Do You Dare Enter? Part Forty-Eight: June 1974

The DC Mystery Anthologies 1968-1976

by Peter Enfantino and
Jack Seabrook

Nick Cardy

Unexpected 157

"The House of the Executioner"
Story by Leo Dorfman
Art by ER Cruz

"The Corpse in the Dead Letter Office"
Story Uncredited
Art by John Calnan

"Something's Alive in Volcano 13!"
Story Uncredited
Art by Jim Mooney
(reprinted from House of Mystery #83, February 1959)

"The Man Who Cheated Death"
Story Uncredited
Art by Bill Ely
(reprinted from House of Mystery #101, August 1960)

"The Mystery of the Sorcerer's Squad"
Story Uncredited
Art by Ruben Moreira
(reprinted from House of Mystery #118, January 1962)

"The Phantom Duel"
Story Uncredited
Art by Bill Ely
(reprinted from House of Secrets #1, December 1956)

"Beware, I Can Read Your Mind"
Story Uncredited
Art by Sheldon Moldoff
(reprinted from Tales of the Unexpected #7, November 1956)

"I Battled the Abominable Snowman"
Story Uncredited
Art by John Prentice
(reprinted from My Greatest Adventure #10, August 1956)

"Born Loser!"
Story by Carl Wessler
Art by Sonny Trinidad

"The Mystery of the Teen-Age Swami"
Story Uncredited
Art by Mort Meskin
(reprinted from House of Mystery #92, November 1959)

"Body Snatcher!"
Story by Carl Wessler
Art by Rich Buckler

"Who Will Kill Gigantus?"
Story by George Kashdan
Art by Alfredo Alcala

Peter Enfantino's dream girl

Jack: Sheldon Sutton, reporter for The Dispatch, shows up late one evening at "The House of the Executioner" to interview Loren Grue, the pretty, young woman who is the last of a long line of executioners. The building is haunted by the ghosts of her ancestors, including Uncle Jonah, who died a frustrated man. He only got to use his hangman's noose on one criminal before the state changed to the electric chair and then outlawed capital punishment. His last victim was Sheldon Sutton's brother! Sutton believes his late sibling was innocent and pulls a gun on Ms. Grue, but before he can shoot he is electrocuted when he yanks the phone cord from the wall and it comes in contact with a fully functional electric chair that Uncle Jonah had left behind. This reads like a story that was slotted for Ghosts and Leo Dorfman never met a tale he couldn't monotonize. Cruz's art is nice to look at but the story goes nowhere fast.

Peter: Another 100-page Super Spectacular! and, judging by the first two stories, the same will hold true of this one that held for the others: the old stuff is better than the new. "The House of the Executioner" is a nicely illustrated bit of mindless fluff. Why would anyone live in a house haunted by dead executioners? Sutton being unmasked as the brother of the final victim of Uncle Jonah is a tad... um... shocking?

Click here for the music

Jack: When Margaret Poe and Luanne Lowry decided to tour the old ghost town of Copperton, they did not suspect that one of them would end up "The Corpse in the Dead Letter Office"! Margaret finds a yellowed newspaper from a hundred years ago and reads an ad from Sam Harrison, a man looking to correspond with a woman. She mails him a letter and becomes possessed. A seance reveals that ghosts are after her and she disappears, only to turn up dead. There is no mystery as to why the writer of this muck did not sign his work. John Calnan also neglected to put his name on the art, but the GCD confirmed what we all suspected about who was responsible for the bizarre poses of the two young women.

Peter: The much "beloved" (at least around these parts) art of John Calnan continues to confound. I'm pretty sure that Madge is supposed to be terrified in the panel at the bottom of page 3 so why does she look like she's attempting the twist? Has Calnan ever filled in his backgrounds with anything but a solid color? And I'm really confused by that climax. Why did the spirits murder Marge?

"Born Loser!"

Jack: Lou Lowry is a "Born Loser!" who wants to get himself arrested and thrown in jail so that he can take advantage of free room and board for the weekend. His plans are interrupted by various good deeds that endear him to the police but, when a man offers him a job, he finds himself thrown in the pokey for trying to sneak through the turnstiles on the subway for lack of a token. Wessler's story makes sense for a change and Trinidad's art isn't half-bad, but praising something like this really shows how low our expectations are.

Peter: I'll take what I can get, Jack! "Born Loser" is something not only Unexpected but perhaps Unprecedented... a really good story (with a satisfyingly ironic climax) courtesy of Carl Wessler. Someone ring the dinner gong!

Jack: Morgue attendant Roy Cabal becomes a "Body Snatcher!" when he starts selling corpses to the local medical school so that he can spend money on his new girlfriend. He murders his partner when the man threatens to tell the cops, but the act causes a near-fatal heart attack and Roy is rushed into surgery. The heart surgeon gives him a new ticker but Roy won't get to enjoy it for long, since he's headed for the electric chair for murder. This is some fairly rough, early work by Rich Buckler, who seems not to have discovered the Kirby swipe file quite yet.

"Body Snatcher!"

Peter: It's not just the out-of-whack linear storytelling that makes "Body Snatcher" a stinker (welcome home, Carl Wessler!), it's the dreadful Buckler artwork. Even though these DC titles never listed inkers, I have to believe it's the embellisher's fault that Rich's art is so bad here. For proof, one only has to jump over to Marvel's Fantastic Four #147 (on sale the same month as this issue of Unexpected) to see what the right inker can do for Buckler (in the case of FF, it was Joltin' Joe Sinnott). The artist's work there is dynamic and cutting-edge (and would become even more so by the time he helped create Deathlok the Demolisher for Astonishing Tales a couple months later), arguably the best FF artwork since The King jumped ship. You can't convince me Buckler did his own inks here, as "Body Snatcher" is just too muddy and pedestrian.

"Who Will Kill Gigantus?"

Jack: Calvert and Boehme discover a T-Rex in the jungle and bring it back to Washington, D.C., but the natives who came with it set it off on a path of destruction. The horrified public wonders "Who Will Kill Gigantus?" and the native chief says he can tame the monster if he is allowed to return him to the jungle. Calvert sees his profits evaporating and puts up a fight, but soon finds himself dead and plugging a hole in Gigantus's noggin, keeping the beast calm on the trip home. Even Alcala can't save this sloppy mess.

Peter: George Kashdan's take on King Kong benefits greatly from the art of "He Who Knows No Peer" but suffers from a super-silly climax wherein an inspector evidently doesn't even check the top of the dinosaur's head and thus misses the fact that there's a human being stuck inside Gigantus' blowhole! Oh well, who reads these things anyway? I like the pitchers!

Jack: Reprint time! "Something's Alive in Volcano 13!" and it turns out to be Prof. Fielding, who was transformed into a giant caveman by mysterious gases. Can the intrepid team of explorers get out alive before they start to grow and get hairy? The Mole, a tank with a drill for a nose, got them down below easily enough but getting back up is not as easy.

"The Mystery of the
Sorcerer's Squad"

Lucky Lorman is "The Man Who Cheated Death" by means of a magical painting given to him by a dying hobo. His success at beating the reaper helps him climb to the pinnacle of the crime world, but he forgets that being on top means someone will come gunning for you.

"The Mystery of the Sorcerer's Squad" has to do with three ancient magic wands that appear to have real power--or do they? My favorite bit in this one comes when an antique dealer asks "Lt. Jed Conway of the Bunko Squad" to verify the antiquity of the artifacts, because he knows about such things.

In "The Phantom Duel," a suitor wins his lady's hand by defeating his rival in a duel, but the ghost of the loser finds a way to exact his revenge a year later.

"Beware, I Can Read Your Mind," warns Tello the Great. He should have waited a few years and become a Marvel superhero! As a boy, Tello was exposed to radiation and, as a result, he found that he could hear the thoughts of others. He becomes a carnival mind reader but has to flee society when all of the thoughts he hears start to overwhelm him. An intriguing story with fun art by an unknown artist.

"Beware, I Can Read Your Mind"

Frank Martin is able to boast that "I Battled the Abominable Snowman" after a trip to the Himalayas to capture a wild mountain goat. But was the snowman real or was it just a trick performed by another man in the party?

Finally, "The Mystery of the Teen-Age Swami" turns out to rest with a camera from the future, yet safecracker Ray Weede runs into trouble when he tries to profit from the strange device. The reprints range from good to really good this time around, though I could do without the final panel revisions to have a character say something along the lines of "That was so UNEXPECTED!"

"Something's Alive
in Volcano 13!"

Peter: Seven reprints this issue and not a horrendous one in the bunch. Despite a whole lot of silliness and naiveté, there's also a big bunch of imagination and wonder on display; as I've remarked before, the writers of the 1950s and 1960s DC fantasy tales just seem to have had a lot more respect for their readership than those pumping out swill like the first two "original" tales in this issue. "Something's Alive" is a fun time-waster that won't tax your brain much (in the best tradition of DC sci-fi). Think of all the fabulous things you could do with a "mole"! The best of the oldies, "The Phantom Duel" has a few Unexpected twists and turns I didn't see coming (like the otherwise respectable lead protagonist cheating while dueling and his ultimate death by uprooted tree!) and some nice Bill Ely artwork. "Sorcerer's Squad!" relies on some pretty questionable sleights of hand to get its message across (my favorite roll-your-eyes moment being the revelation that the staggered crew of pranksters were actually attached to a hook!) but still retains a heaping helping of charm.

Jack: The annual sales report in this issue tells us that Unexpected was selling an average of 164,102 copies a month. Not bad!

Luis Dominguez

House of Secrets 120

"To Never Grow Old"
Story by Virgil North
Art by Tony DeZuniga

"The Right Demon Could Do It!"
Story by Sheldon Mayer
Art by Paul Kirchner and Tex Blaisdell

"The Lion's Share"
Story by Steve Skeates
Art by Alfredo Alcala

Peter: Scientist Harry Jungmann is hoping "To Never Grow Old" by inventing a machine that not only stops the aging process but reverses it! After several false starts, Harry is trying the patience of his business partner, Max. During the latest experiment, an aged skid row bum is transformed into a young man but, after only a few minutes, the derelict dies. Seeing this as his golden opportunity, Max conks Harry over the head, steals the way-back machine, and calls the police to report a homicide. Harry gets twenty to life but, happily for him, the prison has a fabulous laboratory and Harry gets back to work. Since he's been a model prisoner, Harry is released after only fifteen years and looks up his old partner, Max. But this is a completely different Harry, a younger version of his old self, and Max is impressed  enough to offer his backing once again to finance Harry's machine. The professor tells Max that he wants everything in the past to be forgotten and, to prove it, he'll make Max young again as well. Professor Jungmann zaps his partner with his youth ray and Max becomes a crying baby. The House of Secrets prison is just as well-stocked and utilized as the one on the old Batman TV show (where they used to let Penguin and Riddler lounge around in their uniforms!), letting its inmates have the run of the place. And this was a nutty professor who got sent up the river for conducting dangerous experiments in the first place. Rehabilitation, indeed! The climax is a good zinger but the journey there is a bit tired. At least we have the art of Tony DeZuniga to keep us awake.

"To Never Grow Old"

Jack: DeZuniga's art is always good but I think it worked better on the Batman comic around this time. I have to admit I did not see that ending coming, which is always a plus. However, the story seems like it could have had a little more meat to it--there is no real horror here, just a twist ending.

Where is John Calnan now that we need him?

Peter: Harrison Quimby goes through life cursing people right and left, never knowing he's being watched by a demon who's taking notes. Eventually, said demon approaches Quimby with a proposition: he'll make Quimby the ruler of the world and that will solve the man's general dislike of everything and everyone. Quimby agrees but, in the grand tradition of deals with the devil, the world he's left to lord over is not to his liking either. "The Right Demon Could Do It!"is a decent "Demonic Bargain" tale that is rendered virtually unreadable by the absolutely ugly and cartoonish artwork. At least the backgrounds are filled in (smiley face emoticon inserted here). Blaisdell spent several years as the primary on the daily Little Orphan Annie strip.

Jack: I went from thinking this was terrible to loving it. Paul Kirchner also drew for High Times and Heavy Metal and his pencils here are so stylized that they look like something out of an underground comic. Some panels remind me of Sam Glanzman or Robert Crumb. The demon is wonderful and it grows bigger and bigger until it fills entire frames. The buxom Miss Fox and the downbeat ending, where the demon gives Quimby a noose, are unlike much else we've seen in the DC horror line.

Peter: Big game hunter Michael Hoover is a right old nasty sod but adept with a rifle in the African wilderness. When Hoover kills a sacred lion, he makes enemies of the local voodoo-practicing natives. Despite my obvious thumbs-up for the art, "The Lion's Share" hammers the nail in the coffin of the sub-genre of "treacherous, unfeeling, unthinking, and selfish hunter who's eventually brought down by black magic." Mr. Skeates... perhaps it's time to investigate another old warhorse?

"The Lion's Share"

Jack: Alcala is always worth a look but this is a tired story, as you note. Did Alfredo spend time in the jungle observing native rituals? He sure seems to have them down pat.

Nick Cardy

The Witching Hour 43

"Village of the Vile"
Story by George Kashdan
Art by Alfredo Alcala

"The Gun That Couldn't Stop Killing"
Story by Carl Wessler
Art by Ruben Yandoc

"When Time Went Mad"
Story by George Kashdan
Art by Jerry Grandenetti

Jack: Sandy and Inga are two pretty young women on a cycling tour who happen upon the "Village of the Vile," where everyone is nasty and the inhabitants await the arrival of an important visitor at midnight. The only spark of kindness comes from a small boy, who offers Sandy his handkerchief to use as a bandage when she hurts her ankle in a fall. At midnight the Devil arrives, but the boy's single act of kindness disqualifies the village from joining Satan's kingdom. The women ride off and the townsfolk are angry that all of their nastiness went for naught, but when the boy kicks a cat they decide that perhaps the Devil will return and reconsider letting them join him. The story starts off a bit shakily, in part due to Alcala's trouble drawing normal people, but when the Devil shows up it improves, and the downbeat ending is of interest.

"Village of the Vile"

 Peter: Funny that the cover claims this is a "Village of Evil" but Kashdan plays Scrabble with the title on the inside. Either spelling, "Vile/Evil" is one very dumb story. Are these the same two witless dames we've seen traveling through these stories lately or do they all look and act alike? Just remember that editor Murray Botinoff had a big sign over his office door: "throw whatever you can at the wall and hope something sticks!"

Jack: Lucius Howton is so upset at being passed over for the top job at Yorktown College that he hypnotizes a gun-toting stranger and tells him to kill the school's president. The deed is done and Lucius is next in line, but he didn't reckon with "The Gun That Couldn't Stop Killing." The man remains hypnotized and stalks Howton, the new president. Howton demands police protection and eventually gets his own gun, but when the stranger appears on the scene the police mistake Howton for the killer and shoot him in the back. As Howton dies, his trigger finger contracts and the gun fires, killing the stranger. Yandoc is a second-tier member of the Filipino artist group, in my opinion, but his talent is far greater than that of Carl Wessler ca. 1974, since this story is a one-note joke that goes on too long.

"The Gun That Couldn't Stop Killing"

Peter: The cop never found out he'd shot the wrong man? 1974: The Year Before Ballistics!

"When Time Went Mad"

Jack: Horst is a rotten young man whose dying father gives him three bottles with a liquid that, when consumed, will send him into the past, present or future. He robs a jewelry store and uses a drink to escape into the past, only to find himself in a worse situation. Another drink sends him into the future, where things are no better. Drinking from the third bottle sends him back to the present, where he is again at the scene of the robbery. Desperate to escape, he recalls his father's instruction to take a drink from all three bottles to escape trouble. This lands him in limbo, where he will remain for eternity. At least, I think that's what happened in "When Time Went Mad." The crazy moves back and forth through time are illustrated in the usual slapdash Grandenetti style, so who can be certain?

Peter: "When Time Went Mad" is way too disjointed to make heads or tails of and welcome back, Bad Jerry!

Nick Cardy

Ghosts 27

"House of 1,000 Ghosts"
Story by Leo Dorfman
Art by Gerry Talaoc

"Conversation with a Corpse!"
Story by Leo Dorfman
Art by Bob Brown and Frank McLaughlin

"The Haunted Hotel"
Story by Leo Dorfman
Art by Ernie Chan

"Welcome to Your Tomb"
Story by Leo Dorfman
Art by John Calnan

Jack: Sarah Winchester, wife of the man who invented the Winchester rifle, is tormented by the ghost of her husband, who insists that she build a home for the specters of all those who were killed by the gun. She spends a fortune to build a massive mansion where the ghosts take up residence and she and a team of servants wait on them. One night, a terrible calamity occurs and Sarah and the servants flee the house, only to witness the servants' wing collapse in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Sarah is convinced that the ghosts created an uproar to save the lives of all the living inhabitants of the "House of 1,000 Ghosts." It feels like we don't get enough of Gerry Talaoc's art lately in these comics, so I'm happy to see it, but the story is flat.

"House of 1,000 Ghosts"

Peter: Having grown up ten miles north of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, and having toured the landmark a few times, I can attest to most of what transpires in "House of 1,000 Ghosts." Well, most of what happens. The "true-life" foundation of Leo Dorfman's short stories always drowns out any decent narrative; it's a lazy way of writing when all you do is connect dots.

"Conversation with a Corpse!"

Jack: Lt. Harry Burger is a bombardier flying over Berlin in late 1944 when his plane is attacked and nearly everyone but him is killed. He sees the ghost of a German plane from WWI and realizes it's the same plane whose pilot his father had saved. He follows the plane to safety, guided by whispered instructions from his badly wounded captain. Landing in England, he is told that what he thought was a ghost plane was really the reflection of his own plane on a cloud. Worse still is the news that the captain was shot through the heart and Harry had been having a "Conversation with a Corpse!" Not a bad little story from Leo Dorfman, though it mines familiar territory. Brown and McLaughlin turn in serviceable art.

Peter: Nice art by Bob Brown (who was about to take over Marvel's Daredevil at the time and save that title from the doldrums) but I can't help feeling I've read this story... more than a few times. Dorfman makes things overly confusing by involving not one but two ghosts in the narrative.

Ghosts check in, but they don't check out

Jack: Ronald Morton spends a chilling night in "The Haunted Hotel" as a spook repeatedly stabs at a ghostly figure in the bed. Next morning, he learns that a murder took place there a century ago and he and the manager discover the skeleton of the murderer behind a hidden door inside the room's closet. A three-page quickie, this tale is enlivened by Ernie Chua's facility at drawing ghosts and skeletons. The last panel is especially nice.

Peter: Well, at least it was only three pages long but how did Ronald Morton know so much about the skeleton when, obviously, no one else did?

Jack: One rainy night in 1972, Sam Edwards, foreman of a wrecking crew that will knock down a brownstone in midtown Manhattan the next day, sees human figures inside the soon to be demolished building. He goes in and discovers the funeral of a young woman being held by a witches' coven! They lock him in a closet but he escapes by picking the lock with a button he finds on the floor. Sam races to the police station, only to be told that the event he witnessed happened 20 years ago and the button he holds is a campaign button for Ike from 1952. He heads back to the brownstone and again sees the figures through the window, causing him to wonder if he will kill living people when he razes the building the next day. Sam is quite handy with the pin on that button and he manages to jump out of a window without getting hurt due to some conveniently placed sandbags.

Another hot babe sacrificed to Satan

Peter: What's worse: a credit at the beginning of a story that reads Art by John Calnan or getting to the climax of a story only to realize Leo decided not to write an ending to the story? And starring Ed Asner as the disbelieving Sergeant.

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