Expert: Chris Brown - 5/14/2010

Question
QUESTION: Horror comic likely DC or Marvel (but not necessarily) circa 1976-1985?.  Midieval town reports a monster (not shown initially), and sends a message to the king requesting help in the form of a knight.  The knight arrives and finds the monster.  It is a ball with many tentacles (very alien looking - not what a reader would expect from middle ages context).  The knight is afraid, but attacks the monster, successfully slicing it in half with his sword.  The monster is simply just split in two, and both halves continue to attack the  knight.  The last frame is that the knight urges townspeople to flee.  I'd be willing to pay for your time for searching for this so let me know.

ANSWER: Hi Kent

I appreciate your offer to pay for time spent researching.  The problem with looking for a story is that there are not any real indexes of the horror comics of this period.  Therefore, the only way to look for the story would be to look at every comic published during that period.  It would be a massive undertaking to even locate copies of each comic, much less to take the time to page through each one.

You provide a time frame of approximately 10 years and a belief that the comic may have been by DC or Marvel.  Was the comic a traditional 36 page color comic, or was it a magazine-sized black and white comic?  Was the story you mention one of several stories, or was it the only story in the comic?  Do you remember if the story was featured on the comic's cover?  I'm guessing you have no idea who the artist was who drew the story.

There are, during the time period you mention, many possibilities.  The most likely are Marvel, DC or Charlton if in standard comic-sized format.  It could have been many different publishers if it was magazine-sized.  It sounds a little more grim than your typical comics code-approved story.  It could be a reprint of a 1950s horror story, but there really weren't many sword-and-sorcery or knight-in-shining-armor type stories in those.  It could also have been in one of Marvel's sword-and-sorcery character titles, like Conan, Kull, Red Sonja, etc., but again I'm guessing you would have remembered if it featured a hero figure.

Anyway, if you can provide any more info, I can see if I can be of any help in trying to narrow your search.

Chris

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Chris-
thanks for this.  Here are answers that may help to narrow search.
1.  traditional 36 page color comic
2.  the story was only one of several sorties.
3.  it must have been Marvel, DC, or Charlton (the latter a name I definitely recognize)
4.  this was a horror comic - not tied to a particular hero figure
5.  time frame is narrower - 1975 to 1982 more plausible
Hope this helps.

Answer
Hi Kent

1975 to 1982 was right about the time frame that I was buying lots of new comics.  However, I was just buying superhero stuff then.  Marvel did publish a few horror comics in that time period, but as I said previously, they were mostly reprints of 50s and early 60s material.

So it seems most likely you are looking for a DC or Charlton comic.  The main DC titles to look at would be

House of Mystery
House of Secrets
Strange Adventures
The Unexpected

The main Charlton titles would be

Creepy Things
Ghost Manor
Ghostly Haunts
Ghostly Tales
Haunted
Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves
Midnight Tales
Monster Hunters
Scary Tales

I have really not read a lot of these comics from the 70s.  I have read some of the DC titles listed above in the late 60s.  My feeling is that Charlton is more likely than DC for the story you describe, just based on the bleakness and the medieval elements, but that's really just a hunch.

What I suggest is that you look at some covers of these titles and see if anything rings a bell.  Maybe you'll get lucky and the story you are looking for will be cover-featured.  Or maybe you will remember the cover when you see it.  There is a website

www.comics.org

where you can input the title names and then look at the covers of the series.

Good luck, and let me know if I can be of any further help.

Chris