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.

The 40 Years fo Comics Project - Day 258: House of Yang #1, 1978

There's a couple of genres (okay, probably more than a couple) with which I'm unfamiliar for the most part when it comes to comics, and the martial arts genre is definitely one of them. I'm sure that it can, like the western, another of my unfamiliar genres, be done well.

House of Yang does not do it well. I'm not sure if it's the Dell-esque art, where even the most dynamic moments come across as very static and staged, or if it's the choppy and stilted dialogue. It could be that the main villain, Eva Ku, daughter of Chao Ku, ostensibly a Chinese national, looks a little like Betty Cooper. Whatever it is, I did not enjoy this comic. It barely kept my attention.

I think that I will have to find a few examples of the martial arts genre and do a week of posts about them. The same goes for westerns. Both have been popular genres, either recently or in times past, so there must be something to them, and there must be shining examples of them. I'd welcome suggestions, should any of you have any.

Well, I suppose that this comic proves that not all of my random selections are going to be good ones. But I'll continue on tomorrow with a random comic from the collection - maybe even one from the latter part of the alphabet, if I have the strength to move boxes around tomorrow! See you then.