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The Dead Who Walk is a mysterious one-shot from 1952. It was issued by Realistic Publications, an ephemeral publishing arm of Avon Books, during the decade that they haphazardly dabbled in the funnybook field.
The pungent dialogue and its implications aside, what fascinates me about this lavishly grotesque cover is the jarring schism in art styles: the damsel in peril is of the classically-buxom Matt Baker–Nick Cardy species, while the revenants belong to an expressively oddball Edvard Munch–Manny Stallman–Jerry Grandenetti school. As far as I know, the cover artist(s)’s identity is lost to time and obscurity. It has been established, thanks to a signature, that the insides were provided by longtime jobber Tex Blaisdell… a rather stiff and workaday performance, regrettably. But the cover assuredly isn’t his, no matter what the good ol’ GCD says.
You can pore over the sordid tale of The Dead Who Walk thanks to the excellent Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine, where the issue was examined back in 2007: http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.ca/search?q=Dead+Who+Walk
At the time, it was presumed that the inside art was the work of future EC and DC player Joe Orlando, which didn’t seem far off the mark.
-RG
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