THIS ONE'LL FLOOR YOU!

Here's another twisted tale from TORMENTED #2 (Sterling, September 1954). It seems apartment building janitor Cyrus Madden is a bit obsessed with cleanliness and his landlady has scolded him for chastising her tenants for mussing up his floors. There's no love lost between them and Madden has had enough, killing her with a knock on the head with a shovel. Madden's conscience gets the better of him and he ends up a victim of his own fixation.

The art is by Mike Roy.

HEADLESS AND LOVING IT

Mrs. Van Dell is the financial sponsor of Leopold, a very talented ceramic artist who is also very insane. She rejects everything he makes because it is not "lifelike" enough. Leopold finally develops a technique that he's certain she'll lose her head over in this wicked little tale called "Design for Death" from TORMENTED #2 (Sterling, September 1954), published just before the release of the Comics Code Authority.

The prolific pulp and comic book artist Bill Ely illustrated the story. Ely worked in the comics industry from the 1930's into the 1960's for publishers such as DC, Dell, Charlton, Fiction House, Marvel, Ziff-Davis and others.

HORROR COMICS AFTER THE CODE

After the Comics Code Authority went into effect in September 1954, publishers went into panic mode -- not immediately because of the Code guidelines -- but mainly because distributors and newsstand dealers began refusing orders for fear of public backlash and boycott. The last thing they wanted to have happen was close their shops and lose their livelihoods; after all, they had plenty of other types of comics and magazines to sell that weren't affected by the Code.

Many publishers out-and-out dropped their horror titles and some morphed them into new titles with Code-compliant content. One such publisher was Sterling Comics Inc., who only put out one horror title during the Pre-Code period, THE TORMENTED. They came late to the game and published only two issues when the hammer fell. Instead of dropping it, they modified the title and the content and with what would have been the third issue, they instead published it in March 1955 as the first issue of SURPRISE ADVENTURES. The resulting comic was given the CCA stamp of approval as seen on the cover. The worst we see here is a man falling out of a plane and another one being hit by a car.

This is a fairly common example of what happened to horror comics after they were neutered -- in other words, most of their bark was gone. One look at these stories and its easy to tell that the heyday of horror comics was over.

SURPRISE ADVENTURES

Vol. 1 No. 3 (First issue)

March 1955

Editor: Martin Smith

Cover: Mike Sekowsky

Pages: 36

Cover price: 10 cents

CONTENTS

"Guilty?"

Script: ?

Art: Mike Sekowsky

"One Way Trip"

Script: ?

Art: Myron Fass

"The Luckiest Man in the World"

Script: ?

Art: Mike Sekowsky

"The Last Number"

Script: ?

Art: Edvard "Ed" Moritz

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