BOY, TAKE A LOOK AT THESE COVERS!

I've mentioned that many crime comics by virtue of the subject are often horror adjacent. This gallery of covers from Lev Gleason's BOY COMICS emphasizes the point. Some pretty ghastly stuff here.

MAD KILLERS MENACE OUR SAFETY!

This comic's title, WHO IS NEXT? (#5, Pines/Standard Comics, January 1953) says it all as the stories are some of the most nasty and brutal you're bound to come across. One in particular is especially violent, as a teenager works his way through murdering two women in "Don't Let Me Kill", illustrated by Mike Sekowsky.

Alex Vorple is not only a troubled kid, he's also ugly. Turning his anger toward women, he follows a girl home from a dance, sneaks through her bedroom window and bashes her head in with a table lamp. He meets a girl at another dance that actually pays attention to him, but he goes a little too far with his amorous intentions. Feeling rejected again, he strangles her to death.

This story doesn't end well for Vorple, but in the meantime, it aims right at the heart of teenage angst, uncertainty and peer pressure. Isn't that horror enough?

GROUNDS FOR MURDER!

This is a story of a couple's insurance scam that went horribly wrong, from Charlton's LAWBREAKERS SUSPENSE STORIES #15 (November 1953) with a script by possibly Joe Gill and art by Stan Asch. Obviously influenced by EC's CRIME SUSPENSTORIES, in my opinion, while not as text-heavy it still packs a similar punch.

Besides teaching at the University of Montana and being a fine arts lithographer, Stan Asch ghosted for Milton Caniff and Al Capp on TERRY AND THE PIRATES and LI'L ABNER respectively. He also ghosted on the KATZENJAMMER KIDS Sunday strip during the 1940s. His primary comic book output was with DC.

GETTING A-HEAD

Call me morbid, but I just love a good "headless" story. There were a number of them during the pre-Code horror comics era, and this one comes from one of those odd crossover crime/horror titles that seemed to indicate that the comic publisher was testing the waters to see if more extreme horror stories would attract readers but weren't quite ready to pull the trigger. Well, we all know the answer to that, don't we?

"Getting A-Head" is from LAWBREAKERS SUSPENSE STORIES #10 (Charlton, January 1953) and was the first issue of the re-named title after LAWBREAKERS had a nine-issue run containing straight crime stories. The book was edited by Al Fago and the story drawn by Dennis Laugen, who also worked on western and hot rod comics for Charlton.

If the title of this comic sounds a little familiar, you'll know where its inspiration came from after reading the story. Then remember the old saying from Oscar Wilde: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness."

SHOCKING MYSTERY CASES

One of the covers used in THE TRUTH ABOUT COMICS shown in the last post is SHOCKING MYSTERY CASES #58 (Star, April 1954). Overall, it's a typical crime comic of the day, promising "True Cases From Crime Files". However, the lead story diverges from the usual crime elements into the "horror-suspense" realm.

"No Harm Done . . . !" is a bizarre story by an unknown scriptwriter and artist that takes a cue from the crime/horror that EC was producing at the time and provides a twist ending -- but the explanation of what happens comes from way out in left field.

Cover art by L.B. Cole.

YOU CAN'T JUDGE A HORROR COMIC BY ITS COVER!

After reports that EC Comic's horror titles were becoming profitable, numerous publishers were tip-toeing their way into the field, reluctant to go all in for an as-yet, largely untested new subject. As a result they used an interesting, but misleading "bait-and-switch" tactic.

A number of publishers mimicked EC's strategy of introducing horror stories into their crime titles (CRIME PATROL and WAR AGAINST CRIME), as well as swiping cover design ideas.. Thematically, it seemed like a fairly good fit and it was a cautious way of finding out how readers would react.

There was one problem with that: the cover images were as far as they went -- the interiors were still comprised of the usual crime stories that they had been using all along.

Shown here are a few examples some of the other publishers who experimented (such as it was) to test the blood-filled waters.

This is not an exactly a horror story, but it is definitely a weird tale (STARTLING TERROR TALES #13, art by Jay Disbrow).

Perhaps the most blatant come-on of all was Hillman's MONSTER CRIME, cover-dated October 1952. Behind the cover of the 52-page, 15-cent book were nothing more than crime stories from their overstocked inventory. The closet thing to horror was one story's title, "Another Hallowe'en".