Heading:
Author:
Title: CHAMBER OF CHILLS No. 18
Place Published:
Publisher:Harvey [Indicia: Witches Tales, Inc.]
Date Published: July, 1953
Description:

G/VG (3.0). Super slight spine roll, three small splits to spine (largest being slightly over 1/4"), rubs along spine and top edge of front cover, small nicks and tiny corner chip to top edge of front cover, several shallow chips to top and bottom edges of back cover, dampsoiling to top edge of covers and pages, penciled reseller's price to margin of 1st page ("$1.25"). Cream to off-white pages. Nice copy for this grade; potential to slab at 3.5. Cover: Lee Elias. Art: Howard Nostrand, Joe Certa, Bob Powell, Joe Giunta. Overstreet: "Atom bomb panels." GPAnalysis: A 3.0 sold for $359 in October 2020; a 3.5 sold for $435 in December 2019.

Grave and a Haircut: Throat-slashing barber cover and story ("Suddenly, five o'clock shadow doesn't seem so bad anymore" — Green Apple's "EC, MAD and Pre-Code HORROR" catalogue, 1997). Also, in the "Don't Try This at Home Dept.," a man gets caught in an A-bomb blast, kills a guy, drinks hootch, and spontaneously combusts. Atomic blasts occur with enough frequency in pre-Code horror mags that it's worth considering the connection between nuclear fears and the grisly dead that populate pre-Code terror tales:

"The timing [of the horror comics boom] was apt. On September 3, 1949, U.S. government intelligence discovered that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb. Suddenly, for most Americans, young people among them, the Cold War was no longer a political abstraction, a jumble of foreign maps with dotted borders or debates about economic theory, but a palpable threat of vast and gruesome devastation. The zombies with hollow eye sockets and skin peeling off their bones who haunted the boneyards in the panels of [horror comics] could not have been far removed from the readers' mental pictures of their own fate in the wake of the nuclear holocaust now possible at any moment." — David Hadju, The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. FSG: 2008, p. 177.

Consignments welcome for PBA's Fall 2022 Comic Book sale. Pre-Code Horror, Golden Age and Silver Age comics, original art, vintage comic-related photos and ephemera sought. Send inquiries to ivan@pbagalleries.com.

A limited edition of 100 softcover and 6 hardcover catalogues are available. 140 pages, fully illustrated. Fun reference, great keepsake. Softcovers $40, dust-jacketed hardcover with limitation plate $200. To order, contact ivan@pbagalleries.com.

Consignments welcome for PBA's Fall 2022 Comic Book sale. Pre-Code Horror, Golden Age and Silver Age comics, original art, vintage comic-related photos and ephemera sought. Send inquiries to ivan@pbagalleries.com.