Well, I've been using the summer slowdown at work to catch up on some reading. Picked up the Showcase edition of House Of Mystery which reprints the first 20 horror comics from 1969-70 or so. Wow, this is some great stuff. I'd read an issue here or there, but this early stuff is so much better than the later more formulaic stuff DC put out.
And the art by Neal Adams, Wally Wood, Bernie Wrightson, Gil Kane, Alex Toth, Al Williamson..it just pops in B/W. And a LOT of great Sergio Aragones cartoons too.
A couple things stick out immediately:
First, there are a lot of longer stories with more involved plotlines.
Secondly, it's interesting to see how often Cain & the House itself are actually part of the story, not just relegated to introducing the story in the first panel. Cain interacts with a number of characters, and is given some background as well.
Third, in one of the stories, they specifically place the House of Mystery itself just inside the Kentucky state line (which side they don't say though). And in the earlier tales, Cain is given a southern dialect in his speech, which actually works if you read it that way "in your head".
A nice book, one of the better trades DC has out in the Showcase series. I guess due to the nature of the series, it doesn't suffer from "overdose" syndrome like a few of the other Showcase volumes I've read (Green Arrow & Wonder Woman come to mind). By that I mean that I had to take a break from reading the other series (of a few days to a week), as the stories became repetitive when read in a single sitting for long. Did not have that with the HOM volume.
And the art by Neal Adams, Wally Wood, Bernie Wrightson, Gil Kane, Alex Toth, Al Williamson..it just pops in B/W. And a LOT of great Sergio Aragones cartoons too.
A couple things stick out immediately:
First, there are a lot of longer stories with more involved plotlines.
Secondly, it's interesting to see how often Cain & the House itself are actually part of the story, not just relegated to introducing the story in the first panel. Cain interacts with a number of characters, and is given some background as well.
Third, in one of the stories, they specifically place the House of Mystery itself just inside the Kentucky state line (which side they don't say though). And in the earlier tales, Cain is given a southern dialect in his speech, which actually works if you read it that way "in your head".
A nice book, one of the better trades DC has out in the Showcase series. I guess due to the nature of the series, it doesn't suffer from "overdose" syndrome like a few of the other Showcase volumes I've read (Green Arrow & Wonder Woman come to mind). By that I mean that I had to take a break from reading the other series (of a few days to a week), as the stories became repetitive when read in a single sitting for long. Did not have that with the HOM volume.
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