FORGOTTEN BOOKS #85: FOUR COLOR FEAR Edited By Greg Sadowski

Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s dazzles with a dozen stories from legendary EC Comics. Greg Sadowski does a great job choosing stories from Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt: haunting stories by Sid Check, Jack Cole, Jack Katz, Fred Kida, Joe Kubert, Howard Nostrand, Bob Powell, Manny Stallman, and Basil Wolverton. Among the artists in Four Color Fear are two of my favorites: Wallace Wood and Frank Frazetta. The infamous Comics Code killed these graphic comics for over a generation so this collection reminds us how scary and creepy horror comics were in the 1950s. What a wonderful compendium! Don’t miss it!

9 thoughts on “FORGOTTEN BOOKS #85: FOUR COLOR FEAR Edited By Greg Sadowski

    1. george Post author

      The great cover is just the tip of the iceberg, Jeff. There’s wonderful (okay, lurid) artwork inside the covers of FOUR COLOR FEAR.

      Reply
  1. Richard Robinson

    Would I be frightened? I don’t want to have a nightmare.

    Seriously, I never read the horror comics, I was too much into Uncle Scrooge, Daffy Duck, Gyro Gearloose and Yosemite Sam. Then I went straight to DC and Marvel.

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  2. BV Lawson

    This looks just the sort of thing my mother didn’t want me to read before bedtime, but I did anyway, usually under the covers with a flashlight (and promptly had nightmares thereafter). It’s a nice offering to start off “Halloween Month.” I also agree with the above comments — gotta love these covers and the illustrations.

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    1. george Post author

      You’re right, BV, this is EXACTLY the kind of thing mom’s didn’t want us to read as kids. You figured out the Halloween connection! I’ll be posting more scary Halloween stuff throughout the month of October.

      Reply
  3. Todd Mason

    And DC and Marvel (well, Atlas/Timely) also did horror comics in the 1950s…until the Code came and suddenly HOUSE OF MYSTERY was no longer a horror comic but an all-but-cozy strangeness and very light suspense title, with much less grim humor even more in evidence and more cod-sf. I think the proto-Marvel folks just gave up, though the reprints of their horror comics in the 1970s, particularly in the TOMB OF HORROR comic, were favorites of mine…I liked them better than the DC reprints (mostly in the “giant” issues of DC’s resurgent ’70s horror titles, such as THE WITCHING HOUR) or even the EC reprints (though certainly the best of the EC work rivals anything done in the medium). New horror comics in the mid ’70s were usually pretty mild, outside the undergrounds, though I did certainly like DC’s WEIRD WAR TALES, and Marvel’s WEREWOLF-BY-NIGHT and DC’s revived THE SPECTRE were among my favorite “hero” comics. Batman comics, too, moreso than Supes or Spidey, was my meat…in those pre-Dark Knight days, even old Ray Palmer-magazine veteran David V. Reed (David Vern) was writing comics scripts for DETECTIVE and such that were a bit grimmer and more grounded in reality when called for, outre when called for, than some of the other characters got. Charlton imported interesting horror manga in their anthology books such as GHOST MANOR (in 1973-74, if that wasn’t a first it was pretty damned close), and even Gold Key was still offering decent stories, by newsstand comics standards, in their media-tied anthologies such as TWILIGHT ZONE. Didn’t like the Warren books much.

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