The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics

           Horror comics came into being in earnest near the start of WWII and quickly became hugely popular – and controversial.  Before they were effectively banned by the creation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954, horror comics were being release monthly under dozens of different titles.¹  By far the most famous are the four main offerings from EC: Shock Suspenstories, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, and of course Tales From the Crypt, but there we scads of other horror titles of wildly varying levels of quality available.  Today I want to talk about a series of collections that highlight the artists and stories from those other horror comics, IDW’s Chilling Archives of Horror Comics.

"Attractive" isn't quite the right word for the covers.

            At the time of this writing there are five volumes of this series available, so we’ll be going over each entry briefly.  First, however, I want to talk about the collection as whole.  This is a hardcover series in a large coffee-table style format - They’re meaty-feeling and nicely put together overall.  The covers and spines are really eye-catching, with brightly colored illustrations that pop off the black background.  Three entries showcase a particular artist, while one is a compendium of zombie tales (of course) and the last is a collection of the first 3-issues of the Haunted Horror monthly comics, which feature reprintings of classic stories with new introductions. 

Each volume includes a foreword about the subject matter – the ones about the artists are far more interesting than the rest.  When we’re introduced the artists, we’re treated to a brief biography and a small sampling of some of their other works.  This provides a lot of context and honestly goes far to make the stories contained thereafter more enjoyable.  The introduction for the zombie volume is nothing profound and just notes the resurgent popularity of that monster archetype, while the final volume contains a very short foreword by Jerry Only of Misfits fame. 

This series doesn’t include any stories from the famous EC books.  Instead it showcases work from lesser-known titles such as This Magazine is Haunted, Tomb of Terror, Dark Mysteries, and The Beyond.  That’s actually pretty refreshing, as EC’s stories have been reprinted in a number of other formats.  One issue that has been brought up by other reviewers is that the comics themselves haven’t been cleaned up much – if anything, they’re presented in sort of a faux-aged format.  I kinda’ like it, but I can understand why some people would be put off by that aspect of the presentation.

Even the spines are attention-grabbing.

Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein – This was the first entry in the series but the last one that I got myself.  I wasn’t sure that I care much about an ongoing Frankenstein series, but after reading through it I realized how wrong I was.  Briefer was lured from a pre-med course in college to work in a comics bullpen for Will Eisner.  He wrote and drew an Americanized (and King Kong inspired) Frankenstein series for Prize Comics beginning in 1940.  Eventually Briefer’s Frankenstein got its own magazine, morphed into a kid’s funny book, and finally returned to its horror roots before being struck down by the Comics Code.

            This volume contains Briefer’s original miniseries adaptation as well as a sampling of both the horror and humor variations of Frankenstein.  Despite dwelling on a single creation, it’s probably the most tonally diverse volume in the series.  In one story we may find a friendly Frankenstein becoming pals with a man who’s taught himself to astrally project to avoid his nagging wife, while in another we’re treating to a legitimately shocking panel in which Frankenstein snatches up an old woman by the ankles and uses her to cudgel an approaching mob of zombies.  I only wish that this had been a complete collection of all of Briefer’s Frankenstein works.

Bob Powell’s Terror – One theme across all of the artists featured in this series is the crazy diversity of their work.  In addition to horror comics, Bob Powell drew everything from covers for The Shadow to Batman trading cards.  He’s probably best known for his very sexually drawn women (For example, in the story “Cavern of the Doomed” from Tomb of Terror, which is included in this volume.) counterpoised with his lovingly detailed, positively revolting monsters.  Powell loves to give his monsters close-ups in which he can really pour on the detail.

My favorite stories in this volume are probably “The Last Man on Earth” and “The Last Man Returns”, both of which originally ran in Black Cat in 1952.  These stories are about a scientist who sacrifices everything to stop a plague of nuclear mutants, only to find himself utterly alone in the world as he slowly succumbs to the mutation.  The stories have a time travel twist I won’t spoil, and they really blend together the feel of a postwar sci-fi cinema with the explicit gore of classic horror comics.  It’s also interesting to see that some of the stories in the collection only exist in pencil format and were provided to the editors by private collectors.  

             

Zombies – This book collects a series of zombie stories from various artists and a number of different titles.  Overall this book is solid, but it’s a little hard to talk about.  Some stories worth drawing your attention to are “Live Man’s Funeral” from Black Cat and “The Vault of Living Death” from Chamber of Chills.  Both are presented in their uncolored formats and really showcase the art of Al Eadeh and Vic Donahue, respectively.  I also really enjoyed “The Corpse That Wouldn’t Sleep”, which is a story from the old Ken Shannon detective comic book.  It was a lot of fun to see a horror story meshed with the two-fisted bombast of 1950s macho man comics.  Finally, “The Thing From the Sea” from Eerie and artist Wally Wood is a simple morality tale that really pops thanks to the chilling concept and the stark, gruesome illustrations.  Also of note is a gallery of full page cover illustrations, some of which are simply fantastic.

Jack Cole’s Deadly Horror – Jack Cole has the distinction of one of his comic panels being singled out by Seduction of the Innocent author Frederic Wertham as particularly prurient.  The self-trained Cole not only made his mark on horror comics, but also drew a number of comics for Playboy and other men’s magazines.  In the comics medium, Cole’s characters often have grotesquely caricatured features and his art is dark and busy – no horror comic looks more like a horror comic than one drawn by Cole.

            The first thing readers may notice is that “The Corpse That Wouldn’t Die” from Web of Evil appears in this volume after also appearing in Zombies.  It’s a good story, but it’s a bummer to see duplications in a series like this.  Of note in this book are “The Killer From Saturn”, “A Pact With the Devil”, and “The Brain that Wouldn’t Die”, all from Web of Evil.  A lot of the stories in this volume have Twilight Zone-ish twist endings that work to varying degrees.  “The Killer From Saturn” is practically a dark Scooby Doo story.

Haunted Horror: Banned Comics From the 1950s – This volume collects the first three issues of the Haunted Horror newsstand comic from IDW.  Every story is reprinted from a classic magazine, but they’ve all been given short introductions by new mascot characters representing the editors.  This book has a mix of horror archetypes and even a couple of tales that could be classified as sci-fi.

            Readers will note another repeat – Jack Cole’s “Hangman’s Horror” appears both in this and the preceding volume. Of note in this volume are “The Constant Eye” from This Magazine is Haunted, the sci-fi horror yarn “Slaughter-House” from Black Magic and featuring art by Jack Kirby, and the short, predictable, but oddly satisfying revenge tale “The Thing in the Pool” from Tales of Horror.

            Overall, The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics is a pretty satisfying collection and I look forward to more volumes coming out in the series.  I wish that there wasn’t overlap between the different volumes, but that’s not a deal-breaker for me.  It’s fair to say that horror comics in general are not the most cunningly written pieces of fiction out there, but when bolstered by a clever artist they can really hit the spot.  If you’re looking for something to read on dreary night or a raining October afternoon, you could do much worse than these books.  If you’ve much interest in horror comics, I’d heartily recommend checking these volumes out.

1.) For an excellent overview of the history of the Comics Code Authority and the controversies leading up to its creation, I highly recommend The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hadju.

A Look at the Legend: "Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy"

Okay, so a couple of months ago I was pretty hyped about getting a copy of Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy, a weird children's book about Satanic Ritual Abuse. It was produced during the height of the big Satanism scare and it's attained a semi-mythical status among SRA researchers because it contains illustrations like this:

I don't recall a scene like this in The Pokey Little Puppy.

Yes, that's a picture of black-robed Satanists menacing naked children with a noose in a snowy forest with the caption "Nothing that happens in the circle can be told outside of the circle. There is no way out because there is no end to it. Your parents have given you to us. They know what is happening." Pretty creepy stuff.

Unfortunately that's also kind of the money-shot of the book. I had planned to do a full review of Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy, but it's virtually impossible because the story is presented, as the back cover notes, in vignette format. We see little snippets of the story: Little Allison suddenly doesn't like chicken anymore; Little Allison misbehaves at home; Little Allison is scared because Halloween is coming; Little Allison takes part in the above-pictured Satanic Mass. Ultimately, with the help of a heroic SRA counselor, the police arrest the swarthy proprietors of little Allison's daycare and they go to prison. Finally, Little Allison gets a kitten and learns to love again.

As you can see, there isn't much to this book but a vapid repetition of the standard ritual abuse claims followed by a warm, fuzzy ending. In a sense that's to be expected - it was part of a larger children's book series called "The Hurts of Childhood" that was intended to help kids and families move past traumatic experiences. Critically examing the claims at hand wasn't a priority for the author*- the only priority was trying to help the children. In and of itself trying to help children is a noble goal, but bad things happen when a social movement is built around having a big heart and an empty head.

This unthinking mindset wasn't limited to Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy, it was symptomatic of the entire Satanic Panic: Lots of good intentions, lots of fear, but very little critical thinking. This book may be a curiosity, a quaint relic from a truy bizarre period of recent American history, but it's also an emblem of the harm that can be caused when society gives into fears that aren't backed up by fact.

_____
* Officially the book was written by Doris Sanford, the lady who penned the rest of the "Hurts of Childhood" books. Rumors abound, however, that the story is actually the work of one Laurel Rose Wilson, aka Lauren Stratford. Stratford is most famous for writing the pseudo-autobiographical book Satan's Underground, in which she claims to have been victimized for most of her life by members of a sprawling Satanic cabal. A thorough discussion of Stratford's claims can be found here.

Vampire Attack! (Sort of...)

I've been reading Dark Banquet- Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Bill Schutt. In a lot of ways it's kind of a spiritual successor to Carl Zimmer's excellent Parasite Rex and it's certainly worth a look. I've only just completed the section on vampire bats and begun the section on blood itself, but the book has already been absolutely fascinating. For example, of the three species of vampire bats, desmodus rotundus (the common vampire) is especially well-equipped for locomoting on the ground*. Desmodus often hunts ground-based prey, unlike its cousins that do a lot of arboreal hunting, and as such it has evolved a stronger set of hind leg bones than most bats. Thus, rather than the normal shambling gait shared by the majority of bats, desmodus can tool around on the ground by way of a speedy ape-run.



Pretty cool, huh?

*Another type of vampire, diaemus youngi, can also move around on the ground fairly well too, but desmodus is better at it and can also effect tremendous (for its size) jumps. The third species of vampire, diphylla ecaudata, has wussy little hind leg bones that aren't useful for moving on the ground. Fortunately for diphylla, it has other adaptations that make it very good at climbing trees.

Here's a Hint: Read First, Review Second

I finished reading Jesus Interrupted yesterday, and as usual I found Ehrman's work to be informative and well-spoken. To be fair, much of what he discussed has been covered in his other books, but I think it's kind of his style to write each of his popular books as a stand-alone piece (With the exception of Lost Christianities and Lost Scriptures, which are best read together). Biblical criticism aside, one thing that was of interest was his insistence throughout the book that it was not his study of the Bible that caused him to embrace agnosticism, but rather the problem of theodicy.

Ehrman repeats several times throughout the book that he doesn't view higher criticism as a path that leads inexorably down the road to a loss of faith (I'm not sure I really agree with him, but that's another post for another time) and that contradictions and whatnot in the Bible are not what led him to lose his own faith. He even devotes the final chapter of the book to this discussion, under the title "Is Faith Possible?", to which he answers, ultimately, "yes". To quote Dr. Ehrman, "I decidedly do not think that historical criticism necessarily leads to a loss of faith."

Why then am I seeing Amazon reviews that look like this:

A pot pourri of anti-Christian non-sequiturs, arguments from outrage and warmed over Dawkins-isms.... "Contradictions" are thus created ex-nihilo by Ehrman's hostile worldview and by nothing else.

and

And there is something increasingly disengenous about Ehrman's claim in the last chapter that he is not trying to destroy anyones beliefs...while that is obviously his agenda from the first page.

Could it be that, just maybe, some folks aren't bothering to read the book before they review it? Shouldn't it be, you know, the other way around?

Who the hell is Rene Salm?

Though it apparently came out last summer, I just recently caught wind of a book called The Myth of Nazareth by a fellow named Rene Salm. In it, Salm attempts to argue that the town of Nazareth did not come into being until after the time Christ, which would in turn make a powerful argument that Christ was merely a mythological figure. Apparently this is the first volume of series of books that Salm is cooking up that question the traditional origins of Christianity. It's all very interesting if true, but I'm troubled that I seem to find can't find any credentials for Salm save for a few notes here and there that refer to him as "a historian" and a composer.

If it is indeed the case that this Salm fellow has no formal archaeological training and is in fact just an amateur historian, this book ceases to be especially intriguing. Granted, Robert M. Price certainly seems to be excited by it, but there's a paucity of what I would consider to be unbiased reviews floating around out there. It is (rather predictably) being fiercely attacked on religious sites like Theology Web*, and while the sole review on Amazon says that it's the best thing since toast, said review was written by an author who is featured prominently on Salm's website.

Still, I think I may have to order this book, if only for curiosity's sake.** That's not to say that I don't find a rather large bit of Salm's thesis, that there's some kind of conspiracy amongst archaeologists to promote incorrect dating for the founding of Nazareth, pretty freakin' hard to swallow. After all, books that purport to offer stunning new insights (from a laymen, especially) into a well-studied field should be treated with caution (see here), and philosophically attractive theses should be treated with even more caution. I'm not especially bound up in the idea of a purely mythological Jesus (Unlike, I should note, Robert M. Price) so I'm not going to cry if Salm turns out to be mistaken.

That's a good thing too, because at this point I think there's even odds that Salm has his head up his ass.

*Actually, a large percentage of the unfavorable reviews floating around out there trace back to a Theology Web user called J.P. Holding, aka Robert Turkel, aka the guy that runs that Tektonics apologetics website. He's not held in high regard even for an apologist, and a Google search for "Robert Turkel intellectual dishonesty" returns nearly 900 hits.

** The same reason I own this book, written by a fellow who apparently thinks trolls are real...

Shameless Plug for Phil Plait...

If you haven't bought, begged, or borrowed a copy of Phil Plait's new book then you're really missing out. Death From the Skies! is a fascinating look at cosmic catastrophes for non-scientists, but unlike many other popular works on such things it isn't just a bunch of goofy prophecy mumbo-jumbo or sci-fi nonsense. The world will end one day, but it's not going to end with Jesus dropping the cosmic elbow on us or Cthulhu burbling up from long-lost R'lyeh.* Nope, one day the earth will be struck with a civilization-annihilating impactor, scorched clean of life by our sun's death throes, or utterly obliterated by a gamma ray burst. And Phil Plait wants to tell you all about it.

Honestly, I don't think there's anything better than a good astronomy book to provide a reader with a sense of slack-jawed, humbling, awe. Phil's also better than most about sneakily dropping knowledge on you while regaling you with pants-wettingly frightening doomsday scenarios, so this book isn't just for entertainment. Seriously, check it out.

*Speaking of R'yleh, its (wholly fictional) location is tagged on the current version of Google Earth for some reason...

Joe Nickell's Adventures...

I recently received a copy of Joe Nickell's Adventures in Paranormal Investigation as a gift, and during my during my recent expedition to the stinking wilderness that is rural Pennsylvania I finally got the opportunity to dig into it. Nickell's a Kentucky native, just like your old pal Skippy, but unlike me he actually gets paid to do paranormal investigations because they link into his job as a folklorist and professor at the University of Kentucky. Accordingly, Nickell gets to travel the world investigating hauntings, miracles, and urban legends - kind of like Kolchak the Night Stalker. Nickell has also written numerous books, of which Adventures is the latest. I thought I'd bang out a quick review because I found it to be an addicting little book, but please forgive my brevity and rather jagged prose - I'm trying to wrap this up during my lunch break.

Adventures in Paranormal Investigation is largely a collection of Nickell's articles from The Skeptical Inquirer, though some of the entries are apparently somewhat expanded. A couple of dozen different subjects are covered, from "vanishing hitchhiker" stories to stigmata to alien abductions, though most of them are given only a brief treatment. Overall none of the entries really go into great detail, but the book is still an interesting read. Honestly the best entries are the ones in which Nickell gets to show off his background in folklore, such as the discussion of haunted castles towards the end of the book. Nickell has an impressive gift for research, a prime example being his exhaustive tracing of the origins of a yarn about a "haunted dungeon" at a fortification in Florida, and entries that highlight this shine brighter than, say, his brief sketch of a study correlating alien abduction experiences with fantasy-prone personality traits. That being said, Nickell includes a bibliography at the end of each chapter, so interested readers immediately have a jumping off point for further study.

One concern that does come up occasionally (Because most of the book's chapters originally saw print as individual articles, I suspect) is that Nickell seems to have tendency to repeat himself. Over the course of about half a dozen chapters on ghosts and/or aliens, for example, the reader will encounter, verbatim, the same sentence about waking dreams. I found that to be a little tedious. I was also a little bothered by Nickell's brief hand-wringing about how he's a "paranormal investigator" rather than a "debunker" - I think that's a mincing of words that can probably be done without.

Overall Adventures in Paranormal Investigation is a worthwhile book even though it mostly just scratches the surface of its subject matter. Keeping in mind, however, that it is largely composed of Nickell's Skeptical Inquirer columns, regular readers of that magazine may find themselves reading over material that they've seen before. In particular, the chapter called "The New Idolatry", which deals with weeping religious statues and the like, ran in the Skeptical Inquirer fairly recently. Still, the book has a light "armchair reader" quality and will likely appeal the most to the curious and to casual skeptics who don't plow through quite as much skeptical literature as I do. Check it out. It's definitely worth a look.

Plugging another book...

Reader JAK mentioned the book Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Science Experiments a few weeks ago while discussing my post about Illya Ivanov's ape-man experiments. I picked it up to have something to read while I was in PA last week and I have to give it my recommendation. Written by Alex Boese, author of the also awesome Museum of Hoaxes, it's a very fast read that is essentially a collection of abstracts of various peculiar and inobvious experiments from the 1800s to the present. Each experiment discussed is also tagged with a relevant journal article for further reading (and, I suspect, to prove that he's not making it up).

This is a fairly lightweight book and is presented, according to the author, in a style appropriate for "bathroom readers", so there's not an enormous amount of technical detail here, but it's a fun read and serves as a good mental palate-cleansing in between more serious works. Check it out.

Oh, and Boese also has a website here.

Plugging some books...

For those of you out there who are clamoring to know just what I'm reading (and who wouldn't want to know that?), I'd like to recommend my current book-in-hand, How We Know What Isn't So - The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich. It's an intriguing book that seeks to help explain how we sort through the information that constantly bombards us and how our usual reasoning mechanisms, which usually work pretty well, are occasionally underused (or over-applied) to the point that we err in our thinking. It's a neat book, but admittedly it's kind of dry and it uses some statistical arguments that aren't exactly riveting, but it's worth the time to push your way through it.

For a slightly easier read on the same subject, I'd recommend Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We make In Thinking by Thomas Kida. It's written in a somewhat simpler style and touches on, as you might guess, six basic logical errors that have a deleterious effect on our reasoning. Kida doesn't go into as much depth as Gilovich, but the book is just as good a use of your time.

I heartily recommend both of them.