The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1965: The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves #59, October 1976

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I recently pulled from the collection all of my Charlton "horror" titles. I put the term in quotation marks because these are obviously horror stories that are trying, as the little box in the top right of the cover suggests, to keep within the framework of the Comics Code. It's a pity, because without those restrictions, I think that some of these stories would be really creepy.

That said, the very best part of this comic is the cover by Rich Larson. There's definitely something of the Bernie Wrightson school of art here, one that continues with a artist like Kelley Jones into the 80s and 90s. It's got me thinking about the some time disparities between cover art and interior art, even when it comes from the same person. The purposes of the two kinds of comic art are very different. The cover is meant to draw us in, while the interior is meant to convey narrative once we're drawn in, puns intended. But often the interior will feature art that doesn't necessarily match, or live up to, the cover. Though Mike Zeck's work on the inside of the comic is excellent, it's the only one that comes near to the quality of the cover art. And this, for the most part, has nothing to do with the relative strengths of the artists. Mike Zeck, I'm sure, could have created a spectacular cover for this comic where he commissioned to do so. But the cover, and I say this as someone with very, very little strength when it comes to visual art, seems more like a portrait, more like fine art, than the narrative art within the comic. Only rarely, and often with great delay, do we see comics with spectacular cover art in which the interior art is of the same quality.  And even then, because the interior art's ostensible purpose is to convey story, the interior and cover art are always going to be of differing quality. Cover art wants to suggest to us a story that we will want to read. Interior art attempts to tell us that story, to meet our expectations, and, hopefully, to surprise us a bit.

Not sure where the blog's going over the next little while. I feel an overwhelming urge to keep posting works by BIPOC, but I also want to delve into some of the strange stuff I've got kicking about. And I'm thinking of reading as much of the old Marvel "Onslaught" crossover as I have. Been a while since I read a crossover. So we'll see. I'll probably try to mesh everything together. Seems to be my way of doing things.

More to follow.