Number 1225: Mom alarmed by Alarming Tales

In 1958, when bringing home a stack of comics from my weekly trip to the drugstore, anything that looked like a horror comic went to the bottom or middle of the stack so Mom couldn't see it. Even though 1958 comics weren't horror comics like the pre-Code horror, if it looked like horror to Mom it was banned. I slipped up, and she saw me reading this when she came into my room. She snatched it out of my hands and I didn't see another copy of Alarming Tales #3 for several decades.

The cover was drawn by Joe Simon in Jack Kirby's style. I read an opinion by a religious person once about this cover, which the writer thought mocked Jesus walking on water. I wonder if Harvey Comics got any nasty letters over this cover. We’ll probably never know.

I'm showing three stories today, the cover story, “They Walked On Water,” “The Strange One,” both drawn by Doug Wildey, and “Get Lost,” drawn by Ernie Schroeder. Schroeder we know from several Airboy stories posted on this blog. These stories are all Code-approved, but even without being horror they are  moody and have a lot of atmosphere. The first two stories are swamp gothic, and “The Strange One” is set mostly in the dark, with deep shadows and dark figures.

This is the fourth Harvey posting this month. It's a coincidence and I didn't notice it until now. You have to admit, despite all being from the same publisher, the entries are very different from each other. I even have more Harvey Comics coming up in the next few weeks.

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Number 107


Doug Wildey's Bug-A-Boo!


When Doug Wildey died in 1994 at age 72 he left behind a body of comic book work but will best be remembered as the creator of the television animation series, Jonny Quest.

In the 1980s toward the end of his career he did some issues of a title called Classic Jonny Quest for Eclipse Publishing that showed how good an artist he was.

"Bug-A-Boo!" is a story from Mysterious Adventures #17, December 1953. Mysterious Adventures* used EC Comics as its model, and in this story Doug Wildey uses Wally Wood's artwork as his inspiration. The artwork is the main saving grace of this story, which pretty much uses for its model Pappy's Rules Of Horror Comics:

• Horror comics characters shall be as stupid, unpleasant, or unredeemable as it is possible to be in 5 to 8 pages.

• Whatever fate awaits those characters shall derive from their own stupidity, unpleasantness or unredeemable actions and shall end in death, the more horrible the better.

In this story the characters are in the jungle trying out a new pesticide. As the old TV commercial used to say, "It's not nice to mess with Mother Nature."

Wildey drew this story when he was about 30 years old and despite appropriating Wood's style (not a bad style itself!) shows that his artwork was very mature. Later on, before Jonny Quest in 1964, he would draw love comics, westerns, mystery and even a run of Tarzan for Gold Key.
 
*Mysterious Adventures also used The Law Of Skeletons to guide its choice of cover subjects. It's been well known to publishers for decades that a skeleton on the cover increases sales. The cover for this issue had nothing to do with the contents of the comic, but is a story in itself that the reader can just make up on his own.

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