Dick Ayers When it comes to the legacy of
renowned comic book artist Dick Ayers, it’s the blind men and the elephant all over again. Many comic book enthusi- asts know Ayers best for his work on Silver Age titles such as The Human Torch and Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. To horror fans, however, the legendary artist’s name conjures images of ghostly vigilantes, rampag- ing monsters, and gore – lots and lots of spurting, squirting, gushing gore. “I got carried away and really drew
some gruesome stuff,” Ayers laughs, recalling his stint as a freelancer for the pulpy horror titles of Eerie Publications in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The 86-year-old’s first foray into the horror genre came in 1949, when he helped create the horror-themed Ghost Rider character for Magazine Enterprises’ popular western series, Tim Holt. He went on to provide pencils and inks for a number of horror, western, war and superhero titles, becoming a regular for Atlas/Marvel Comics. Marvel ac-
counted for much of Ayers’ pre-code horror output, but not all of it. “Charlton had me do a funny book,
like Mad magazine type stuff, called Eh! Dig This Crazy Comic,” he remem- bers. “They also had horror stories, so I got horror stories to do for them, and I could experiment, go a little further and get more horrible than I could at Marvel.” The horror work that Ayers enjoyed
disappeared with the arrival of the Comics Code in 1954. It would be more than a decade before artist/ed- itor Carl Burgos would invite Ayers to return to the genre by reworking pre- Code horror stories for Eerie Publica- tions (not to be confused with Warren Publishing’s Eerie magazine). At first, Ayers was reluctant to deliver the grisly goods that Burgos and pub- lisher Myron Fass wanted, but he eventually relented and got into the gory spirit of things. His work for Eerie on stories such as “I Chopped Her Head Off” and “House of Monsters” is a gonzo blowout of spurting blood, flying body parts and dislodged eye-
rible karmic consequences, and Mirrors (Dark Horse) jux- taposes the cruelty of schoolchildren with mirror-based su- pernatural horrors. Cute and disgusting collide with extraordinary repercussions. DA
Kazuo Umezu
Dubbed “The Godfather of Japanese Horror Comics,” Kazuo Umezu, now in his 70s, created the genre with his Grimm’s fairy tale-like marriage of childlike innocence, to corrupt morality and hideous imagery. Translated works include Reptilia (IDW), The Drifting Classroom (Viz Media) and the Scary Book series (Dark Horse). Featuring monsters, demons, mad- ness, plague, deranged doppelgangers, hideous insects, swamp creatures, even a fecalphilic kindergartner(!) – his inter- est in the extreme and darkly comedic has influenced every horror manga artist in his wake and made him a veritable rock star in Japan (he’s known for his red and white striped wardrobe and house). Having spun off his work into an album, films, TV, collectibles and a haunted house, he’s raised the profile of horror manga considerably. DA
Kiddie Comics
Proving that horror comics can be about more than just flesh-eating ghouls and brutal dismemberments, some of the best artists in the busi- ness satirized the 1950s and ’60s monster craze with naive characters that generally wanted to be good, even though they lived in a topsy-turvy world of horror. Harvey published Casper the Friendly Ghost and Wendy the Good
Marvel Zombies 35RM
balls that had Ayers scrambling to brush up on his knowledge of anatomy, trying to figure out “what was what and where was where.” “It was fun,” he re-
calls with a laugh. “In fact, my mother-in-law, when she saw what I was doing, said, ‘Don’t you get nightmares from drawing that stuff?’ And I said, ‘No, if anything, it gets it out of my system!’” AS
Little Witch, while Gold Key countered with The Little Monsters and Mr. & Mrs. J. Evil Scientist. But perhaps the most successful remains Dell’s Melvin the Monster, which still holds up wonderfully as a reminder that horror can be fun. PAUL C.
Legion of Monsters
Man-Thing! Ghost Rider! Morbius! Werewolf by Night! All four teamed up only once in 1976 for Marvel Premiere #28. They didn’t exactly set the comics world on fire, but a super team of monsters is hard to forget. Rick Remender recently resurrected them (plus the Living Mummy and Manphibian) in his Punisher/ Franken-Castle storyline with nerdgasmic results. PC
Marvel Zombies
Flesh-hungry rotters and spandex superheroes seemed like strange bedfellows before Robert Kirk- man’s Marvel Zombies (RM#55) came along in 2005 to prove us all wrong with its crazy cool al- ternate universe storyline, where the likes of undead Spider-Man, Cap-
tain America and Wolverine fight each other for human flesh. Arthur Suydam’s grotesque re-
workings of classic Marvel cover art is worth the price alone. MSK
Marvel Monsters! Mighty
By the late 1950s, horror comics were rele- gated to mad scientists, invading aliens or giant monsters. When it came to the latter, nobody did it better than Marvel’s Stan Lee
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