Heading:
Author:
Title: HAUNTED THRILLS No. 9
Place Published:
Publisher:Ajax-Farrell [Indicia: Farrell Comics, Inc.]
Date Published: May, 1953
Description:

CGC certified: Fair (1.0). Cream to off-white pages. Grader notes: "Spine of cover completely split & cover detached, moderate creasing to cover, multiple chips out cover." Cover and art: Unknown Iger Shop guys. Edited by Ruth Roche. Overstreet: "Classic decapitated heads cover." GPAnalysis: No reported sales in this grade. A 0.5 sold for $320 in 3/22; a 3.0 sold for $900 in 10/22.

Crazy "cauldron of cabezas" cover, plenty gory by Ajax-Farrell standards. Ajax-Farrell outsourced story and art production to the Iger Studio, whose editrix, Ruth Roche, generally preferred psychological strangeness to graphic violence.

"Roche dealt in truly creepy, unsettling concepts, and she created narratives with an eerie, nightmare atmosphere.... The innocent died with the guilty in her stories, and sometimes the particular personification of evil would still be at large at the story's end.... The art in these stories is not always elegant, but it's a full partner in their success, and only after reading the stories is this apparent." – John Benson, "Ruth Roche and the Iger Studio," Four Color Fear. Fantagraphics: 2011, p. 299.

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