Heading:
Author:
Title: TALES FROM THE CRYPT No. 35
Place Published:
Publisher:EC [Indicia: I.C. Publishing Co., Inc.]
Date Published: April-May, 1953
Description:

VG- (3.5). Spine roll, moderate spine stress, top spine nicked, corners creases, two small nicks to top right corner of front cover, book only bound with a single staple in a bindery error (there are no staple holes for the absent staple). Cream pages. Cover: Jack Davis. Plots and scripts: Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein. Art: Jack Davis, Joe Orlando, Jack Kamen, Graham Ingels. GPAnalysis: A 3.5 sold for $290 in 10/20.

In Jack Davis's "By the Fright of the Silvery Moon," a Hungarian werewolf, displaced by WWII, brings Old World terror to smalltown America. In Joe Orlando's "Midnight Mess," newfangled vampires feast on foul fare in a "blooditarian restaurant." Both stories use shifts in midcentury American life – the influx of wartime refugees and the resulting proliferation of ethnic eateries – as springboards for tales of homeland horror.

"These two 1953 tales – from EC's Tales from the Crypt – were among thousands of similar ones that comic book companies put out in the early 1950s. In such tales, the alien and unclean arose within marriage, family and community, turning the normal, even sacred institutions of middle-class life into charnel houses of disembodied limbs and bloodless bodies. Carrying the punch of pint-sized pornography, they were inevitably framed by the mocking laughter of a Crypt-keeper or a Vault-keeper." – Tom Englehardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. Basic: 1995, p. 97.

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