Comic Book Collecting

[horrorhunter]

I started reading DC The Witching Hour('69-'78).







I finished the run several years ago but finally started reading them. Good art by Nick Cardy, Alex Toth, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Jack Sparling, and others. The Cardy covers on the early issues are especially good. The stories range from good to average but still fun to read. The title has three hosts who are witches, two old crones who are Mildred and Mordred, and young hot hip Cynthia. They send out Egor to bring back the reader to the castle and spin their yarns hoping to outdo each other for the reader's approval.

I love the Horror comics from the late '60s to mid '70s. Nothing like reading the original issues to get the overall experience right down to the ads, editorials, letters pages, and sweet smell of the old paper. Anybody else reading old Horror/Monster comics?

[darkmonkeygod]

The title has three hosts who are witches, two old crones who are Mildred and Mordred, and young hot hip Cynthia.

The way Toth drew them in issue one, Mordred and Mildred do indeed both look like crones, but only Mordred is meant to be the crone. Mildred is the "mother" and Cynthia the "maiden". They are the Hecateae, the aspects of the triple form goddess Hecate. That as the idea then, and it becomes much more fleshed out as the decades rolled on. Fun stories and fun characters.

[horrorhunter]

The way Toth drew them in issue one, Mordred and Mildred do indeed both look like crones, but only Mordred is meant to be the crone. Mildred is the "mother" and Cynthia the "maiden". They are the Hecateae, the aspects of the triple form goddess Hecate. That as the idea then, and it becomes much more fleshed out as the decades rolled on. Fun stories and fun characters.

Good observation! I guess they wanted the characters to be as extreme as possible for a Horror comic with no half-measures, so the "mother" figure gets to be cronish as well, though Mordred has her beat in levels of cronishness imo.
Either editor Giordano or big cheese Joe Orlando must have told Toth and the gang to stress ugliness for Mordred and Mildred and hotness for Cynthia.

Just noticed I mistakenly typed House of Mystery instead of The Witching Hour in my initial post above. 
I guess I had House of Mystery on my mind since it's one my favorite of the DC "Mystery" titles (really Horror though softened a bit since the CCA was still holding sway in the late '60s. In '71 it lost most of its bite when the code was revised but DC stuck with the "Mystery" branding for its Horror titles.)

Just read issue 3. Great early Bernie Wrightson art on a Sword & Sorceryesque story.



As great as all of Wrightson's art is my favorite of his work is late '60s to mid '70s. His later stuff after the '70s is still very good but just not as overall excellent as his earlier work imo. He broke his hand at some point which affected his details and as the years wore on he probably lost some of his passion for the work he had early on.

[horrorhunter]

As great as all of Wrightson's art is my favorite of his work is late '60s to mid '70s. His later stuff after the '70s is still very good but just not as overall excellent as his earlier work imo. He broke his hand at some point which affected his details and as the years wore on he probably lost some of his passion for the work he had early on.

One of Wrightson's crowning achievements was the Frankenstein graphic novel illustrations which saw publication in 1983. He worked on those drawings for 7 years. Even though I respect his fine work on that project it never held the same meaning for me as his fanzine and comic/magazine work in the late '60s to mid '70s. When I started collecting in 1975 as opposed to just reading comics some of the first things I hunted down were Wrightson comics- Swamp Thing, Web of Horror, House of Mystery/Secrets, etc. It would be the early 2000s before I finally found a copy of Badtime Stories from an eBay seller after seeing ads for it in the '70s in The Monster Times. Late '60s-mid '70s are my favorite time for comics and monster mags.



I heard he broke his hand iceskating at some point which affected his art afterwards. I searched the web and couldn't find any mention of it. Maybe it was just hearsay. Anyone else familiar with this?

[horrorhunter]

Important note: don't try to use pics from Grand Comics Database. They disappear after a few hours.

[Rex fury]

Well, here we go again:
https://www.cbr.com/universal-monsters-blood-of-the-wolf-man-comic-release-date-confirmed/

Hope this series is good, the overall imprint has been kinda hit and miss.
RF

[darkmonkeygod]

Hope this series is good, the overall imprint has been kinda hit and miss.
RF

I got to see a preview of this some months back, and casually know the author, and it looks very, very good. I would call it the best of the bunch, but it deserves more than that faint praise.