Friday, January 26, 2007

Masters of Terror - Black and White Terror

As I've mentioned, paperback anthologies darkened my back-to-school autumns when I was in junior high. I was introduced to Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, August Derleth and of course H.P. Lovecraft in selections from the Teen-Age Book Club.

Marvel and Warren's black-and-white horror comics brought fear to my summers and furthered my education of the horror greats. The other night--serendipitously, I think, the same night Cliff was writing Horror Can Be Comic--I was digging through several boxes of comics to locate issue #1 of Masters of Terror from Marvel.

The mag introduced me to Theodore Sturgeon's "It" which came along before Stephen King's pronoun-titled tome. It also includes Robert Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper"-- in which a police detective partners with a psychologist to track down a modern-day ripper. It was new to me then, long before I discovered it had been adapted as an episode of "Thriller."

Robert E. Howard's work in the horror field was also featured. Masters presented Howard's "The Horror from the Mound," an adaptation that looks like it probably started out in one of their four-color comics. It features art by Frank Brunner
and pits a cowboy against a vampire.

"The Drifting Snow" by Derleth and "The Terrible Old Man" by Lovecraft.

It was an impulse buy, probably because there were no new issues of Vampire Tales or Vampirella, but it was a good choice, 76 pages of chills.

Cliff rememers more issues, but unfortunately #1 was all I ran across. Maybe I'll scope out the next on ebay.



5 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

You should mention your own comics work here, Sid. Marauder and The Scary Book. Good stuff.

Danny Tagalog said...

Yeah, I'd like to hear about your own stuff. Lovecraft - yes please. Years since I've had any copies with me, but that prose...

Dodn't he write: "The most blissful thing is man's inability to correlate all of his mind's contents,..." or something along those lines....

Sidney said...

Ah, OK, you guys talked me into it. I'll talk a little about "Marauder." They say a Baptist Minister will talk at the drop of a hat, even if he has to drop the hat.

So I guess I can have my arm twisted pretty easily.

Clifford said...

Hey, and let's not forget The Mantus Files! I bet you didn't know I have a copy of that!

Sidney said...

Glad you found that, Cliff. Peter Mantus was a little darker than that Dresden guy.

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