A Classic TV Christmas- Advent 2017 Day 19

If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you would know that I am a big comic book collector. While I am a devotee to superhero books, one of my all-time favorite line of comics are the old EC Comics from the 1950s. These books were filled with sensational and quite controversial material that lead to a series of Senate hearings and eventually a comic book code of ethics being enforced. 

Despite their ages, EC Comics aren't hard to find as they are highly sought out by collectors. However, they are not cheap. Just this year, I was able to finally join the Original Issue Club when I purchased a copy of Shock SuspenStories #18. The title isn't one of EC's most well known titles, but I didn't care. I just wanted a copy of something EC to call my own.

Titles you, the average person not familiar with comics, might recognize are ones like Weird Science, The Vault of Horror (my all-time favorite), and Tales From the Crypt. Oh, you remember that show from HBO and layer aired in syndication on Sci-Fi Channel? Well before it was a TV show, Tales was a comic book.

The episode for today is called And All Through The House. Directed by Back to the Future's Robert Zemeckis, this episode, while a Christmas one, didn't air during the holidays. Instead, it was broadcast during a balmy evening in June, 1989. 

The episode is based on a story of the same name from The Vault of Horror #35. In both the TV show and comic (as well as 1970s movie starring Joan Collins), a woman kills her husband on Christmas Eve. Desperately trying to remove the body, she is stymied by her young daughter who just can't go to sleep because of the excitement of Santa coming. 

As the woman goes to work on disposing of hubby, the radio makes an announcement that a patient from a local mental hospital has escaped. He's wearing a Santa suit and brandishing an axe. Already having killed several people, he's considered armed and very dangerous. By the end of this classic thriller, the woman discovers that her daughter let Santa in and for some reason, he's carrying a bloody axe with him...

Well as luck would have it, for today's Advent, I present to you the complete 1989 episode, minus the opening credits and Crypt Keeper intro, for your enjoyment. Be advised, this is not for kids! But if you are old enough to enjoy a cup of holiday fear, then by all means ENJOY! And until next time- Scary Christmas!

Tales from the Crypt #2, (Banned Comics Week)

 This doubled sized reprint from Russ Cochran contains issue #34 of Crypt and Crime Suspenstories #15. Though I mention Gemstone as the publisher of the most of the EC Comics reprints in my collection, it was actually Cochran from Missouri who first obtained the rights to reprint the entire EC line. (Other EC reprints exist before this but Cochran was the first to reprint the entire line of EC Comics comics.) The collection was very popular, but it was a niche market.

 The Russ Cochran Company found itself unable to recoup its losses and sold the rights to newly established Gemstone. Gemstone got the brilliant idea to reprint in small batches and later reissue as needed. Thus, back issues of past copies could either be ordered through mail or replenished in comic shops nationwide. It’s this method that’s held on for over 25 years and helped keep the EC Comics from fading into obscurity.

   In Tales, our first story is by the Crypt Keeper in segment called “The Crypt of Terror” which was Tales’ original title. That story is based on the cover image in which a mad scientist creates a Frankenstein type monster and it goes on the rampage at a carnival. Then the Vault Keeper spins a yarn about two con men who dupe a small town into believing their sitting on the next oil boom. The Crypt Keeper then returns in his signature segment “Grim Fairy Tales” which are fanciful fables with gruesome endings. This go-round, the Crypt Keeper regales us with a story of a king who goes too far when he learns about taxation.

The last story is by the Haunt of Fear’s Old Witch. It’s rather interesting as it’s adapted by Ray Bradbury of Fahrenheit 451 fame. It’s a fairly light tale in which an old woman filled with salt and vinegar doesn’t want to die so badly that her spirit storms the mortuary in which her body is housed and demands it back.

  What I found so intriguing about this ghost story was that it’s basically by a well-known author. When Fredic Wertham testified before the Senate during the Juvenile Delinquency hearings, he claims that there was no ‘artistic merit’ to the prose found in comic books. Bradbury is such a big deal that not only did my wife read some of his work in high school for her English classes, I read it too! And I went to a strict anti-anything secular Christian school! So when ever anybody tells you that comics are rubble- you can point out that the great Ray Bradbury was featured in comics as was Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, and even Doctor Seuss!

Before I close, let’s examine the Crime Suspenstories reprint. The first tale is a film noir-type love triangle between a wife with a bad heart, her husband, and his best friend who happens to be her lover. Take about Double Indemnity! Then Ray Bradbury returns! This time, his tale ‘the Screaming Woman’ stars a little girl who hears a woman begging to be released from a shallow grave but nobody will believe the tyke’s warnings. Next, we get an interesting story told in two parts in which the same man must suffer through thirst an dehydration first on the high seas and then in the Sahara. There are plenty clever twists in ‘Water, Water Everywhere…” as well as a unique story structure that clearly influenced some of the greats of the Silver Age like Julie Schwartz, Gardner Fox, and Stan Lee. Finally, the Old Witch guests to recall the bickering marriage of a hen-pecked husband and his meddlesome wife.

The Crime comics of the 1950s were a thing of the past by 1959. Crimes of the heart in which implied sex, adultery, and murder were considered taboo. Thus there was a rise in crime digests like Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen. Those mags contained the occasional illustration but were considered so wordy that it wouldn’t appeal to kids. Crime Magazines were still available where kids could reach them and they still had graphic covers. But the changing format was considered enough to prevent kids from going into a wanton frenzy like un-coded comics were said to have inspired.

True, it was 30-years later, but in the 80s I remember walking into a newsstand and buying crime mags as a gift for my mother who loved a good mystery. I was never carded. I couldn’t have been- I was 8! Still, the view towards comic books as low culture is proof of the hypocrisy of censorship. The next time someone tells you comic books are kids’ stuff and for the uneducated, ask them if they watch The Walking Dead, or have seen Men in Black? When they say “yes” tell them it was based on a comic book and watch their face drop. Argument won in your favor!

Worth Consuming

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.

Tales from the Crypt Presents the Vault of Horror #5 (Banned Comics Week)

The main horror titles of EC Comics were Tales from the Crypt, the Haunt of Fear, and the Vault of Horror. The most well-known of these titles is obviously Tales from the Crypt thanks to a 1990s TV series on HBO, hosted by the delightfully funny, Crypt Keeper. But my favorite of the EC horror anthologies was the Vault of Horror.

It was hosted by the Vault Keeper and featured tales of deception, corruption, passion, murder, and intrigue. There was always a twist ending to these tales but the bad guys didn’t always get their just desserts. Sometimes, the hero took the fall! For the American government, that just couldn’t do! Thus, when the Comics Code Authority was established, titles were required to tell stories in which the villain got punished for his crimes. An allowance was allowed for stories to have cliffhangers throughout several issues as long as the villain received punishment before the story was captioned ‘The End.’

In this issue, a young wife who’s trapped in a loveless marriage takes advantage of a sinkhole on their family farm. We then meet a talented surgeon who loses his arm and conducts dangerous experiments in an attempt to make himself whole again. Then a young man meets the woman of his dreams at a masquerade ball. But when it’s time to unmask, it becomes his worst nightmare.  Lastly, a weight loss remedy bears some dangerous fruit.

The masquerade story, entitled “the Mask of Horror” is such an example of a story in which a rather innocent man meets a tragic demise. The man is spurned by his finance whose is cheating on him with an older gentleman. Determined to get over the harlot, the bachelor goes to a party only to take his troubles off his failed relationship. It’s when a drunken friend introduces him to a woman dressed as a miserly vampire does things go sour. The guy forgets his troubles and feels that this woman is his true love. But the only thing he feels at story’s end is her fangs in his neck.

  The only thing that guy did was fall in love with another woman. But, I don’t see him as immoral because his first relationship was destroyed by his fiancé. Just because the guy didn’t end the relationship while his girl was in another man’s arms, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t kaput. Still, I am sure that the message of the story was a misogynistic “beware of wanton women” that was the moral of many of EC’s stories involving passion. In the sinkhole story, the woman falls in love with a handsome health inspector but he turns out to be married. The wife had previously killed her husband, faking his death in a sinkhole, but she is forced to be with her loveless hubby forever, when his bloated corpse rises from the household well and snatches her into the underground river below that formed the giant crevice.

EC was as nourish and ghoulish as they come and I loved it. I still do. My dad until he died took pride in how I saved my money doing odd jobs to buy the complete Vault of Horror Collection from Gemstone in the late 80s. It was the first time I ever set a financial goal and made smart decisions with my hard earned cash. Nowadays, I continue to save my money trying to collect the entire EC library that Gemstone reissued continuously from circa 1988-2000.

Along with the reprint of Vault of Horror #18, this edition also reprints Weird Science #11. In those pages, the great Wally Wood regales us with a futuristic story in which a uranium company condemns both the earth and the moon with its questionable mining practices. Then a computer system learns about love for the first time and gets terribly confused. Then a ship is stranded on a planet of giants while a man goes back in time and ends up becoming his own father in a head-scratcher that makes Terminator seem plausible.

Worth Consuming

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.