Thursday, March 10, 2011

Classic Pulp-Fiction Revival


Do you remember those vintage comics that focused on the grotesque and the bizarre, with titles such as Thriller and Weird Tales of Terror? Often the artwork featured a vampiric attack or a horrified victim, and until the Comics Code relegated these to dustbins, they had a popular following.

Well, thanks to the latest offering by Feral House, you don’t have to remember – you can take a walk right down memory lane, and enjoy the same strange stories and terrifying tales that outraged parents and censors in the 1950s. The Weird World of Eerie Publications: Comic Gore that Warped Millions of Young Minds! is a compilation of many pieces once offered by Eerie, publisher of many post-pulp magazines (where the publications moved after leaving the comic medium).  The book is treated in the February 20th New York Times Book Review, which describes how author Mike Howlett “resurrects both Eerie… and the grotesque stories and images that filled adolescent minds a decade after the crackdown in 1954, when the Comics Code placed strict puritanical limits on the amount of gore, crime, and sex in comic books… Even if you’re not a fan of the genre, it is a curiously wonderful, weird, and eerie tale of magazine history.” Who would want to miss that? Pick up a copy, on sale now.

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