Four Color Fear It seems unfortunate to me that cartoonist Howard Nostrand (1929-1984) was not a contributor to the early Mad comic book. He would have been a comfortable fit, more so than John Severin.

Below is Nostrand's strange, surreal "What's Happening at... 8:30 P.M." from Witches Tales #25 (June 1954). This has just been reprinted in Greg Sadowski and John Benson's noirish, nightmarish Four Color Fear, an anthology of pre-Code 1950s terror tales, coincidentally shipping during Banned Books Week (September 25 to October 2).

When I interviewed Nostrand in 1968, I carried along a copy of Witches Tales #25. I asked him about Harvey Comics, Bob Powell and this story: "Harvey had a sort of chicken attitude about horror stuff. Like it should be horrible but not too horrible. Granted, they get a little ghastly every once in a while, but I suppose they wanted to keep it in fairly good taste. When you look at '8:30 P.M', there's nothing particularly horrible about it. It's a little germ wandering around. And the fact that the germ gets killed, nobody's going to lie awake at night thinking about it."

He also spoke about the Eisner-like title billboard in the splash and achieving atmospherics on the first page: "Powell was a great fan of Hitchcock's, same way that Eisner was. You look at an old Hitchcock movie... the first thing you do is set the scene. This is what I tried to do in a lot of these things. You set a mood for the whole thing. With about the first three shots, you set the mood, and then you go from there... Eisner used to get his titles in the opening panel there. The treatment is strictly Eisner. But then again, the background and all that is EC." Nostrand also commented on the unusual coloring: "It's supposed to be on the inside of a body, and so everything is kind of reddish. The only thing that isn't red is this foreign body."

This analogy between the interior of a city and a human body, linked only by redness, is what makes this story remarkable, actually more imaginative than such movies as Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Innerspace (1987). As I wrote years ago, it has more in common with Samuel Beckett's journey into self-perception, Film (1965), shot in lower Manhattan with a dying Buster Keaton. You can see Film here.

Strange synchronicity when I wrote about this story in the early 1980s for The Comics Journal: I wanted to compare it with Film and wished I had a copy of the obscure book about the Beckett movie published years earlier by Evergreen Books. I shlepped up the hill toward the usual Saturday afternoon yard sale. There was a table with only about 20 books. One of them was the very book I needed. Stunned, I gave someone 35 cents for the book, walked back down the hill and continued typing.


I feel lucky Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s (Fantagraphics, distributed by W.W. Norton) made it here. One side of the W.W. Norton cardboard mailer was ripped open with the book poking out. The mailer was too big, causing the unwrapped book to slide around inside. Someone at the Post Office put it in a plastic bag, and it was delivered hanging on the mailbox where it stayed overnight. You would think a company like W.W. Norton would have figured out how to package books for mailing by now.

Greg Sadowski and John Benson did a superb job on this collection of early 1950s horror stories, including Wood's "The Thing from the Sea" from Eerie #2 (August-September 1951) and Joe Kubert's beautifully drawn "Cat's Death" from Strange Terrors #7 (March 1963). Also included: Fred Kida, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Basil Wolverton, Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, George Evans, Sid Check, Jack Cole, Bob Powell and others. There's a spectacular section of 32 front covers, full bleed on slick paper, including covers by Wood, Frazetta, Lee Elias and Norm Saunders.

In addition to Greg's attractive design throughout, he delivers meticulous, pixel-perfect restorations, quite evident to me when I compared the reprint of "What's Happening at... 8:30 P.M." with the original comic book. In the pages above, scanned directly from the book, one can see Greg's patience and precision in creating flawless restorations. It can also be quite time consuming, as I recall from 1988-89 when I did restoration work on ten volumes of NBM's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy book series.

There are 25 pages of fascinating, informative notes by both Greg and John. I love that line "Comic Media... featured a rising sales chart as its logo". The book has an interactive aspect as one turns back and forth from stories and covers to the notes. The "Cover Section Key" shows the influence of web design, as each note about a cover is accompanied by a full-color thumbnail of the cover.

In an attempt to nail down which issues are "true horror comics", John Benson lists 1,371 pre-Code issues representing 110 titles from 30 companies. He also contributes a full article analyzing the work of scripter-editor Ruth Roche, noting, "Many 1950s horror comics featured violence, gore and menace for their own sake, but in Roche's world they were often only suggested, for they were merely manifestations of her real subject: the unbridled evil and chaos that was always lurking just beneath the surface, waiting to escape into the world. The innocent died with the guilty in her stories, and sometimes the particular personification of evil would still be at large at the story's end. A chilling variation on the theme of hidden chaos is the discovery that a loved one or trusted figure is actually 'the other' (a theme effectively used in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers a few years later). 'Evil Intruder' tellingly develops this theme and is one of the more horrifying stories in the whole genre." The slobbering love-starved creature in this outré story (from Journey into Fear #12) is totally unlike anything one might see in fantasy films or TV.

I don't like to read an article reversed into black, but even so, the inside front cover, title pages, contents page and intro, unified by the black background surrounding colorful typographic devices, all demonstrate Greg's skill as an inventive designer.

The only real flaw is the Adam Grano cover design. I always disliked the idea of enlarging panels to show halftone dots. Maybe this was clever 40 years ago, but now it's just annoying. Greg could have easily designed a much better cover, possibly by combining his logo-like title page creation with the Frank Frazetta/Sid Check cover of Beware #10 (July 1954), showing the undead about to toss a gravity-defying girl into an open grave.

This book is like time-traveling, a document of an era. Some of these stories and covers I barely recall, some are familiar and others are new to me. This will stand as an important reference work that should be shelved alongside David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague. Where Hajdu detailed the behind-the-scenes political machinations and wild witchhunts of the 1950s anti-comics crusade, Four Color Fear shows what was actually available on newsstands at the time.

One minor error: The 1931-38 horror-fantasy radio series which inspired Gaines was The Witch's Tale, not The Old Witch's Tale. The host-narrator of the series was not the Old Witch, but Old Nancy, the Witch of Salem. Miriam Wolfe, who died in 2000, was 13 years old when she began portraying the cackling Old Nancy. The program's creator, Alonzo Deen Cole, provided the meows of Old Nancy's coal black cat Satan. To hear The Witch's Tale, go here.

For PDF preview of Four Color Fear with four complete stories, go here.

Labels: beckett, benson, eisner, gaines, hajdu, kurtzman, mad, nostrand, sadowski, severin, wolfe

  ¶ 4:33 PM 4 comments

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"Scream Test!" was the first comic book story I wrote, a collaboration with John Benson. It was published in Creepy #13 (February, 1967) and later reprinted in the 1968 Creepy Yearbook. Scroll down to read the story.

With lettering by Ben Oda, Angelo Torres drew very effective panels, adding moody Sunset Boulevard atmospherics, but the unmasking is somewhat confusing. Kire (an anagram of Erik) was supposed to be well lit throughout, not in shadows, so he would look normal until the mask is ripped off. Unfortunately, at the climax, the burned face and the mask don't look that much different, and the drawn image is overwhelmed by the movie still. So the pay-off just doesn't work as I had intended.

I don't remember too much about the creation of the story, only that we began writing about a creature coming to life in a refrigerator, based on my real-life experience with rot and mold filling a refrigerator when I didn't pay the electric bill. The script seemed so cliche that I interrupted and said, "As long as we're doing this, why don't we go for something unique and different?" John said, "Okay, like what?" That's when I suggested doing a story combining artwork with photographs, adding, "So the best situation for that would be a story set in a theater with the photos showing what's on the movie screen."

With that premise, we abandoned the refrigerator idea and began to develop "Scream Test!" (I later worked the unpaid electric bill into my 1974 story "Bugged", posted here last month.)

To fill in my memory lapses, I asked John what he remembered, and he replied:

More recently, John Benson made a scholarly study of the naturalistic romance comics created by writer Dana Dutch for St. John Publications during the 1950s. To probe the period, he interviewed Leonard Starr, Joe Kubert, editor Irwin Stein (later the publisher of Lancer Books) and others. This material stretches over two Fantagraphics Books, Romance Without Tears (2003) and Confessions, Romances, Secrets and Temptations: Archer St. John and the St. John Romance Comics (2007). Some of this can be read using "look inside" at Amazon.

In a switch from girls to ghouls, Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s, co-edited by John Benson and Greg Sadowski, will be published next month by Fantagraphics. It features work by Bernard Baily, Jack Cole, L.B. Cole, Steve Ditko, William Eckgren, George Evans, Matt Fox, Frank Frazetta, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton and Wallace Wood.

The Four Color Fear front cover is a montage of art by Reed Crandall ("The Corpse That Came to Dinner", inked by Mile Peppe, Out of the Shadows 9) and Howard Nostrand ("I, Vampire", Chamber of Chills 24). How many books have ever been published with the word "Free" on the front cover? Also note the tiny figure at the foot of the curving staircase around the giant vat of blood for industrialized vampires. The title design is curious. Yellow type vanishes into a white background, and magenta was never used in four-color comics; it was mixed with yellow to make the familiar comic-book red. Oddly, it looks like a can of paint one might find at Home Depot, but maybe that adds to the surreal midnight snack.

Angelo Torres used movie palace historian Ben M. Hall's The Best Remaining Seats (Clarkson N. Potter, 1961) for reference on old theaters. At the time, that was the only book with photos and color architectural renderings of the 1920s movie palaces.

Theaters named Alhambra were quite common. According to Cinema Treasures, there once were more than 50. Most of these have been demolished, and today there are less than ten.

The horror of "Scream Test!" pales in comparison with what happened to Ben Hall. He lived at 181 Christopher Street near the Hudson River in the former offices of a steamship company. With an elaborate gold eagle door knocker and a colorful umbrella table on the rooftop, it was a distinctive building, and the 49-year-old Hall was murdered there December 1970. For more about Ben Hall and the Theatre Historical Society of America (which Hall founded), see this article by Steve Levin.



On March 11, 1927, the opening night film at New York's Roxy Theatre was The Love of Sunya starring Gloria Swanson. When the Roxy was demolished 33 years later, Swanson stood in the ruins October 14, 1960 for Life photographer Eliot Elisofon.

Labels: archer st. john, beacon, ben hall, ben oda, crandall, creepy, gloria swanson, john benson, magle, memoir, nostrand, roxy, sadowski, torres

  ¶ 11:10 AM 1 comments