The Horror Comics by William Schoell

The Horror Comics by William Schoell

Author:William Schoell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-26T04:00:00+00:00


Part II

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The Silver Age, 1956–1969

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Nine

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Marvel, DC and Charlton

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MARVEL

Journey Into Mystery

Stripped of extreme horror and graphic bloodletting, horror comics in the silver age had to go underground—at first. Horror was to be found primarily in monster stories in a variety of sci-fi fantasy mags, although eventually some legitimate horror titles began to appear on the newsstands. Tales of marauding, giant or grotesque animals could be classified as science fiction, but as most concentrated on the creature’s horrific size or terrifying appearance, they were decidedly of the horror genre as well if not primarily.

Journey Into Mystery, which had begun in the golden age, continued as a sci-fi/fantasy/monster comic for several years before turning into a super-hero title headlining The Mighty Thor. Before that there came “The Beasts” in which a man teaches animals to speak but his talking spider is swatted before he can prove it (JIM 46); “The Strange Secret of Henry Hill” (40) in which a jealous man discovers a town favorite may come from another dimension and plots his ruin to his own regret; and “I Spent the Night in the Haunted Lighthouse” (56), an atmospheric tale of a man temporarily shipwrecked on an island when the lighthouse in which he’s taken shelter gets a visit from specters off of the infamous “Flying Dutchman.” “I Don’t Believe in … Ghosts” (77) is a clever, if confused, variation on the ghost story in that the protagonist, a ghost breaker who debunks haunted houses, turns out to be a ghost himself, whose mission is to convince people that houses aren’t haunted so that the domiciles won’t be torn down and the spirits will still have a place to reside.

Some stories feature a narrow-minded bigot or condescending twit who winds up the prisoner of a “superior” race, sees the error of his ways, and develops a new love for his fellow human creatures. An amusing story in JIM 75, “The Magic of Mordoo,” has a different moral. The protagonist, Franz, a middle-aged man, falls for a widow, Katrina, who is “intelligent and charming” but as old as he is, and he wants a younger, more glamorous wife. He takes the woman to the magician, Mordoo, who casts a spell that turns her into a teenager. Unfortunately for Franz, Katrina is appalled at the thought of being with a man old enough to be her father and goes off with a younger man—Mordoo!

Journey Into Mystery features a great many stories about monsters. Often the monsters would turn out to be a little more complicated than the typical sea monster on the rampage found in 1950s creature features. In the interesting “I Brought Zog Back to Life” (56) a hairy, thousand-foot-high creature is found in a block of ice with the word ZOG on it. Mankind is so frightened at the thought of the gargantuan creature getting loose, and of what it could do when it does, that people just give up and begin to act as if the end of the world were near.



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