The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1932: Ghost Manor #45, September 1979

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There's something so very intriguing about the Charlton Comics horror output from the 70s. While researching today's featured creator, the late Wayne Howard, I found an excellent articulation of this intriguing feeling from blogger Mark Andrew at Comics Should Be Good: "...since Charlton didn't want to do anything that'd offend your average 9-year-old, you can feel this book fighting against the uber-restrictive comics code." This is the sense that I get every time I read a Charlton horror title. The writers and artists want to be telling us much more interesting stories.

The other really interesting thing I came across, thanks to Mr. Howard's Wikipedia page, is that he was the first comics creator to receive the "Created by" credit in a comic for his work on Midnight Tales for Charlton. Such credits become common over the course of the 80s and 90s, but Mr. Howard was there first.

Much is made in a lot of the things I read about Mr. Howard's art style, some calling him the best of the Wally Wood school of artists, some calling him a really good imitator of Wood. I think they're really saying the same thing, but the language they're using really shifts meaning. I don't think there's anything wrong with coming from an artistic school - we see so many creators who are Kirby-inspired - where do we draw the line between practitioner of particular artistic techniques and wholesale copier? For the record, I think Howard's art is fantastic - it is dynamic while hanging onto a sense of menace that, as Mr. Andrew above notes, fights against the restrictive reigns of the Comics Code. The comic is really quite well done, for the genre of non-scary scary comic (?), and were I still an academic, I'd probably have something to say about the depictions of the Devil in this book and some of the similarities I see to the depiction of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. But I'm not still an academic, so never mind.

One last interesting thing to note is that Mr. Howard apparently did not want to talk about his work for Charlton, turning down an interview in 2001 with Comic Book Artist. I'm curious as to why this was the case, but that may simply be one of the great unsolved questions of comics.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1025: Ghost Manor #20, September 1974

(We'll start Christmas stuff tomorrow?)

There's a cool little booth at my local flea market called "Snobby's." Thankfully, the proprietor is anything but. I bought a large stack of coverless Archie comics from his a few months back and got some really amazing, really old, stuff that I likely wouldn't have had the chance to read otherwise. And the other day I picked up a "15 Comics for $5" pack at his place. Today's comic was one of the random things in there.

There were actually quite a few old Charlton horror comics, and I'm really looking forward to reading them. This one had some interesting stories, and sort of seemed to be a hybrid of horror and romance. The cover story, for example, is about a couple who purposefully get themselves bitten by a vampire to keep the woman, who is dying of...something, alive. And they get married at the end. And then the story about the man and woman who meet in the wake of a UFO crash ends with him, having known her all of about 6 hours, proposing to her. It's actually really odd. But perhaps that was the schtick for this title, that it was going to attempt to bridge the gap between male and female readership by offering something that, supposedly, appealed to both sexes.

I don't know. It was entertaining.

To be continued.