Number 1807: Hooray for Halloween Horror: While the Cat’s Away

Here is the third posting in our Halloween week offerings. Today, a tale from Jack Davis and Al Feldstein, published originally in The Vault of Horror #34 (1953).

Let us get one thing straight: this story is a joke; it is what I consider a shaggy dog story. It builds and builds and then...the end. I don’t want anyone writing and asking me how these two dolts could hide out in the tunnels under an old house, all the while being chased by vampires, werewolves and zombies, and eventually escape. It’s a joke!

Jack Davis had the ability to draw horror comics, and also draw some of the funniest stuff ever published in comic books. It is a gift.

More Davis horror, featuring the infamous “Foul Play,” which was represented by an illustration in Seduction of the Innocent. Just click on the thumbnail.

 **********

IT WILL BE HALLOWEEN IN JANUARY with the release of Craig Yoe’s latest Chilling Archives of Horror Comics: Devil Tales, edited by Mr. Karswell himself, Steve Banes!

Stories of Satan from obscure issues of horror comics of the early 1950s. Wild and weird tales served up at His Satanic Majesty’s Request, featuring art by Gene Colan, the team of Brown and Gantz, Dick Ayers, Ken Rice, among other lost souls, including the infamous Iger Shop, the original “little shop of horrors”!  These artists and creators worked in the hellish pages of America’s shame, the cheap and often sleazy (it’s why we love ’em!) 10¢ comic books of an otherwise more innocent and conservative age. And while they brought joy to hundreds of thousands of readers in their time, oh, the terrors these horror comics wrought with parents and teachers... also a certain psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham, M.D., who led the crusade to strike the comic book scourge from the land. They were even investigated by the United States Senate!

But now these stories have been conjured from the fiery pit where they had been consigned over 60 years ago. We have Steve “Karswell” Banes (of The Horrors of it All blog to thank (or curse) for bringing back these forgotten stories from the mouldering mounds of horror comics, published in that time before they were exorcised from the American newsstands by the Comics Code.

I have seen an advance of this book, and it gets my highest recommendation. Release date is January 14, 2016, and the retail price is $24.99.

Number 1219: Baseball by moonlight

Ty Cobb (1886-1961) was an awfully great baseball player and a greatly awful person. There are many stories of his nastiness. Despite the records he set and his accomplishments on the field he's just as well known for his bad temperment, his aggression and intimidation of opposing players. The story is that Cobb filed his steel cleats to be razor sharp, and when he stole bases he slid into base “with his feet up and steel showing.”

I'm sure that Ty Cobb was the inspiration for “Foul Play” in Haunt of Fear #19 (1953). The story, with its gory ending, was fairly typical EC-revenge. But it was brought before a stunned public of non-comics readers with a page in Seduction of the Innocent (1954) by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

The caption reads, “A comic-book baseball game. Notice the chest protector and other details in the text and pictures.”

In 1986 I attended a panel with Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis at the San Diego Con. Davis made mention of the horror comics and the trouble they caused. Speaking of the Senate hearings and uproar over them Davis said, “I'd lie awake at night and think, did I cause this?”

This is the infamous baseball story, drawn by Jack Davis, and written by editor Al Feldstein.