Retro Comic Rewind: Weird Horrors

Eileen’s main literary love is comedian books, however she’s all the time looking out for her subsequent literary journey it doesn’t matter what type it takes. She has a Bachelor’s in media research, a Master’s in digital communication, a smattering of printed brief tales, and a severely cute canine. Follow her on Bluesky and Twitter.

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Some comics go down in historical past as masterful examples of the craft and are beloved by a number of generations. Others find yourself on the landfill. In this sequence, I’ll be wanting again on some forgotten sequence to raised perceive what sort of comics our ancestral nerds have been studying within the days of rotary telephones and file gamers.

Today’s topic: Weird Horrors!

Weird Horrors #1 cover — “No, not my best knife!”

The Context

In the early Nineteen Fifties, the comedian e-book trade threw itself wholeheartedly into the horror craze began by EC Comics with their titles The Vault of Horror and The Crypt of Terror. Every writer on the block scrambled to observe swimsuit — a transfer they might quickly remorse when Congress began asking thorny questions on why they have been promoting such gory comics to children.

Most of those horror comics had pretty generic names that made liberal use of phrases like “terror,” “horror,” “weird,” “strange,” “crypt,” and so forth. Weird Horrors, printed from 1952-53, was only one extra to throw on the pile (or the bonfire, as a number of locations organized comedian e-book burnings).

The Creators

Like with a variety of these anthology comics, every story was finished by a unique creator or pair of creators. In retrospect, the most important names to work on the title have been George Tuska, who contributed “Dungeon of the Doomed” (Issue 1), and Joe Kubert, who contributed tales to Issues 7, 8, and 9.

The writer is St. John, which has fairly the historical past. Their comics division lasted nearly a decade, throughout which period they printed the primary 3-D comedian, a well-regarded crime comedian referred to as Manhunt, and the primary official graphic novel: It Rhymes with Lust by Arnold Drake (future Doom Patrol creator), Leslie Waller, and Matt Baker, probably the most well-known Black artist working on the time. Though not a industrial success, It Rhymes with Lust has since earned a revered place in comics historical past.

Aside from that, St. John principally did a variety of licensed comics and romance comics. In different phrases, horror comics weren’t their inventory in commerce. And it exhibits.

The Comic

Despite the title, this isn’t a lot of a horror comedian. I think St. John picked the identify “Weird Horrors” to money in on the horror craze, regardless that they didn’t have the capability or the need to create an precise horror comedian within the fashion of the extra well-known titles, like Shock SuspenStories or Tales from the Crypt, which contained distinguished supernatural components and/or a really actual and current sense of foreboding (to not point out some putting social commentary).

Plenty of the tales in Weird Horrors, by comparability, are extra alongside the strains of fantasy mysteries that really feel about as scary as your common Scooby-Doo episode.

Even the few precise horror tales we have now aren’t excellent. In a narrative from Issue Two, “The Violin of Death,” a struggling musician sells his soul to seek out the situation of a priceless, misplaced Stradivarius. He goes to an deserted citadel, the place he does certainly discover the violin, in addition to the corpse of the person who constructed it. He performs the violin, which…brings the builder again to life? And then he instructions the zombie to construct him a violin? Why? You have already got what you got here for, dude! And it’s received zombie-making powers!

The artwork isn’t a lot better than the writing. Check out these panels, which seem throughout the similar story a number of pages aside in Issue Three. Aside from the truth that everybody on this “Middle Eastern” nation is white, the artist clearly copy-pasted the working man to save lots of time. In their protection, they in all probability received paid pennies.

Two panels: In the first, a half-naked man in a turban runs down the street, hand outstretched. The second panel shows a barely altered version of the first image. — Not pictured: Any effort in any respect

Issue Three begins a development of breaking the temper fully by together with a web page or two of textual content jokes. They’re not all dangerous — one options an American businessman attempting to pay the pope to shill for Coca-Cola — nevertheless it’s in no way what you’d count on from an alleged horror comedian, particularly in later points once they put the gag pages in the course of a narrative moderately than ready until the top.

I’ll say that beginning with Issue 6, issues decide up a bit. We get two ingenious covers by William Elgren, and Kubert lastly exhibits up. Especially art-wise, Kubert’s work blows all earlier tales out of the water.

A half-conscious man just manages to witness a bald man stabbing an old woman to death.

Issue 9 is one of the best of the bunch — and likewise the final. Pity that St. John canceled the title simply as they’d lastly began to seek out their approach.

The Legacy

I don’t vet the titles I evaluation earlier than leaping in. I simply decide a title that appears attention-grabbing after which begin studying. Sometimes that works, and typically we get Weird Horrors. I’m a complete coward, and but only a few of those tales raised a lot because the meekest shiver down my backbone. It’s all very milquetoast so far as horror comics go.

St. John shut down its comics division in 1958, however the firm’s founder, Archer St. John, sadly didn’t final that lengthy. After main an especially colourful life — through which he received crushed up on Al Capone’s orders, allegedly had an affair with one among his comics editors, and struggled with substance abuse — he died of a drug overdose in 1955. Was it suicide, an accident, and even homicide? We nonetheless don’t know.

In any occasion, St. John’s best contribution to comics shouldn’t be their halfhearted try at horror, however their ahead-of-its-time try and stretch the bounds of what a comic book may very well be and the alternatives they gave to skills like Matt Baker and Joe Kubert.

Want extra classic goodness? Check out earlier editions of RCR: Race for the Moon, Stamps Comics, Tippy Teen, Winnie Winkle, Hangman Comics, G.I. in Battle, Adventures in Wonderland, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1993), and The Arrow!

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