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As I see it:
Pre-EC: A lot of tepid little horror comics that didn't cause much of a ripple in the marketplace. Most of them were short (no more than 8 pages) and tended to be retreads of radio horror stories
EC: EC brought literacy, incredble art, and a LOT of formula to the genre. They didn't sell GREAT (they were actually outsold by Atlas's pale imitations) but they were the comics that everyone but DC, Archie and Dell wanted to do. Also brought about the Senate turning their gaze on comics as a cause of juvenile crime, and the comics industry got such a bad name that sales plummetted, distributors quit carrying them and most comic companies were gone by 1956
Pre-Silver Age: LOTS of gimmicky horror title from Atlas, and "mystery" books from DC. There were ghost stories and monster stories for the most part, although it feels like at least 1/4th of the stories Stan Lee wrote during these years were about people selling their souls to the Devil. I wonder....
Silver Age: The monsters at Marvel slowly faded, even though early Hero Marvels still bore the stamp of having monster type stories and characters. DC phased out their mystery books in favor of superhero stuff. What little horror remained in color comics was either reprints or "humor" done by Archie, who's business practices were as shady as anyone could imagine.
Horror during this period mostly went into magazines (primarily Creepy and Eerie) and went back to the EC formula.
Bronze Age: A boom for horror comics (at one point, Marvel had over 20 comics reprinting their 50's horror stories), with DC doing a lot of mystery style stories with Philipino artists who they could pay MUCH less than American artists. Marvel did horror but used the Stan Lee "Misfit hero in a soap opera" style of storytelling. The best examples are DC's House of Mystery and Marvel's Tomb of Dracula. Also a TON of people started putting out magazines to compete with Creepy and Eerie, which all failed. Creepy and Eerie were gone in the early 80's as sales dwindled and markets evaporated. Warren style horror had a brief run in alternative comics, with Bruce Jones's "Twisted Tales" and "Alien Worlds" being amazingly successful, but unable to be duplicated by other companies and creators. Jones quit working ont hem due to the passing of his main publisher and inablity to keep artists.
Vertigo: Based on the sucess of Alan Moore's work, DC built a whole line that was mostly dedicated to horror mining their old concepts. Sandman started as a way to secure copyright (they gave Neil Gaiman a list of characters they would have liked him to use). With the rise of alternatives, there have been a lot of splatterpunk publishers (Avatar, whoever is publishing Tim Vigil's latest Wolverine ripoff gorefest)and one publisher (Chaos) who had a long run of publishing super-hero style horror comics.
Current: Vertigo publishes very few horror books in its line any longer, Bruce Jones writes The Hulk as if it were an old Warren comic, and most horror is Manga style.
My opinion?
A few horror anthologies could do well if published right. The Warren stuff should get reprinted (at least the early stuff written by Archie Goodwin). Both Marvel and DC should look into low budget horror comics, instead of tossing new talent on high profile books to fail miserably. Market them as MAGAZINES, as there seems to be a coming horror boom int he US.
And yes, this is all off the top of my head, so you can prolly tear it apart quite easily, but I think you need to go back further than 5 years to do a review of horror in comics. Other than Super-heroes, it is the longest running genre in the medium. |
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