Beschreibung:

CGC certified: Pedigree Grade: VF+ (8.5). Off-white pages. Light tanning edge of interior front and back cover. Lee Elias cover. Stories and art by Bob Powell, Howard Nostrand, Joe Certa, John Giunta, and Manny Stallman. Northford collection. Additional provenance: Metropolis Comics label to back of CGC holder. The Northford collection, found in a chest of drawers sold to an antique dealer in the early '70s, contained the most complete run of pre-Code horror comics of all pedigreed collections. Northford mags can be identified by a small "circle-X" stamp on back covers. "Suddenly five o'clock shadow doesn't seem so bad anymore." -EC, MAD and Pre-Code HORROR Comics of the 1950s [Green Apple: 1997]. Throat-slashing barber cover & story. Atom bomb panels. Man drinks booze, ignites, burns alive from inside-out. Fireworks ad from the good old days when kids could order explosives by mail: "Contains a full day's fun - Sky Rockets, Cherry Bombs, Aerial Shells," etc. "The timing [of the horror comics boom] was apt. On September 3, 1949, U.S. government intelligence discovered that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb. Suddenly, for most Americans, young people among them, the Cold War was no longer a political abstraction, a jumble of foreign maps with dotted borders or debates about economic theory, but a palpable threat of vast and gruesome devastation. The zombies with hollow eye sockets and skin peeling off their bones who haunted the boneyards in the panels of [horror comics] could not have been far removed from the readers' mental pictures of their own fate in the wake of the nuclear holocaust now possible at any moment." -David Hadju, The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America [FSG: 2008]. CGC census: Two 8.5 copies (seven copies graded higher). Top 10 copy. Comparable CGC sales: No 8.5 sales in over 15 years. Most recent sale in any grade: 4.5 copy sold for $482 (Oct. 2019).