Without really thinking about it in those terms at the time, I suppose I was already a horror fan by the time the horror wave hit American comics in the early 70s. Like most young kids I was drawn to old spooky movies on tv; I also loved (and was often terrified by) Rod Serling's Night Gallery, and had already read a fair bit of Edgar Allan Poe (i.e. more than one short story collection), an abridged edition of Stoker's Dracula, an HP Lovecraft book (The Shadow Over Innsmouth was in it, I recall), and an Edward Gorey illustrated anthology called Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural that I still think might be the best I ever read.

So I was totally primed for this kind of thing when Marvel's Tomb of Dracula came on the stands, though I didn't see it until the 2nd issue. Werewolf by Night also fascinated me: I even remember day-dreaming about having a statue of the werewolf in my library when I grew up and had my own house (he was turned into a statue in one of the early Ploog issues). I devoured the Dracula Lives magazine when I could find it (Dracula was an early obsession for a few years after reading the Stoker novel). The Wein/Wrightson Swamp Thing, and an early issue or two of the Steve Gerber Man-Thing.

But for one reason or another I stopped buying and reading comics for 2 or 3 years shortly after this. Luckily, when I came back a few of these series were still going - ToD was only up to around issue 36 when I came back to it, for example, with the best yet to come. But I had missed the peak years and a lot of the best series were very short-lived.

I have to agree with Confessor, though: the comics, much as I loved them, never terrified me in the way Night Gallery and some of the movies did; ToD never scared me the way Stoker's book had done. But I think this might be something intrinsic to comics as a medium: the reader of a comic is much more in control than the passive viewer of a movie or tv show - and even, in a way, more than the reader of a novel.

The first point is obvious: watching the screen, we pretty much just have to sit there and experience what unfolds before us, admitting the obvious options of getting up and walking out or, if watching a recording at home, fast-forwarding, or just turning it off.

But even while reading a novel we tend to be more caught up in the flow of the reading experience than we are with a comic, for the simple reason that though we can flip ahead in a book as easily as we can in a comic, the incentive isn't there because it isn't the visual medium comics is: flipping ahead while reading a book, we don't get the immediate visual reward of seeing images of what's happening before our eyes. Yes, we can read a few lines, but quite possibly they aren't indicative to what's happening in the story.

So I think there's more of an unconscious sense or feeling that we're in control when we're reading comics than when reading a book or watching the screen and horror comics are hence less likely to actually scare the reader. But is the only purpose of horror stories to scare people?

Ditto.

Scariest line ever might be "Since yesterday."

Enjoyed many of the comics published during that wave, not the anthologies, but the character-driven titles: It, Tomb of Dracula, Swamp Thing (both the Wein-Wrightson and Moore incarnations), Supernatural Thrillers, and the SF ones like Worlds Unknown.

Warren got the jump on the 4-color publishers since they never had to deal with the code. The 70s resurgence was spurred by the relaxation of the code plus, I'd imagine, by the influx of artists who were influenced by the EC artists like Wrightson, Kaluta, Jones, Brunner, Ploog, etc. Also, Orlando coming on as an editor at DC (he was the original editor of Creepy as well as being at EC).

Of course, Dell and Gold Key never dealt with the code, and some of their stories could be pretty scary to younger readers, (or at least to me) almost because they were drawn so "straight," Ripley's Believe It or Not, especially, since the stories were "true."