Beschreibung:

HAUNT OF FEAR No. 9 Author: Place: Publisher: Date: Description: EC (Indicia: "Fables Publishing Co., Inc."). September-October, 1951. Fair/Good (1.5). Nicks, creases, tiny chip at top corner of front cover. Spine heavily taped, with tape on front cover adhering to first page through chip near top staple. Two distributor's rubberstamps to "F" in "FEAR" ("AUG 22 Rec'd). A fully-intact reading copy with off-white pages. Al Feldstein cover. Scripts by Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein Art by Graham Ingels Joe Orlando, Jack Kamen and Jack Davis Feldstein's cover references a scene in Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom and Huck, attempting to perform a midnight wart-removal ceremony in the graveyard, witness a murder. Despite Wertham's concerns that comics degraded children's reading skills, '50s kids were probably more conversant in American literature than the current crop of kids, and many of them presumably would have understood the literary allusion embedded in this cover. Literary Double Header: features "The Gorilla's Paw" by Davis, the first of two EC adaptations of W.W. Jacob's "The Monkey's Paw." As Feldstein later quipped, "How creative we were—changing 'Monkey's' to 'Gorilla's!'" The distributor's stamp on the cover, indicating that the September-October issue of Haunt of Fear was placed on stands near the end of August, helps explain why Haunt was the least-successful of EC's horror mags. It wasn't due of the covers or contents—rather, it's because Haunt was hampered by an out-of-sync publication schedule, resulting in less display time on the nation's newsstands. Comic books, then and now, typically had cover dates several months in advance of their actual street dates, in order to assure a longer life on the newsstands. As John Benson explains in his annotations to Russ Cochran's Complete Haunt of Fear volume 1: "The Haunt of Fear appeared on the stands, issue after issue, on the very day that, based on its cover-date, one would have expected it to be pulled off sale." A limited edition of 100 softcover and 15 hardcover catalogues are available. Over 200 pages, fully illustrated. Fun reference, great keepsake. Softcovers $40, dust-jacketed hardcover with limitation plate $200. To order, contact ivan@pbagalleries.com or visit: https://www.pbagalleries.com/content/comics/. R. Crumb says, "I found [PBA's catalogue] so interesting that I am saving it for the texts that accompany the comics which were put up for auction. This is some of the best commentary I’ve yet seen on the quality of the content of comic books. I especially enjoyed the reviews of the post-war horror comics. Great. Priceless." Consignments welcome for PBA's Spring 2021 Comic Book sale. Pre-Code Horror, Golden Age and Silver Age comics, original art and ephemera sought. Send inquiries to ivan@pbagalleries.com. Lot Amendments Condition: Item number: 316947