Holiday Horror VAULT OF HORROR "...and All Through the House...." PLUS Video Holiday Presents!

Here's not one, not two, but three versions of a horrifying holiday tale...

...starting with it's initial appearance in EC Comics' Vault of Horror #35 (1954)!

This horror-day classic (sorry, couldn't resist) written and illustrated by Johnny Craig had been reprinted numerous times and been adapted twice, once as part of the 1970s anthology movie Tales from the Crypt...

...and as the second episode of the 1990s Tales from the Crypt TV series...

We'll be back after the New Year with more terrifying tales from the 1950s!

Merry Christmas

&

Happy New Year!

Countdown to Halloween 2020 / Twice-Told Tales TERROR TALES "Jury of Skeletons"

Yesterday, we presented a 1950s tale grounded in the real-life horror of the Holocaust...

...now, here's a remake from the 1970s, since the original couldn't be reprinted due to the Comics Code!
Note: May be NSFW!

South American artist Enrique Cristobal illustrated this redo from Eerie Publications' Terror Tales #V6N1 (1974), 21 years after the never-reprinted original's publication.
We hope you've enjoyed our Countdown to Halloween 2020 blogathon contribution featuring 1950s tales so ghastly they couldn't be reprinted and had to be re-illustrated for 1960s-1970s publication!

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Complete Maus
(Multiple Award-Winning Graphic Novel)

Countdown to Halloween 2020 / Twice Told Tales VOODOO "Corpses of the Jury"

For our final Halloween entry, we're combining fictional horror...

 with the real-life horrors of concentration camps!
Warning: NSFW!

Memories of World War II and the Nuremberg Trials were still fresh in peoples' minds when this tale was published in 1953 in Ajax/Farrell's Voodoo #5.
There were stories aplenty of hidden Nazis being tracked down, but most involved them being tried and executed by Allied (American/British/French) law-enforcement, not spectral beings, and certainly not in so gruesome, yet poetic, fashion.
BTW, the identities of any of the Iger Studio creatives associated with this tale are, sadly, unknown!
Tomorrow, the redone version from the 1970s!

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Complete Maus
(Multiple Award-Winning Graphic Novel)

Countdown to Halloween 2020 / Thrice-Told Tales WEIRD "Land of No Return"

The first, horrifying version of this tale was HERE...

...the second, far less scary version of the story, is HERE!

Now let's continue with the final version...

Ajax/Farrell finally gave up the ghost (as it were) in 1958, but publisher Robert Farrell remained in publishing, doing non-comics projects.

In 1969, he joined with Myron Fass, a former comics artist who had failed to make a Silver Age color comics line (MF Enterprises) profitable, but realized that Warren Publications' b/w magazines (Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella) were selling very well!

With Farrell providing art from the Ajax/Farrell files, the two launched Eerie Publications with titles like Tales of Voodoo, Weird, and Terrors of Dracula!

This version of the tale appeared in Weird V3N4 (1969)

Was the alien entity modified from the original (1953) version, or was this the original version, modified for the initial publication in 1953?

We'll never know...

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Seduction of the Innocent!

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Four Color Fear

Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s

Countdown to Halloween 2020 / Thrice-Told Tales STRANGE JOURNEY "Space is a Secret"

We Have Already Seen...

..this story...well, sort of!
This is a censored version of that tale, "sanitized" by the Comics Code Authority!

Like almost all other comics publishers, Ajax/Farrell was hit hard by the Seduction of the Innocent witch-hunt of the 1950s.

They survived, where many others didn't, by kow-towing to the sometimes inane restrictions placed on them by the censor agency created by the industry itself...the Comics Code Authority!

This story, from Ajax/Farrell's Strange Journey #2 (1957) is a classic example of how extreme the Code took matters.

Every page has alterations, including changing the ending (in the original version, the Earthmen never escape)!

The final version, taken back to it's original level of horror...and beyond...can be found here...

TOMORROW!

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Four Color Fear

Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s

Countdown to Halloween / Thrice-Told Tales STRANGE FANTASY "Love Trap"

No, we didn't mistype the title!

This tale was published during the heyday of horror comics, then modified to satisfy the Comics Code, then re-modified to be more horrifying...probably!

All we know about the credits for this tale from Ajax/Farrell's Strange Fantasy #6 (1953) is that it was produced by the Iger Studio, who supplied several publishers with ready-made stories and had a history of re-using their material over and over again...as you'll see from the follow-up entry...

TOMORROW!

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Four Color Fear

Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s

Countdown to Halloween 2020 / Twice Told Tales STRANGE GALAXY "Planet of Horror"

Remember "Last Expedition", our tale from yesterday?

Well, here it is again, right down to the original captions, dialogue balloons and character names!

Eerie Publications editor Carl Burgos thought the story from Fiction House's Planet Stories #72 (1953) was good enough to have Argentinian artist Oswal re-draw it almost 20 years later in his b/w magazine Strange Galaxy V1N8 (1971)!

(In fact, all the stories that appeared in the Eerie Publications line-up were either reprints or re-drawn versions of 1940s-1950s tales from defunct publishers!)

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Weird World of Eerie Publiications

Comic Gore that Warped Millions of Young Minds