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.
2 comments:
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!
I 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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