Chadzilla ROARS!!!

House of Mystery #1

In a quiet, small corner of the dreaming...

A group of strange, mysterious individuals trapped inside a House of Mystery pass the time and pay for their room and board by telling tales of the strange and mysterious...

It's back and...well, I think it's far too early to proclaim that Vertigo's relaunch of DC's Bronze Age horror series House of Mystery is better than ever, but the premiere issue was loaded with enough mystery and horror (yes, horror) - as well as delicious hints of greater mysteries and horrors to come - that the final page left me both satiated and hungry for more.

Most of the issue is spent setting up the ground rules of this all new House and introducing its rather large cast of storytelling characters.  The one story offered, Hungry Sally's The Hollows, is short on narrative logic, but long on nightmarish and gruesome imagery, and it ends with a nifty little punchline that shows that the writers and artists of this new series know exactly what they are doing and that they clearly love doing it.

And I think that I am going to love reading it.

Showcase Presents: The House of Mystery Volume One

Cain, the able caretaker of The House of Mystery, is the host with the most chills and thrills in this collection of tales from the anthology series devoted to frightening stories of the strange and supernatural.  Do You Dare Enter...The House of Mystery?

While the other kids were reading Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, and The Incredible Hulk, I was plowing through the horror comics.  For a monster movie junkie such as myself, those books were where it was at.  While the individual titles of those comic books have faded from my memory, something that makes finding and attaining them today more than a tad difficult, the stories contained within those mysterious books have not been forgotten.

Judging by the copyright information, Showcase's first volume of The House of Mystery (a second volume will be released this March) contains issues (174 to 194, to be exact) published at the very end of the Silver Age and the start of the Bronze.  Considering I was all of 3 to 4 years old at the time of their original publication, it is highly unlikely that any of the stories in this collection would be one of those that I remember to this day.  (Besides, I'm thinking that those stories are probably located in either The Witching Hour or The House of Secrets.)  Not that it made reading the collection any less of a fun experience, I still had a nostalgia fueled blast with it.

The stories are an eclectic bunch, ranging from the playful and mischievous to the intense and unsettling (but not too intense and unsettling).  Some of the yarns that I think make for the best reading are: The Hound of Night!, The Haunting, Nightmare, No Strings Attached, Dark Night, Dark Dreams!, What's the Youth?, Fright!, both of which are personal favorites, Boom!, and Image of Darkness.  (To name but a few.)  On the just plain fun to read level, stories such as Roots of Evil, Night Prowler, House of Madness, The Human Wave, and The Negative Man brought a warm, happy smile to my face.  Clunkers?  Well, everybody has an off day, but none of the stories in this collection left enough of a bitter taste in my mouth to warrant singling them out.  I'm sure opinions about the overall quality of the stories will vary anyway.  As long as you go in expecting stories that are only slightly more intense than your average Saturday morning cartoon, you should come away satisfied.  Those expecting an E.C. comics level of gruesome thrills will be sorely disappointed.

But there is more than just spooky stories to be found in the pages of this collection.  Sprinkled among many of the tales are the morbidly funny illustrations of Sergio Aragones, a comics legend that will be familiar to anyone that has ever been a reader of Mad Magazine.  Those Cain's Game Room extras makes the collection's $16.99 cover price even more of a bargain.  If horror comics are your thing, then I highly recommend that you make a visit to The House of Mystery some day.

The House of Mystery #253

Cain, and a few unwanted visitors, share seven terrifying tales of terror in The House of Mystery:

Grave Labor: Vladimir Koslov has come to Haiti to learn the secrets of the Bocor, the practitioners of the Black Arts that can supposedly bring the dead back to life.  Koslov thinks that this ritual could prove to be very useful in his eastern European home land.

Images of the Dead:  Doctor Wisp has perfected human duplication, but the people willing to pay for the service have very good reason to make sure that it stays a secret.

Demon Child:  Melissa Stribling's most recent babysitting job gives her the perfect opportunity to explore the dark arts.  Too bad her little conjuring ritual breaks the one rule of the house: Do not disturb the baby.

Photo Finish:  Cain's brother Abel wants to take a picture of his brother.  So that the best possible picture is assured, Abel journeys to the DC Comics offices to meet with shutterbug Jack Adler, who also happens to be Vice President in charge of production.

The Face of a God:  When Brock Sneary's bank robbery goes wrong, he goes on the run.  What he finds in the desert seems to be a dream come true...

More Than Human:  The wealthy Bentley pushes his scientific expedition to its very limit, so determined is he to capture a wolf like beast with an ability to heal that renders it both indestructible and immortal.

A House is for Haunting: Porter wagers that Lacey will be unable to spend the night in the old Turner place.  Porter is determined to humiliate Lacey, so he takes steps to frighten the man into leaving the house.  The house observes the antics of the two men, and it chuckles...

The Actor:  Ichabod Hasgood wants only one thing in life, to be the famous and respected actor that he believes himself to be.  After killing a man during an attempted robbery, Ichabod meets a young girl with mysterious powers.  She tells Ichabod that she can make him a famous actor, if he would only do one thing for her...

I thought that this issue of DC's The House of Mystery might contain the monster baby story that so frightened me as ten year old boy, but it didn't.  Having read this and, at the moment, two issues of DC's other horror comic, The Witching Hour, I'm pretty much convinced that the monster baby story was in the latter and not the former.  My memories of the artwork and storytelling style match up more with The Witching Hour than with The House of Mystery.  Of the two books, however, House's stories seem to have a far more serious, even mature, feel to them than those I have read in The Witching Hour.

With that little personal digression done with, I have to say that issue 253 offers a fairly solid bunch of stories, with more winners than losers.  That's just the way I like my anthologies, heavy on quality.  Grave Labor, Demon Child, More Than Human, A House is for Haunting, and The Actor are all fine horror stories.  (Demon Child and The Actor being my favorites of the bunch.  Man, kids can be vicious.)  Images of the Dead and The Face of a God are more fantasy oriented morality tales.  Neither story was very good, but they weren't terrible either.  Photo Finish, on the other hand, being a comedy piece, is something that I could have done without.  Obviously the story was included to give the book's younger readers something to lighten the mood, should the grim proceedings in the other stories prove too much for them, I guess.