THE WOLPIRE IN TRUEVISION!

What do you get when you cross a wolf man with a vampire? Why, a Wolpire, of course! This is just one of the quirky stories you'll find in this issue of ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN #53 (March 1954).

Somehow, the American Comics Group (ACG for short) was able to fly mostly under the radar of Dr. Wertham's discerning eye for "unwholesome" comic book content. That doesn't mean the Richard Hughes edited titles didn't serve up some crazy horror stories.

Harry Lazarus illustrated all the stories here. He was an artist, writer, inker, letterer, editor and all-around idea man. One of his most unique inspirations was pitching the idea of adding 3-D comics to the ACG line. At this point in the 1950s, 3-D movies, comics and other media were all the rage. Dell, EC, Harvey, St. John and DC all tried them with varying degrees of success. The problem was, a reader had to wear special 3-D glasses to get the full effect and most of the time they weren't only uncomfortable, but didn't seem to work so hot.

That didn't deter ACG from giving them a shot, only their comics did something different: they dispensed with the glasses and formatted the art to imitate the effect with a weird type of quasi 3-D art. Dubbed "Truevision", it was achieved by black page borders and panels drawn with foreshortening, forced perspective and using lots of Zip-A-Tone (thanks computer graphics for killing this really fun-to-use product) in the grayscale backgrounds for dimensional contrast. I have to say that the technique didn't quite make the grade, but they were still very interesting and kinda cool.

Unfortunately, the 3-D craze was already on its way out, and ACG dropped using Truevision in their comics by the end of 1954.