On sale just a month after TOWER OF SHADOWS, with a cover date of October 1969 (on-sale date July 15 1969), Marvel's second new horror anthology CHAMBER OF DARKNESS hit the spinner racks. The cover by John Romita (logo by Sam Rosen) includes the text "Tales of Maddening Magic!" Maddening, indeed, as -- aside from the addition of host Headstone P. Gravely -- this inaugural issue a a far cry from anything EC-inspired.
The trio of tales in this issue are tepid: "It's Only Magic!" with a script by Stan Lee, pencils by John Buscema and inks by John Verpoorten, is a bit of a hackneyed story about a kid unleashing a Djinn who plans to take over the world. A notch better is Denny O'Neill's "Mr. Craven Buys His Scream House!", illustrated by Tom Sutton, and "Always Leave 'Em Laughing!" is a worn-out time-travel tale by Gary Freidrich, pencilled by Don Heck and inked by Frank Giacoia.
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| Page of original art by John Buscema and John Verpoorten. |
One wonders what Stan Lee was thinking after the debacle with Jim Steranko and this only average follow-up. In both titles, the stories are uneven with a paltry handful of gems (that included H.P. Lovecraft adaptations) and eventually, they would go out with a whimper, stuffing the last few issues with reprints from decades-old Atlas reprints.
Mercifully, CHAMBER OF DARKNESS lasted for only eight issues, from October 1969 until December 1970 with an all-reprint one-shot special in January 1972.
Despite their early fate, TOWER OF SHADOWS and CHAMBER OF DARKNESS are landmark issues and it wouldn't be too much longer when the turbo-charged Marvel Monsterbus would pull in with a boatload of successful new horror titles.
Another blast from my past. Again, after this debut issue, I did not get another until years later, but the quality of this is issue is less than ToS but still off the charts for a comic like this. I likely gave them up because of money. It's sounds silly today with prices being what they are, but I was still a kid and money was limited.
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