shaxper's #3: “Inherit the Howling Night!”



writer: Bob Haney
pencils: Art Saaf
inks: Nick Cardy

From: Teen Titans (1966) #43
Publication Year: 1973

Explanation:

It starts like any good nightmare. No explanations, no setup, no hows and whys; you're just there, on a desolate hill, an old man pleading with all his heart for you to save his young grandson, currently being tossed around like a rag doll by a wild assortment of demons atop the adjacent farmhouse.

Art Saaf keeps the momentum climbing from moment number one; the panels, dynamic perspectives, and exaggerated moments keeping you on the edge of your adrenaline-hammered seat while those trusty heroes, the Teen Titans, scramble desperately to make their way through that farmhouse and bring that boy to safety. There are no jokes, no youthful banter, nor any other such conventional trappings to be had here; no sense of the familiar. Your favorite heroes are running through a nightmare, and even though the past few issues have all placed these characters in the now popular horror genre in an effort to boost sales, something about the pairing is still incredibly jarring here, and that sense of discomfort works to the story's advantage.

The boy is rescued after an intense five page ordeal, but the breather is used to provide some much needed exposition, and both its tone and all it foreshadows hardly allow this pause to feel like a break. It's not hard to guess where this story is leading – how the young boy, years earlier, came down with an unexpected fever, appeared to die, and was then well and happy in his crib again, this time accompanied by the presence of demons. We suspect, but no...it can't be THAT. There's no way a comics code approved superhero comic—and especially not the Teen Titans-- are going in that direction.

But they are.

And they do.

And it's damn powerful.

The Teen Titans had failed once before, but harder and more unexpected still is a situation in which they did everything right, made no blunders, and still failed to save the life of a young boy who had actually died years earlier. The thing they had been desperately scurrying to save for fifteen pages is no more than a changeling – a being that the forlorn grandfather, the very impetus behind this surreal rescue operation, must finally kill with his own shotgun. A sense of pure hopelessness pervades in that final panel. The Titans have met the horror genre, and the horror genre has proven more powerful than their sunny dispositions and youthful idealism could handle.

That this ended up being the final issue of the run was, of course, inadvertent, but years later, Marv Wolfman would attempt to show that the final moments of this story, the terrible humility in the face of failure, caused the team to disband until their 1976 revival (see Secret Origins Annual #3).

In the end, while the story is exceptionally well plotted, and the art is enthralling, the true power comes from Haney's brazenness, taking one of the safest, most conventional superhero franchises of the time and shocking us with a brutally cruel ending that shouldn't have been possible in their pages.

I haven't read Triumph and Torment since it first came out (I have no idea why it's no longer in my collection), but I remember it having quite an impact upon me. Excellent choice.

No. 3. "Fiends from the Crypt"

Cheating here a bit, because most of this is taken from a post of mine from the old CBR forum, though I can't really remember the context (I think I'd finally just obtained, after years of searching, an agreeably cheap copy of the mag). I happened to cut & paste it into a reference file of mine because I used it maybe 3 years ago as the core of a post on Mike Howlett's FB page for his The Weird World of Eerie Publications: Comic Gore That Warped Millions of Young Minds. Vague memory tells me I also resurrected it at least once for either a Classic Comics Christmas list or the mid-summer one-shot Kurt hosted a few years back.


Anyway --

credits: GCD has no idea of writer or artist

From: Fantastic Fears #8

Publication Year: 1953

Explanation: Evidently, my fateful first encounter with this diseased little item came via its first ever reprint appearance, in Eerie Publications' typically sleazy Weird vol. 2, no. 2, circa the spring of 1967.  I was 7 years old & in 2nd grade, & I was accompany my mother during a trip to the grocery store – Kroger, I want to say (which as a kid I pronounced “Krodger” because I didn’t know any better; there were no chain groceries or chain anything else in my hometown)
. We lived in Pine Bluff, about 100 miles northwest of Stamps, where I'm from, for most of that school year because of a teaching job my mother wound up losing right before the end of the academic year. Had we still been in Stamps, it's highly unlikely I'd have laid eyes on the magazine or of course on its contents, though I did come across a subsequent reprint about 3 years later in another Myron Fass paean to subtlety & good taste.

In any event, at the time I'd owned &/or read probably a couple of dozen color comics, but this was almost certainly the first b&w horror publication I'd ever encountered. I couldn't have spent more than 5 minutes or so glancing through its pages, but a couple of final panels therein have stayed with me forever -- most prominently, one of one or more ghouls holding, by the hair, the mostly devoured bodies of their human collaborator's wife & daughter after emerging from the sewers during a dinner party;' to wit:



(The other concerned a flower that somehow incorporated the visage of a man's dead, buried brother. There was a werewolf in there somewhere as well. Even for pre-Code horror, this one was pretty deliriously nonsensical.)
Nothing from any of the other 6 stories rings any sort of bell at all, but those 2 stuck with me so vividly that I remember trying to describe them to a friend in our front yard, back home in Stamps, a year or 2 later.

This story, like the rest the mag ... hell, like everything else Fass ever put out, pretty much ... was a piece of trash, pure & simple. Compared to even a middling EC, or for that matter Avon or Harvey or whomever, story from the pre-Code era, much less a Warren offering from the following decade, it was, in cinematic terms, Bloodsucking Freaks as compared to Citizen Kane.

Hell, if I had a kid, I sure as heck wouldn’t want him or her reading it at age 7 (or for quite a few years thereafter, really).

Something about “Fiends from the Crypt,” though, just hit me so viscerally as a child as to resonate for all the decades I’ve existed since, a sensation only reinforced when, as mentioned above, I encountered the story yet again in another typically sleazy Fass title in the early '70s. Just as scenes from a couple of nightmares from when I was a preschooler appear to be etched into my brain until death or senescence take me, at this late date I can say the same of this little …

... well, "gem" isn’t really the right word, is it?

“This little thing” will suffice, I suppose.

I’m one of those unfortunate individuals who ofttimes treasures the tawdry & traumatic as much as, & occasionally even more than, the sublime. This one is obviously a case in point.

Is there higher praise for a specimen of horror, or at least a certain type of (sub-)gutter-level horror? Is there?

I’m not sure. I don’t think there is.

And, y'know, in hindsight, just as broken (non-digital, anyway) clocks are right twice a day, every now & then Dr. Wertham might've been on to something ...

30 Days Of Night
Steve Niles - Ben Templesmith
IDW (back when they actually published something good once in a while)
2002


Very high on my list of favorite horror comics ever. To me it's the definitive vampire story. Also it's the series that made me fall in love with Templesmith's art, which I think is perfect for horror.


I think this comic may have a cross-medium effect on vampires much like the effect the Dawn Of The Dead remake had on zombies.

I posted this request a few weeks ago and nobody responded.

It's my Number Three but I still don't know what it was titled or what comic it was in, despite a frustrating Internet Search where I couldn't find an online EC Index that had enough details that I could figure out which story this is.

One of you EC fans must know!

HELP!

Really wish I could. As I told you then, it's inexcusable how little Pre-Code horror I have read