I Dare You... a DC '70s Horror Appreciation (Unexpected, HoM, HoS, Ghosts, etc.)

[t hedge coke]

Kirby's The Demon has some of the best genuine horror moments in 70s comics, for me. His Frankenstein's monster is mistaken for a war-protesting hippie by a cop who immediately draws and fires on him. Later, some dudes grab a girl and publicly start threaten to hurt her if the monster doesn't come out. They're pretty lurid about it. It's a clear power trip. The crowd, of course, is on their side.

Stuff like that cuts to the bone a lot faster and sharper than last page twists in a novelty mystery for me or Dr Thirteen shaking his fist over a corpse because he can or can't prove it wasn't a supernatural murder.

[JLH]

I first started reading comics in 1974 and was primarily into super-heroes, but man did I LOVE the Phantom Stranger series and the Spectre's Adventure Comics run. To this day they remain among my most cherished comics.

[Lee Stone]

Also worth viewing is this article on Marvel's Horror output of the '70s. Especially of interest are the graphs at the bottom which give an idea of the rise, peak and fall of the genre.
With it getting eclipsed out in '77 by the arrival of Star Wars and the move towards sci-fi over at Marvel, and the Implosion the following year at DC (who also moved more into sci-fi as they recovered in the early '80s), not to mention the rise of slasher films as the dominant form of horror at the box office, it's easy to see the big picture of how things played out across the industry.

[Jim Kelly]

I think there must have been a mini-horror boom in the '60s. And the Comics Code seemed to look the other way. I say this because there's lots of monsters in the '60s, which the Code should have disallowed. You got Melvin Monster, Bat-Fink, all the horror characters in ARCHIE'S MADHOUSE and other Archice titles, more witches and monsters in JERRY LEWIS and BOB HOPE, all the witches, ghosts and devils at Harvey Comics, the Hulk from Marvel , Jimmy Olsen as a were-wolf and his other transformations, Lois Lane as a witch, Charlton's GHOSTLY TALES and THE MANY GHOSTS OF DR. GRAVES.

Then you have Dell and Gold Key adapting monsters, witches and their ilk from movies and TV shows--the popularity of THE ADDAMS FAMILY, THE MUNSTERS, BEWITCHED and more.

Rather than Stan Lee defying the Code in 1970, I think it was the cumulative effect of all these horrors that broke the will of the Code to keep on insisting comics had to meet the criteria that really only had existed to drive E.C. out of the comics business.

[Lee Stone]

I think Dell and Gold Key got away with still being sold without a comics code because most of their output was licensed material based on shows that had already met similar requirements for television (and likely more appealing to stores because they knew readers would be familiar with the shows and knew what to expect since the IP owners would have a say in Dell or Gold Key's usage to protect their images).

[Lee Stone]

I just noticed that the second issue of the original Swamp Thing series carried the bat symbol on the cover, only without the title enclosed in it.
That (in addition to it being by Orlando) would push it to being a core title, I think.
Oddly, enough... the core horror titles had just stopped carrying the bat symbol. Which may explain why they didn't bother making a 'Swamp Thing' specific one since it was only used for that one issue.

[Jim Kelly]

When the regular titles all switched from 48 pages for 25 cents to 32 pages for 20 cents, that's when they introduced the new DC bullet. That was for the issues on sale in May of 1972. But several titles also kept the identifying figures. I guess the change was kind of abrupt and they were caught with covers that had been designed for the 48 page format or something like that.

If SWAMP THING had come on the stands before May (the first issue didn't come out until August and the second issue in October), then it would have been 48 pages, too. One can idly speculate what would fill those extra 16 pages. Most titles used reprints for some of those pages--although TARZAN used almost all new pages (just a few Hal Foster Tarzan pages as reprints). Would ST have had random mystery stories? Or Mark Merlin? Or Johnny Peril?

[ROM Spaceknight]

Nice thread. I'm a fan of the '70's & '80's DC horror anthology comics; I read only a handful of them at the time, but did really enjoy these. To kids like me growing up in the late '70's & '80's, I found these THE iconic horror comics from that era. Very well-done & genuinely creepy/scary.

I would pay good $ if these series were reprinted in color, in a series of DC Omnis.