The prevailing wisdom, at least when I was coming of age, was that EC was the high-water mark for most genre comics during the early 1950s, especially horror, and that all the numerous copycats from publishers like Harvey and Atlas were filled with little more than dreck. But over the last decade or so that notion has changed considerably, as various scholars and collectors—not to mention the wealth of reprint material available to the public—suggest that many of those pre-Code titles actually contained a considerable amount of praiseworthy work.
Which brings me to Adventures into Terror Vol. 1, a new hardbound collection of the first eight issues of the eponymous comic, published from November 1950 through February 1952 by Atlas - which, as many of you no doubt know, eventually became Marvel Comics.
This is the first book in a planned ongoing series of Fantagraphics volumes collecting '50s era work from Atlas, continuing previous collections published by Marvel in its Masterworks series over a decade ago. Upcoming volumes include one devoted to artist Joe Maneely and another concerning the adventures of the love goddess Venus as her title transformed with the trends into a horror anthology.
I don’t want to spend this entire review comparing and contrasting EC’s output with Atlas, but one thing that does strike me about the material in Adventures into Terror is how comparatively bloodless it is. You won’t find any flesh-dripping ghouls or dismembered corpses here - something that other EC imitators had no qualms about depicting. (See the pre-Code horror stories of Steve Ditko collected in Fantagraphics’ Strange Suspense, culled predominantly from Charlton, to get a sense of what I mean.)
There’s another notable aspect that’s missing. In most of the EC stories, the victims almost always deserve their gruesome fate. Not so here, where, with one or two exceptions, the central characters are mostly innocents preyed upon by malicious supernatural forces.
But perhaps the most notable thing about Adventures into Terror is how genuinely dreadful the bulk of the mostly-unsigned writing and plotting in these stories is, with paper-thin characters, hoary clichés (mad scientist, haunted house, etc.) and last-minute twists that strain credulity. In the Gene Colan-penciled “House of Horror,” for instance, the hapless hero ends up going back to a lodging filled with werewolves after escaping it merely because the plot dictates it via a blow to the head.
Sometimes there’s a “so bad it’s good” quality to these tales that induce more chuckles than gasps, as in the Russ Heath-drawn “The Brain!” where an evil head comically bounces along like a rubber ball while trying to induce its victims to do bad things. (Atlas clearly thought they had a compelling character on their hands, bringing him and Heath back two months later for "The Return of the Brain.")
Still, poor plotting is not necessarily a deal-breaker here. In fact, the best stories have a dream-like quality, where logic is thrown out the window and the characters seem to careen from one bad situation to another. Take “The Storm” (art by Chic Stone) for example, where a couple seek shelter at a creepy old house only to find themselves locked within labyrinthian halls filled with peculiar monsters. Or “I Stalk by Night!” (pencils by Mike Sekowsky), in which a demonstrative judge tries on a pair of gloves that force him to kill. Or especially “You Can’t Escape” (pencils by Bill Molno), in which a vampire publishes a comic book story and inserts it into one specific comic at a newsstand, just so you–yes, you, dear reader–will be distracted enough for him to bite your neck.
But of course, the main selling point here is the artwork, and there are a number of contributions by artists that would go on to aesthetic heights, most notably the aforementioned Russ Heath and Gene Colan. Heath brings a striking urgency to stories like “The Man Who Was Death!” - right up to the penultimate panel, where we see from a worm’s eye view our doomed-to-explode protagonist screaming, his head breaking out of the panel borders, for everybody around him run before all is lost.
Colan brings his dark and moody sensibilities to “The Clock Strikes,” a story about a man who hires a hitman to do him in, but then changes his mind. Colan fills his panels with jet-black ink, his nebbish protagonist oppressively surrounded by menacing shadows as he anxiously waits for death to spring out of them.
For me, perhaps the best story of the lot is “Where Monsters Dwell,” drawn by the one and only Basil Wolverton, centered on an apocalyptic alternate dimension filled with bizarre creatures and disfigured humanoids that let the artist indulge in the sort of bizarre grotesquery he’s known for.
But you often go into a collection like this hoping to make a notable discovery or two. For me it was the contributions of Don Rico, who brings a bit of Ditko-esque surrealism to his stories (which, as Vassallo notes, he "almost certainly" wrote himself). “Find Me!” for example, is about an artist who, while trying to create an Escher-esque trompe l'oeil, literally falls into his own image. Rico fills the panels with nested and overlapping rectangles and whirling concentric ovals to convey the character’s disorientation - and, ideally, induce some bewilderment in the reader as well.
I was also stuck by "Going... Down!" the lone, short contribution by Joe Maneely, about an elevator operator who takes a trip to hell. Maneely's inspired, dynamic compositions, filled with leering, monstrous faces, made me genuinely excited to see the upcoming volume devoted to his work.
The fact is, even the sub-par stories often have a charm to them. The main character in “Joe...” drawn by Hy Rosen, seems to be pulled right from a Dan Clowes comic. Even the comparatively naive artwork of Hank Chapman—who, like Rico, writes his own material—has a bit of unique appeal in the way its stiff figures seem like they have been laid on the panels like Colorforms or a shoebox diorama.
As with most of Fantagraphics’ reprint projects, this is an excellent-looking collection, boasting high-quality production values that let the pages pop without the sort of garish computer recoloring that so many other publishers seem to favor these days.1 As an added treat, Vassallo includes the occasional advertisement which promises to teach you to become a hypnotist or a radio-television technician. While these inclusions don’t necessarily make you feel like you’ve been thrown back in time, reading a comic fresh off printer, they do add to the overall charm.
If you’re hoping that Adventures into Terror is some sort of treasure chest of comic book greatness, heretofore unopened to the modern public, then you’re likely going to walk away disappointed. But if you recognize that the comics from publishers like Atlas during this era tended to be a mixed bag, with scattershot thrills and pleasures that sometimes arrive in spite of (or perhaps due to) the limitations of those working in the medium, then you’ll find much to enjoy here.
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- However, note that per an Amazon review attributed to Vassallo, the art was reproduced at a smaller size than intended, leaving a larger-than-usual white border surrounding the page. A Fantagraphics representative has confirmed to TCJ that this will be corrected in future volumes of The Atlas Comics Library and any future printings of Adventures into Terror vol. 1.
