Number 757


Curt Swan's horror comics!


If you don't know Curt Swan's work at DC, then you probably didn't follow the Superman line of comics for decades, where Swan was a star. His work stood out. He was an artist who came into comic books after World War II, drawing Boy Commandos stories. Later he drew Superboy and Jimmy Olsen, and then became the Superman artist. He worked mainly as a penciler, and just about every guy who wielded a brush for DC inked his pages.

In the early '50s Swan did these "horror" comics for DC's House of Mystery. DC's technique was to make it look like a horror comic, while the stories ended up with non-supernatural denouements. To be honest, the rational explanations to the mysteries in these four tales, all from 1952, are almost harder to believe than if they'd given a supernatural reason for the goings-on. "The House Where Evil Lived" is from House of Mystery #3, and was inked by Stan Kaye. "The Tell Tale Hand" appeared in HOM #6, inked by George Klein. "The Devil Was My Partner" came from the same issue, but GCD didn't identify the inker. "The Grim Jester," inked by Ray Burnley, is from HOM #8.

Swan, born in 1920, died in 1996.