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.
ReplyDeleteMy allowance only went so far, too, Rip. When the next wave came I was working with no particular responsibilities. There was a local liquor store that always had two full spinner racks of comics, so after payday every week I'd stop by and grab a handful. That's about the time my collection really started building -- the 70's.
ReplyDeleteThe announcement in "Stan's Soapbox" that Marvel is going to ditch continuing storylines and go with "complete in one issue" scripts is amusing-- especially in light of the current beefing about the MCU releases having plots that required you to see not only the previous theatrical releases, but also Disney+ series like WANDA/VISION and MS. MARVEL.
ReplyDeleteMarvel's color and B/W horror comics were kind of a mixed bag, but I enjoyed them at the time and it's fun to see these again after all these years!
Thanks for posting these, John!
-- hsc
Considering Stan Lee's record with The Watcher backups in the Silver Surfer just before these, one has to wonder if Stan's stories here are just re-drawn stories from the early 1960s.
ReplyDeletehsc: The main reason why I stopped buying comics some years ago was because of long story-arcs and crossovers into other, sometimes multiple titles. Although not a factor in this, another gimmick that's annoying to me is the cult of "variant covers". It seems to work as its been going on for awhile.
ReplyDeleteD.D.Degg: Indeed, one wonders. Maybe he was running on empty -- or close to it -- at the time. He'd had plenty of practice with monster stories with Atlas, maybe too much? In any event, despite these being landmark issues, I liked the second wave of the Marvel horror books better.
Definitely, the "second wave" of Marvel horror was much better. (Though I could've done without the "intros" in the early B/W mags that were just a full-page movie still, "fumetti-ed up" with typeset balloons.)
ReplyDeleteThe explosion of crossovers and "alternate covers" during the '90s "boom"-- when geeks foolishly believed "all these comics are an INVESTMENT that will pay off in a few years!"-- are pretty much what led to the "bust" and the current state of things.
Now they seem to be published primarily to preserve the IPs for the corporations that own the comics companies. (OTOH, I haven't bought a comic since the '90s, so I'm a distant observer to all this, and I could be wrong.)
-- hsc
I broke down and bought a couple of the "new" EC's from Oni Press -- not impressed. The famous comics line got revived, but not necessarily resuscitated.
ReplyDelete