Horror Busy-Ness

 All right, after being largely disappointed by the first two issue of the new Boris Karloff Gold Key Mysteries title, I figured I owed it to myself to go back and read an issue of the ORIGINAL series. Here's the (awesome) cover of my most recent acquisition, issue #19 of "Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery," published in 1967! How freaking great is that? And, as I mentioned in the previous posts, doesn't logo look better with Boris's head incorporated into it, allowing the excellent cover painting to focus solely on some of the issue's actual story content? Yes.  Yes, it does. AND, this being a classic Gold Key comic book, the back cover features that same painting, unobscured by trade dress: We are already off to a better start here, folks.  At this point, the modern day version of the series should already be taking much better notes than it has been. But okay, that's the cover. Common "wisdom" these days on the interwebs is that Gold Key books we...

 Hey! I said I'd be back, and I actually am! Don't get used to it! As the title of this post has already informed you, this time I'm letting you know my opinion on the second issue of the new Gold Key Comics "Boris Karloff Gold Key Mysteries" series. I wasn't all that impressed with the debut, so let's see if things get better in the follow-up, eh? Kicking things off, here's our cover: It's a wee bit similar to its predecessor, and I do hope that the series starts refraining from emphasizing Mr. Karloff's mug so much on future covers. The original series had his image built into the logo itself, and there's even some "shelf space" for his noggin to rest on right atop the "OFF" of his surname in the new logo. To be fair, Boris's glowing eye socket and the eerie ocular orbs of the crowd below his visage DO tie into one of the stories beneath the cover, but still. Speaking of the stories, let's get to one of them, s...

 I'm a big fan of Gold Key Comics, and always grabbed up just about anything I saw sporting one of their gorgeously painted covers when I was a kid. However, I was not immediately thrilled when I saw that some entity was "brining Gold Key Comics back" in these more modern times. I mean, revivals aren't always a a good idea. Look at "Atari," for example: for decades, whatever company bought the rights to that name did virtually nothing worthwhile with it. If anything, all they did was damage the legacy of a once-rightly-vaunted name. Sure, whoever it is that owns those right now (not sure if it's the same people or not) has been doing a lot to make up for all that recently, but that's another story. The story I'm discussing here is that of the new Gold Key Comics company, and specifically about their first published title, "Boris Karloff Gold Key Mysteries." At the time of this writing, two issues of this new title have come out, and I h...

One of my favorite kinds of comic books is the horror anthology. Specifically, of course, the types of horror anthologies that I had access to growing up in the mid 70s to the mid/late 80s.  Magazines like Creepy and Eerie, which I apparently only encountered during their "nadir," but enjoyed just fine, and less "mature" fare like DC's Houses of Mystery/Secrets, etc, Weird War Tales (of course), Gold Key series like Grimm's Ghost Stories, the occasional Marvel offering like Creatures on the Loose, and most importantly and most impactful for me: the myriad types of these series published by Charlton Comics and made available to me through their "Modern Comics" reprint project during my childhood. As I alluded to, Chartlon published a lot of these types of books over several decades, with titles like "Beyond the Grave," "Ghost Manor," "Ghostly Haunts," "Ghostly Tales," "Haunted Tales," "Baron Von...