Friday, October 25, 2024

Halloween Hospital Horror MISTER MYSTERY "All, or Nothing at All!"

Mister Mystery was the host of his own self-titled horror anthology.
Though he looked like a jovial stage magician in a mask, his stories easily matched those of the Crypt Keeper and other ghoulish comics hosts..as you shall see!
For such an innocent-looking guy, Mister Mystery tells a nasty story, aided by illustrator Tom Feelings (yes, that's his real name) and an unknown author in this tale from Stanley Morse's Mister Mystery #14, (1953)!
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Friday, October 18, 2024

Halloween Hospital Horrors WEB OF EVIL "Scared to Death"

College Hazing is a Problem Even Today...

...so imagine what it was like over a half-century ago, when standards about such things were much looser!
A graphic representation of the hazards of hazing as seen in this tale of terror from Quality's Web of Evil #18 (1954), illustrated by Charles Nicholas.
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Friday, October 11, 2024

Halloween Hospital Horrors SCIENCE COMICS "Dr Doom's Diabolical Disease"

No, not this well-known Marvel villain...
...but his totally-unrelated Golden Age predecessor who had his own strip in Fox's Science Comics!
In a future when Mankind has colonized the Solar System, a somewhat-stereotypical Mad Scientist constantly threatens all civilized life due to unspecified "injustices" allegedly-done to him!
Opposing this nutcase are heroic square-jawed aviator Jan Swift and his co-pilot/girlfriend Wanda.
And that's all you really need to know...
In the early days, few comics were about just one character.
(Even books which were titled after a lead strip, like Superman, had backup stories about other characters to fill out 52 to 68 pages in each issue!)
Most comics of the era were anthologies, with up to a half-dozen strips ranging through every genre you could think of!
Many titles had an ongoing feature about a villain...who lost almost all the time!
And even if he (Or "she"! Comics were equal-opportunity when it came to evil!) was captured, they would escape to plot evil once more!
This never-reprinted tale by "Richard Crater" (a pen-name) from Fox Feature's Science Comics #6 (1940) was typical of those "villain strips"
Trivia: Dr Doom appeared in all eight issues of Science Comics, with a couple of already-prepared tales appearing in the back of other Fox comics after Science's cancellation.
None of his stories has ever been reprinted!
Unlike later Science Comics series from other publishers, Fox Feature's version had absolutely no educational material!
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Friday, October 4, 2024

Halloween Hospital Horrors HAUNT OF HORROR "Nightmare Patrol"

We lead off out annual Halloween Horror-fest with a fascinating Vietnam War-set tale...
...created in 1974, just after American participation in the drawn-out conflict ended!
This never-reprinted tale from Marvel's Haunt of Horror V2N1 (1974) was part of a wave of horror tales prompted by the loosening up of the Comics Code to allow "traditional" monsters (who had been banned since the mid-1950s) back into comics!
DC was having some success with their new Weird War Tales book as well as the long-running Our Army at War/Sgt Rock and several others, but Marvel's war titles had been reduced to just Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos...and that had just gone reprint!
So a new war-oriented title was out of the question, and the story found a home in the premiere issue of the second version of Haunt of Horror (the first was a short-lived digest featuring novelettes and short stories).
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Military Medicine FRONTLINE COMBAT "Combat Medic!"

Sometimes a Dedicated Medic... ...at the front is the only person standing between life and death for a wounded combatant! And, sometimes, n...