide an interesting breath of fresh air to overly familiar tropes - they're not *better* stories because of the liberal hand, just less familiar (for example, "A Jury of Skeletons" isn't very good but it sets its story in the Nazi death camps, not something you saw too often. "The Strange Friend" has a typical EC storyline but ends it in an atypical way).
The initial offering is boring and underwhelming - "Living Corpse" just condenses Universal's THE MUMMY into 6 pages, and only one night watchman dies (off panel, no less!). "Skull In A Box", "The Head Shrinkers", "The Horror Doll" and "Terror Of The Dead" are the usual voodoo/witch doctor/native curse stories ("Skull" has the evil-doer fall into the propeller of a ship - something you'd never see in THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY!). A few of the stories have an almost fable-like quality ("The Old Crones' Voodoo" features a magic flute and witches sealed in a cave for 400 years, "The Walking Dead" has a man return to his old haunts where he lived as a street urchin, only to be murdered by his grown friends).
On the fable tip - check out this intro - "No person dares to think what foul and unnatural horrors lurk beneath the black surface of the earth awaiting to crush human life between their slimy fingers... yet of all of these monsters, none are so appalling, so terrifying as THE SLIMY MUMMY!" The titular mummy is a giant, murderous bandit named Toro, revived after death by disgruntled criminals to run rampant in some ancient village ("Rawr-r-r-r-r-r-r-rowr", goes the slimy mummy, "A-a-ar-r-r-h-h-h!" he goes). Another flying decapitation and impalement in a pit of spikes occur before the day is saved by the sudden appearance, in a flash of lightning, of "The White Giant Of Peace" who, in blatant contradiction to his name, beats the mummy's brains in ("The White Giant" looks like a Jack Kirby drawing of The Golem). Interesting folklore occasionally creeps in - "Nightmare Mansion" uses an old Celtic tradition to have the protagonist literally "sweep" evil away with a broom.
There are occasional "against the grain" moments. "A Corpse For A Coffin" (despite it's tasteless splash page previously described) has an almost Ray Bradburyesque frame as a coffin pines for an occupant, and the typical EC "revenge from beyond the grave" tale set in the Gothic south, "Hands Of Terror", has an oddly poignant and surprisingly poetic last panel ("and so they slept").
An old EC story is rewritten in "Careless Corpse" as a man dies in a car accident but doesn't know it and so wanders home. The EC story retained the mystery by showing us only the dead man's POV, but in this case, as might be expected, mystery is out the window as the dead man's pulped, shredded face is on display always (when everyone flees from the trolley that he boards, he simply drives himself home!). Catching his wife cheating on him, he kills his rival and the wife passes out ("Fainted! Well, I'll take care of her later. No fun in killing an unconscious woman!" - as dubious as the morality of that statement may sound, it's worth noting that women are rarely killed here and there's no sex that I can recall. Sexy women occasionally, but no sex).
Regarding sexy women, let me offer up "The Devil's Zombie", in which a murdering gigolo (brutal dialogue as he strangles his ugly but wealthy fiancee - "Henry you're choking...what are you doing?" "You get the idea" he says dryly) runs afoul of a siren hottie he thought he hit with his car out in the swamp - turns out she's the Devil's daughter (or Death, the story doesn't seem to care to make a distinction) and so the last panel shows him enslaved, heavy-lidded with little horns of his own. This has the feel of some strange, low-budget horror film from the 60s that might show up at a drive in, on late-night TV or released on the Something Weird DVD label. In fact, the overall tone of a lot of these stories are like cheap movies from 40s studios like Monogram or PRC, or the sleazy 60's exploitation product of Herschell Gordon Lewis or Andy Milligan. "Voodoo Terror" features a living dead man (who looks like the classic Crypt Keeper comic design) taking revenge on a business rival, only to find that the synthetic blood that unexpectedly brought him back to life has been used extensively for the last decades, and so the dead rise en masse in the last panel, recalling the feeling of the old film CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS.
In fact, "A Ring Of Corpses" also feels like CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS before veering into a TWILIGHT ZONE-like fable as a crazy man plays a magical trumpet and raises an army of the dead, who swarm over a small city, killing inhabitants ("You have sinned. You die." "All in city must die" "I come for you, your grave awaits") until the angel Gabriel (we assume, looking very much like he did in that Jack Klugman episode of TZ) shows up to end the mess.
Some of the stories are just silly - "Give Me Back My Brain" has a doctor renege on a deathbed promise to return a dying man's brain to an ancient tomb where he stole it from a god (how he got it into his head is never mentioned). Said doctor switches the brain ("Hello Dean Baxter! I wonder if you could do me a favor? I need a brain...just any old brain will do" "I think we can manage that for our most brilliant graduate!") and pays a disgraced surgeon to put it into his own head (so much for the seat of consciousness) but then the Egyptian God shows up to take it back. "The Headless Ones" has such an absurd ending that I can't reveal it, but suffice to say I couldn't stop chuckling. "Naked Horror", which features a bandaged man (with an assumed hideously mutilated face) is the most blatant "give them the goods" tales I've ever encountered - there's no real story, just set-up and pay off. Sometimes the silliness works to an advantage - "Eerie Bones" (who couldn't love a title like that?!) has a giant skeleton dug up near an ancient temple in the jungle. The skeleton comes alive and wrecks havoc until it is crushed to death by a python. Really. The panel of the skeleton wrestling with the python, using its own leg bone as club, is some kind of gonzo wonderful kid's fever dream of cool.
Some final notes: surprisingly for the EC lifting, these stories have no horror hosts except in two cases. "The Zombi's Bride", which looks like a Golden Age tale, is hosted by "The Witch Doctor" and the narration of "Swamp Monsters" claims to be from the unseen host "The Nameless One". The book wraps up with a short, surprisingly even-handed essay (that needed some proofreading) on the founding of the Comics Code Authority.
So, is it any good? Hard to say, really. I was initially a bit put out by the lurid, pandering tone of the stories but eventually was able to see them for what they were, which isn't much, but is kind of interesting. I'd say that if you're a casual horror fan or fan of horror comics you probably don't need to read this - there are no lost gems lurking here. On the other hand, if you're a fanatic about the history of your field of interest or have some nostalgic connection to the originals (like me in both cases), it's probably worth checking out.
July 11, 2024
This is an interesting collection of mostly B and C level black and white Horror from the '70s. Credits are nearly non-existent, which is a pet peeve of mine. It would be nice to know what issue which story came from, as well as who wrote and/or penciled it. The scans are way too dark, likely done to compensate for the deterioration of the pulp paper used back then. I'm sure that a C-level publisher like Eerie (no relation to Warren Publishing's superb Creepy and Eerie) didn't bother archiving their stats for later use. This is an okay read if you can find it, although I would have preferred a more comprehensive hardcover collection.
November 5, 2010
I can't honestly say that I was a rabid horror fan as a child, but old comic books that I looked at in my preteens that were lurid, bizarre, twisted, and freaky were of some interest to me back then but now, with the opportunity to revisit some of the devious tales in this compilation, I regret that I was not more into them back in my youth. Never the less, I am pleased to have the chance to take a look at all these different short works of twisted genious. Sure, most of them don't have a very complicated story line but they are vivid, gruesome, and conveniently "bite" sized, if you will pardon the pun.
If you have an appreciation for horror comics at all or horror in general, this is a great little volume that despite being fairly graphic still brings back memories of a less jaded time and place, at least for me. This goes hand and hand with the some of the darkly malevolent monster movies of the fifties and sixties that I still love watching every now and then.
If you have an appreciation for horror comics at all or horror in general, this is a great little volume that despite being fairly graphic still brings back memories of a less jaded time and place, at least for me. This goes hand and hand with the some of the darkly malevolent monster movies of the fifties and sixties that I still love watching every now and then.
December 1, 2010
Isn't the cover beautiful? And just wait 'til you get a gander of its insides too. Ridiculously awesome stories and art.
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