« True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. » — Kurt Vonnegut
Tonight, we’re slumming it up on the cheap side of the tracks. If you thought — and I quite understand you on that point — that Myron Fass’ Eerie Publications were scraping the bottom of the barrel for their market share, then you likely weren’t aware of his fellow cheapjack opportunist Stanley Morse. For a bit of background on Fass, check out these entries from previous countdowns: Hallowe’en Countdown II, Day 1; and Hallowe’en Countdown VI, Day 27… so I don’t have to repeat myself.
Furthermore, here’s my brief introduction to the dodgy wonders of Morse’s ‘Stanley Publications’. I recently came upon all the short-lived line’s covers and was struck by their certain je ne sais quoi. Doubting my senses a little, I queried ds, and she concurred: it’s raw, it’s primitive, but not devoid of a bizarre sort of charm.
Here, then… is a gallery of the entire run of Stark Terror!
This is Stark Terror no. 1 (Dec. 1970, Stanley); cover art by Frank Carin (né Carino).This is Stark Terror no. 2 (Feb. 1971, Stanley); cover art by Carin.This is Stark Terror no. 3 (Apr. 1971, Stanley); cover art by Mexican illustrator Héctor Castellón .This is Stark Terror no. 4 (June 1971, Stanley); cover art by Carin.This is Stark Terror no. 5 (Aug. 1971, Stanley); cover art by Carin. Just in time for cancellation, a new logo, possibly by Ben Oda.As a bonus, here’s the surviving original art to the publisher’s Ghoul Tales no. 1 (Nov. 1970, Morse); artwork, again, by Mr. Frank Carin.
« Veteran genre-crosser Carin delivered this new-for-1970 cover, insinuating troll-like creeps into a mad-doctor/torture-chamber situation. (The published version contains a touch of self-censorship, obscuring one conspicuous element of nudity with layers of color.) Carin is an enigmatic figure in midcentury comics, traversing the idioms of Funny Animals, Good Girl Art, adventure, and lurid shock value. » [ source ]
« Now these men have no need for words… they know! » — Anonymous
Now I won’t claim that Dick Ayers (1924-2014) was all that great an artist. In the early Sixties at Marvel, as an inker of Jack Kirby’s pencils, he was at best neutral, more likely than not to defuse much of the explosive excitement of the King’s pencils*.
However, Ayers’ chief strengths lay elsewhere: it was demonstrated time and time again that he could quickly put together dynamic and easy to parse — don’t laugh, it’s no cakewalk — layouts, and if you paired him with a dominant inker (such as John Severin (on Sgt. Fury) Alfredo Alcala (on Kamandi), Jack Abel (on Freedom Fighters) or Gerry Talaoc (on The Unknown Soldier), you’d get some quite presentable results — and quickly at that. Guys like Ayers should be saluted instead of dismissed, because they were the glue that held the funnybook business together and operating more or less smoothly.
I won’t claim either that Eerie Pubs’ product was anything but shoddy, shlocky goods, but I won’t deny that it can be fascinating… in small doses. While still working for Marvel, Ayers produced a memorable bunch of stories for a pair of former Timely/Atlas colleagues, publisher Myron Fass and editor Carl Burgos (creator of the Golden Age Human Torch). This is Ayers’ first published effort for those rascals. It appeared in Horror Tales v.2 no. 1 (Jan. 1970, Eerie Pubs). Brace yourselves!
«… Dick Ayers understood what ‘Carl and Myron’ were asking for and gave it to them in spades. They wanted gore? They got it! Ripped-off limbs, lolling tongues, gouts of blood and oh my… those popping eyes! Ayers’ trademark was the eye-poppin’. Socket just couldn’t contain ’em! » — from Mike Howlett‘s definitive study The Weird World of Eerie Publications (2010, Feral House).
« House of Monsters » is a Grand Guignol remake of « The Castle of Fear », from Weird Mysteries no. 3 (Feb. 1953, Stanley Morse). Read it here! Myron Fass held the rights to a lot of old inventory, so he had the old stories touched up or redrawn, some of them multiple times. Grotesqueness aside, I do prefer the original version. It had a better monster and a stronger ending… but you be the judge!
I came across this saucy bit of Ayers carnage in 1976, in one of the first Eerie Pubs mags to surface following a hiatus imposed by a severe contraction of the black and white horror mag market (thanks, Marvel). At the time, it just seemed like the oddest item: at once something of another, earlier time (it was an all-reprint affair), but also extremely garish in its goriness, even by slack contemporary standards.
Here’s my beat-up original copy of Weird vol. 9 no. 3 (Sept 1976, Eerie Pubs). Cover by Bill Alexander. I didn’t realise at the time that it was a bit of an Eerie’s Greatest Hits collection, so every other Eerie mag subsequently encountered rather paled in comparison.
-RG
*But then, with the splendid exception of Steve Ditko (and that was a waste of precious resources), I’d argue that virtually all of the inkers he was saddled… er, paired with before Joe Sinnott were rather underwhelming.
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