Number 1043
The monsters that weren't
Halloween is tomorrow, so I have a couple of Halloween-style stories today from DC; kind of a trick, or a treat, depending on your point of view. In House Of Mystery the stories, which start out looking supernatural, usually turn out to have a "logical" explanation. The monsters usually turned out to be not what they looked like.
A couple of examples are "The Mark of X," from HOM #2, 1952. "X" is the creation of a writer that appears to have come to life. "X" reminds me of the monster from a Bugs Bunny cartoon:
The story is drawn by Curt Swan* and George Klein. "The Weirdest Museum in the World," drawn by Bob Brown, is from HOM #10, 1953. It starts out looking like a werewolf story.
There's nothing wrong with these stories, but I wonder if readers of the time felt cheated by them being "fake" supernatural. House Of Mystery apparently sold well, so perhaps not.
*I showed four more of these tales by Swan in Pappy's #757.
Happy Halloween, Pappy! It's been a crazy-busy week and I've been meaning to make the blog rounds before the big day tomorrow. THanks for posting these stories!
ReplyDeleteI do remember getting House of Mystery, House of Secrets, & others of that genre during the late '60s/early to mid-70s as a young teen & I always felt slighted, like the cover art suggested so much more, leaving me disappointed most times afterwards. I did better when Marvel went monster with The Monster of Frankenstein, The Thing, Dracula, & Werewolf By Night. Those often were more frightening at first, then eroded into stereotypical scenarios. Later, when older, & I started getting Creepy, Eerie & Vampirella, I felt the most satisfied of the genre.
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