Number 1225: Mom alarmed by Alarming Tales

In 1958, when bringing home a stack of comics from my weekly trip to the drugstore, anything that looked like a horror comic went to the bottom or middle of the stack so Mom couldn't see it. Even though 1958 comics weren't horror comics like the pre-Code horror, if it looked like horror to Mom it was banned. I slipped up, and she saw me reading this when she came into my room. She snatched it out of my hands and I didn't see another copy of Alarming Tales #3 for several decades.

The cover was drawn by Joe Simon in Jack Kirby's style. I read an opinion by a religious person once about this cover, which the writer thought mocked Jesus walking on water. I wonder if Harvey Comics got any nasty letters over this cover. We’ll probably never know.

I'm showing three stories today, the cover story, “They Walked On Water,” “The Strange One,” both drawn by Doug Wildey, and “Get Lost,” drawn by Ernie Schroeder. Schroeder we know from several Airboy stories posted on this blog. These stories are all Code-approved, but even without being horror they are  moody and have a lot of atmosphere. The first two stories are swamp gothic, and “The Strange One” is set mostly in the dark, with deep shadows and dark figures.

This is the fourth Harvey posting this month. It's a coincidence and I didn't notice it until now. You have to admit, despite all being from the same publisher, the entries are very different from each other. I even have more Harvey Comics coming up in the next few weeks.

Number 1224: For the boys in the band, groupies never come first

Gals, here's a cautionary tale from Teen-Age Romances #17 (1951). It's about a girl who falls for a musician. Even in the days before rock 'n' roll there were chicks falling all over guys in a band. Young Martha, who thought she was only one, found out she was one of many. Tsk, tsk.

Dana Dutch is credited with the story. John Benson's excellent book, Romance Without Tears (Fantagraphics, 2003), is a collection of stories for St. John by Dutch, which the cover blurb for Benson's book calls “’50s Love Comics — With a Twist!” And we don't mean the twist as in Chubby Checker.

This book is still available from Amazon.com, and gets my highest recommendation.

The stories I'm posting today are not included in the book.

Matt Baker did the gorgeous artwork on the cover and for “Secret Love Made Me An Exile.”

Dutch and Baker also collaborated on “I Was Hurt By Love” in the same issue. All I can say about that is, who the hell hasn't been hurt by love?

Number 1223: The reincarnated man

The Search For Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein was a popular best seller in the mid-1950s. A woman was put under hypnosis and told a tale of a past life. Her story turned out after investigation to be a fantasy and not reality. But it caught the public's imagination. As my father, Big Pappy, put it, after one lifetime why the hell would you want to do it all over again?

 My copy of the original printing of the book.

This story from Adventures Into the Unknown is a past-life fantasy taken to extremes for the purposes of storytelling. It's wacky in that special ACG way of wackiness, but it's also fun because of Ogden Whitney's artwork. It was written by ACG editor Richard E. Hughes.

Wouldn't it be great to have all of life's mysteries wrapped up in the end with irrefutable proof that they occurred? That's how “The Many Lives of Mark Martin” ends. Even as fiction it stretched its finish to absurd lengths. But it's a comic book, and unlike real life (or even a fantasy life), mysteries of the paranormal in comic books are easily resolved.

From Adventures Into the Unknown #67 (1955):

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I found this editorial page from the same issue interesting. Are the letters real? If they are then I suspect Herman Kornbluth, asking for ghost, vampire and werewolf stories, must've been living in some sort of bubble, having not heard about controversies over horror comics or the Comics Code. To answer my own question, neither of the letters by “Kornbluth” or “Conrad Haas,” sound real. They read more like editor Hughes composed them to make a point about the superiority of the new stories over the old. We found out years ago that Hughes used a variety of pen-names to fool readers into thinking there was more than one writer on staff. It's not impossible to believe he'd do the same thing with letters to the editor.

I don't know about Kornbluth or Haas, but I know I'm real. A few years later some letters I sent to ACG comics were published in various issues. So those letter pages were legitimate, at least.

Footprints on the Ceiling

After the awesomeness of our recent Serpent Queen and Sea of the Dead posts, you would think the June 1952 issue of Unknown Worlds #1 was a complete winner, right? Well, two out of three ain't bad, as THOIA harkens to a past themed event like "Stupidest Killers Weekends" with this, a tale so ludicrously plotted (10 pages for this?!), you might just think it's a winner after all. Yep-- another full issue up in ya!