If you want to combine fun with collecting horror/fantasy comics, I highly recommend that you look at Adventures Into the Unknown.
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The tiny American Comics Group — dwarfed by the likes of Dell, DC, and Timely/Atlas during its two decades of existence through 1967 — produced many of the most amusing and entertaining comics of the late 1940s and 1950s. AITU, as collectors like to call it, was not only the longest-running of the company’s series (174 issues), but also the most historic
Richard Hughes, editor of ACG from start to finish, had a quirky sense of stories for all of his numerous titles, but never more so than in AITU, which was the first regularly published horror comic. If you can possibly afford a low-grade issue of AITU #1 (Fall 1948), by all means get one, even though it’s listed at $215 in “good” in the Overstreet Price Guide. The “old dark house” cover — guy, gal, ghost (?) and a creaky open door — complete with bats in front of a full moon is nothing less than a classic. Fabulous! It doesn’t really show to best advantage in the Gerber Photo-Journal, since there are so many enjoyable subtleties.
“There are no such things as ghosts! There never were and there never will be! Yet, since stories of the supernatural will live forever, we invite you to enjoy the following ‘Adventures Into the Unknown.’” That was how Hughes worded the closing part of his introduction, and it was in that spirit he presented his stories. What made so many of them delightfully different from most horror comics was the “guy, gal, and ghost themes.” So many of his stories were gothic romances long before they became popular.
I highly recommend any of the first 33 issues of AITU, all 52-pagers running through July 1952. It’s really hard to find any of these in “good” or better for less than $20 to $30, but they have so much more to offer in the way of hokey, creepy fun than more expensive comics of the same period. Plus, do you really need to find them in fine or very fine? (Near-mint ACG’s that far back are almost impossible to locate)
AITU became bi-monthly with #2 (Dec. 1948-Jan. 1949), which has an amazingly creepy “face in the island mountain” cover. There are great “dinosaur” covers on # 4 and # 5. In #8 (Dec. 1949-Jan. 1950), you get a zombie’s eye view of the couple on the outside of the “old dark house” on #1. It’s nothing less than one of the best comic covers of the entire pre-Comics Code period! A lot of the ensuing covers are fairly pedestrian, although there are always delights to be found inside every issue. AITU went monthly with #15 (Jan, 1951), so it took a while to catch on — perhaps until other horror publishers got going in earnest.
“The vampire enters in her mirror” cover of #21 (July 1951) is a classic; likewise, the “vampire flying with woman” cover on #23. Ditto for the image of the Grim Reaper surrounded by a vampire and a zombie on #26, which has the classic Williamson/Krenkel story, “The Lost Lives of Laura Hastings.” The “giant spider with a skull” with a woman in the web is yet another shock classic on #33 (July 1952), the last 52-pager. Like most early AITU covers, it doesn’t refer to any story inside.
The covers of the 36-page pre-Code issues (#34-61) are not generally as compelling, but many of the stories are cool. For these, I always recommend carefully looking through each one, since at $15-30 or more you don’t want to waste money. The 3-D effect covers of #51-58 are OK, but they’re overrated, for my money. There is a really great shlocky cover plugging the “Vampire Spider” story — it’s one of the creepiest critters ever to appear on a cover, but the “help, help” from the woman in the foreground takes away from the feeling.
The first five years of the post-Comics Code provided a lot of not-so-good covers with a nice selection of compelling ones, especially since Hughes was forced to come up with far more imaginative stories.
Some of my favorites are #63, “The Tiny Space-Girl” (June 1955); #64, “Coward in
Outer Space!” (July 1955); #73, “The House on Magnolia Street” (June 1956); #74, “The
Deserted City” (July 1956); #77, “The Lost Continent” (Oct. 1956); #91, “The Anyweight
Champion” (Dec. 1957); #98, “Inside the Shell” (July 1958); and #99, “Missing — One
Scientist” (Aug. 1958). Ogden Whitney drew most of the covers for AITU, although the early issues offered some variety.
AITU #74 and #77 were some of the first comics I bought off the stands in 1956, my first as both a reader and a collector. My 8-year-old imagination was captivated! DC’s Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures were obviously a cut or two above almost anything else on the stands in the realm of imaginative stories, but these issues of AITU were always just so much fun to read — as long as you didn’t take anything the least bit seriously!
“The Witch Who Wouldn’t” cover feature on #101 (Oct. 1958) and “Delinquent in Outer Space” on the cover of #114 (Feb. 1960) are great examples of sheer fun. I loved the Hughes epics like “Delinquent” just because they seemed to take a current pop cultural theme and poke so much fun at it. This story is an especially delightful example of that. It’s a 14-pager that has to rank as one of the most compulsively readable of all comic book stories. There was a follow-up story not long after that I still need to add to my collection.
For space and money reasons, and because I read so many comics starting in 1956, I usually don’t write about comics published after the l950s. AITU, though, offers fun stories all the way through the end of its run. I liked “Nemesis,” the ghostly superhero who ran from #154-170 in the mid-1960s, but lots of other collectors don’t like it at all.
In future installments, I’ll try to cover Forbidden Worlds and many of the other ACG titles. My favorite, though, will always be good old AITU.
This is a guest article. The thoughts and opinions in this piece are those of their author and are not necessarily the thoughts of the Certified Collectibles Group.
