Heading:
Author:
Title: The TORMENTED No. 1
Place Published:
Publisher:Sterling [Indicia: Sterling Comics, Inc.]
Date Published: July, 1954
Description:

CGC certified: VG/Fine (5.0). Off-white to white pages. Cover: Mike Roy. Art: Mike Roy, Mike Sekowsky. CGC census: 20 copies. GPAnalysis: Only 3 reported sales in a dozen years. Most recent sale is a 3.0 that sold for $597 in Dec. 2019. At the moment of cataloguing, there's a single copy on eBay: a crappy coverless .3 with a Buy-it-Now price of $205.

Two corpses manhandle a terrified blonde in a moonlit boneyard. The dead guys' torsos are skeletal, but from the waist down they're flesh and blood, fully functional and ready for action. Dr. Wertham considered the sex-and-death motif in pre-Code horror comics to be an unhealthy "invitation to sadistic perversion," but publishers were probably just catering to basic human psychology — fear and arousal are closer kin, perhaps, than many of us would like to acknowledge.

"The Tormented #1 goes so far as to show an attempted threesome in the graveyard; Two quasi-skeletons energetically wrestle a struggling young woman into a grave, forcing her legs apart in a posture that gives new meaning to the phrase 'body language.'" — Jim Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read! Abrams: 2010, p. 201. Trombetta argues that the recurrent rape and necrophilia motifs in pre-Code horror comics form a "brutal satire about sex" that "now seems prophetic." He doesn't say whether or not he lets his kids read this stuff.

Tuff mag to find, possibly due to an obsessed fan who's been hoarding copies for decades: "I know somebody who, for reasons only known to him, decided years ago to acquire every single copy he could find of both The Tormented #1 and #2. Last time I checked, he was up to about four copies of each. The fellow attended a goodly number of comic shows in those years and this gives us some idea of how scarce these comics are." — George Suarez, Tales To Terrible To Tell #5. NEC: 1992, p. 42.

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.