Number 1044


The Green Hands of Horrorween


It's Halloween today. If the past is any indication, the kids who show up at my door this evening will probably be dressed like princesses or ballerinas and the boys in whatever is popular today. (What is popular today? Transformers?) What fun is that? Where are the witches, the skeletons, the ghouls, besides the U.S. House of Representatives?

Ah well. At least I carry on the tradition of presenting horror stories on Halloween I'm showing a couple of cool tales from the Fawcett vaults of the early 1950s. First up is "The Green Hands of Terror" from This Magazine Is Haunted #2, which readers saw when they got past the cover by Sheldon Moldoff:

"Green Hands" was drawn by George Evans, who as usual did a beautiful job making material that could have looked just silly into creepy. He went on to EC Comics and proved he could draw anything they asked him to.

(Note: you aren't imagining things: the colorist screwed up and colored an extra arm green in the splash panel.)













The second story, "The Resurrected Head," is from World Of Fear #4. The Grand Comics Database doesn't list an artist. The story gives me something of the vibe of Re-Animator, the classic '80s film where a headless scientist gives head!

Number 953


The Thing that Haunted Dick Ayers


I don't have to explain Dick Ayers to anyone, do I? Dick Ayers, who made his debut in comic books in 1948, who has worked for just about every comic book publisher in the business, and who has drawn almost every genre?

These three strips, all published by Charlton, are from, respectively, The Thing numbers 16 and 17, and This Magazine Is Haunted #20 (a title Charlton took over from Fawcett when Fawcett stopped publishing comics in 1953), all from 1954. The Thing #16 has been erroneously called a Seduction Of the Innocent title, when in fact it didn't show up in Fredric Wertham's famous anti-comics screed. The Thing #16 was published after SOTI was released. The gory panel at the top of this post was used to illustrate an article about the formation of the Comics Code in the November 8, 1954, issue of Time, and that may have led to some confusion with SOTI.

Ayers' horror comics work was excellent. In this pre-Code era Ayers usually worked with Ernie Bache as his assistant, and all three of these stories feature Ayers' own distinctive lettering. I have shown "Nothing He Couldn't Do" before, but as with other strips I've re-presented recently, these are new scans.

Number 804

What happens when you die?

Not being a religious person, I don't have any philosophy of what happens after I've quit the planet. No one who has been deceased for any length of time (say, six months or a year) has come back to tell us exactly what's going to happen. So if you're inclined to believe in an afterlife you may slant it to your own needs, your prejudices, your own religious beliefs or your desperate need to believe your life isn't a light bulb that burns out and is discarded, mourned only by the moths that fluttered around it.

That gets us to this afterlife story, drawn by Bernard Baily for Fawcett Comics' This Magazine Is Haunted #1, in 1951. Three things horror comics did well: present stories of people who deserve being killed, the dead coming back as walking corpses seeking revenge, or people dying and going to hell or some variation thereof. In "Stand-in For Death" a man is dead and in hell but doesn't yet know it. That's another tried-and-true formula, but done by Baily it takes on a nice aura of creepiness, and makes me think, after I die what if all those people who for years have told me 'go to hell' get their wish...?