Rendezvous with Death!

Time once again to turn up the heat of our fiendish February love fest with another precode tale of vicious Valentinery! Okay, I really like ACG stories sometimes, especially when they set-up two ding-dong knuckleheads in a scenario where they just can't manage to do anything correctly. Every single decision made is a bad one, and in the case of these two lovebirds, simply taking a trip to the old haunted family estate to search for a hidden fortune is only the start of their bad streak beginning. Love that wonderfully bleak ending as well... from the Oct - Nov. 1954 issue of Forbidden Worlds #34.

The Monster!

Let's get December rollin' with a mad science monsterama from the January 1954 issue of Adventures into the Unknown #51. Ken Landau can certainly cook-up a wonderfully disgusting slime-ball of a creature, but fans of cute bunny rabbits may want to skip this one. Also, you don't have to announce it to the entire neighborhood if you're planning to transform your mad lab into a bar room. I mean, seriously...

Yawning Graves! / Flowering Death!

Yawns 'n flowers don't sound too scary, do they? Well, let's just see how Kenneth Landau and Ed Good deliver on these everyday things from the 1954 issue of The Clutching Hand #1 one-shot from ACG. Spooky cover by Ken Bald too!

What's in the West Wing?

Another Ken Landau tale from the June-July 1967 issue of Unknown Worlds #56 (see our last post HERE), and this one is a bit more typical of his detailed art style that most of us are more familiar with from his precode days. It's a fast paced, atmospheric, and predictable little 6-page mystery-- and for those of you who see the end coming from a mile away please reward yourself with a banana.

Also, if you're interested in spooky 1970's girl's comics from the UK, check out my Spellbound '77 post at AEET by clicking HERE!

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"Go Get Yourself Some Guts, Gil!"

There's been a lot of Ken Landau pre-code horror work showcased here at THOIA over the years, now today I present a spooky, kooky, fun, and sometimes funny example of his post code horror work from ACG's June-July 1967 issue of Unknown Worlds #56. Ken's style is very distinct, (we'll see a more familiar Landau look in the next post), but todays story feels a bit stripped down and stylized in a way that I'm not sure I've ever seen him attempt before visually, it's kind of cool for what is essentially a silly, 11-page adventure into the realm of monsters tale. Anyway, this is a leftover Halloween story that I never got around to posting last month because I was still out on a much needed vacation-- enjoy! (Cover art by Edvard Moritz.)

Decapitation

A friend of THOIA requested a rare Ajax / Farrell decapitation story that unfortunately I do not have (nor do any of my compadres in horror), but as luck would have it, recently I aquired a rather mangled copy of the July 1953 issue of Weird Terror #6 which does contain a rather mean-spirited decap tale by Kenneth Landau. Overstreet mentions this issue as containing "Dismemberment, decapitation, man hit by lightning." Okay, hands up: Whose mom would throw a fit about a man getting hit by lightning in a comic book??!! I think I would've mentioned "iron poker to the face" before the lightning.

Cover art by Don Heck

Smoke Spirit

Another superbly simple, efficient tale of supernatural vengeance from the May 1953 issue of Horrific #5, featuring smokin' hot art from Kenneth Landau. Come back later this week for the last story from this issue "Singing Slaves", (and if you missed it, we posted Rudy Palais' "Death Kiss" back in January 2009, which will eventually make this another THOIA FULL-ISSUE Presentation, --including "Murder Mountain" from our last post.)

Vintage AD