Reading Room CLASSIC COMICS "Frankenstein" Part 1

For Halloween, we're going the "classics are the best" route and presenting the Classic Comics (later Classics Illustrated) adaptation of Frankenstein from the mid-1940s!

Find out the frightening truth TOMORROW!

Reading Room REX HAVOC "and the AssKickers of the Fantastic"

Yesterday, we presented the elegant and refined monster-hunter Sir Leo.

Well, this guy's nothing like that...

Rex's premiere tale from Warren's 1984 #4 (1978) gives us all the basic elements of the tales to come.

A big, strong, not-too-swift hero and his team along with an assortment of supernatural and super-science-based enemies who are only slightly more competent.

Written by regular Warren contributor Jim Stenstrum, and illustrated by Abel Laxamana, who spent the late 1970s-early 1980s illustrating for Warren, left comics to go into animation, then popped up again in the late 1990s-early 2000s, doing superhero and, oddly enough, Simpsons comics!

Rex will return next week with another snarky tale.

Reading Room SIR LEO "Cat"

Another never-seen in America tale of the Victorian monster hunter...

...from the 1970s!

Written and illustrated by Jose Bea and co-written by Luis Vigil, this tale from from Dracula #8 (1971) answers a lot of things regarding cats that I (and, I'm sure, a lot of readers) wondered about.

More Sir Leo next Monday.

Tomorrow, another monster-hunter from the long lost past returns... 

It's Almost Halloween: TIme for Horror (Horror Comics, that is)...

 

Before videogames came along, comics (and tv...and movies) were said to be the contributing factors to JUVENILE DELINQUENCY!
I say...CELEBRATE the stuff your grandparents said would warp your parents' minds!
After all, they turned out OK, didn't they?
Didn't they?
Oh, well...

What could be more appropriate for Halloween than the frightening images of Horror Comics of the 1950s on t-shirt, hoodies, mugs, and other kool kollectibles?

Are you ready to be scared? Click Now...if you dare!

Ride the Halloween Night with the Classic GHOST RIDER!

He began life in the late 1940s as The Calico Kid, a masked hero whose secret identity was a lawman who felt justice was constrained by legal limitations. (There were a lot of those heroes in comics and pulps of the 40s including our own DareDevil and Blue Beetle!)
But, with masked heroes in every genre doing a slow fade-out after World War II, and both the western and horror genres on the rise, the character was re-imagined in 1949 as comics' first horror / western character!

The Ghost Rider himself was not a supernatural being.
He wore a phosphorescent suit and cape, making him glow in the dark, appearing as a spectral presence to the (mostly) superstitious cowboys and Indians he faced.
Since the inside of the cape was black, he'd reverse it, and appear in the dark as just a floating head, usually scaring a confession or needed information out of owlhoots.
Note: some covers, like the one here, show the inside of the cape to be white! Chalk it up to artistic license (and face it, it looks damned cool).

BTW, the artistically-astute among you can tell that cover above was by the legendary Frank Frazetta!
He did several of them, three of which are included in our collection!

In the series' early days the villains were standard owlhoots or, like the Rider, people pretending to be supernatural beings.
That changed around 1952, when he started facing occasional real mystic menaces including Indian spirits, vampires, and even the Frankenstein Monster (though not the one from Prize Comics.)
Unfortunately, it was about this point in time that Dr. Wertham began his crusade against comics in general and horror comics in particular...
By 1954, the Ghost Rider had lost his series. The next year he disappeared entirely.
But, over 50 years later, Atomic Kommie Comics™ brought him back, digitally-restored and remastered on a host of kool kollectibles to go with our other masked Western heroes including The Lone Rider, The Red Mask, The Black Phantom, and The Masked Ranger.

If you're a fan of horror, masked heroes, Westerns, or all three genres, take a long, lingering look at The Ghost Rider!
You'll not see his like again!