The title sounds like it's describing Karswell's office, doesn't it? This story, reprinted from Ajax-Farrell's Voodoo #1, is by Matt Baker. I scanned it from the black and white incarnation in the 1969 Terror Tales Volume 1 #8 (actually #2 in that weird way Eerie Publications numbered their magazines).
It's got Baker artwork, with some added ink shading and spurting blood (by editor Carl Burgos, maybe?) It's also got horror elements: the shrunken heads, a cheating wife, vengeful husband and a cigarette smoking skull. That's good enough for me!
Go back to Pappy's last Wednesday to see more Baker artwork on his great Canteen Kate feature from Fightin' Marines.
To honor this day, April 1: Now this is a horror comic! In the space of six pages everyone in this story dies a horrible, gruesome death. It's also a cautionary tale. Never scoff at old legends so what happened to these fools won't happen to you.
The scariest part of this horror story isn't the ending, it's the beginning. For me, that is. Cowardly Ronald Hamly gets drafted. Getting drafted scared me 42 years ago when the same thing happened to me. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, as the old saying goes, it was the way of life of a college student who didn't think getting kicked out of college would earn him a uniform. It wasn't the first, nor the last time, I would be very, very wrong.
Obviously I lived through my Army experience, but poor Ronald didn't. You'll see how he met his fate in this tale from Eerie Publications' Terror Tales #7 (actually #1) from 1969.
Speaking of brains, how did the person who wrote "Skulls of Doom" write without using one? In the story a character walks around with a 5000-year-old brain transplanted into his head by a gin-soaked old doctor who was "kicked out of medicine". The original owner of the brain gets around, even murders, without having a brain. The writer also got Egypt mixed up with India, but that was par for the era when other cultures and religions were libeled mercilessly in the comics.
It's the Halloween season and we don't worry about such trivial, brainless plot devices. We're dealing with precode horror comic books, after all. This is a reprint from I-don't-know-where, scanned from Terror Tales #7 (actually #1) from March, 1969. It's one of the infamous Eerie Publications, and someone made a decision to add to the originals, so the splash panel with its flip-top skull is modified to be more gruesome.
This is a screwball story from Eerie Publications' Terror Tales #7, March 1969. The title, "Gravestone for Gratis" has nothing to do with the story. Neither does the splash. They look like they've been stuck on from a different story. Other than that it's pretty typical of an early '50s horror comic from which it was reprinted. I don't have the information on its original appearance.
The writer could have let us know early in the story the main character had a medical problem so the plot device at the end wouldn't be so jarring. And speaking of "jarring," the cover is a gruesome Eerie Publications classic.
