Number 1622: Two vampires and a werewolf

These three tales from pre-Code Atlas horror comics feature three very distinctive artists. Russ Heath drew “The Village Graveyard,” which originally appeared in Adventures Into Unknown Worlds #4 (1952). My scans are from the reprint in Marvel Comics’ Giant-Size Chillers #1 (1974).

Matt Fox drew “I Was a Vampire” for Uncanny Tales #6 (1953), which was reprinted in Giant-Size Dracula #2 (1974). While lacking the professional polish of Atlas artists like Heath or Everett, Fox’s oddball art has an eerie quality. His stiff figures (“stiff” has more than one meaning here) is instantly recognizable. Fox did work for Weird Tales, and had his detractors. Ray Bradbury, for one, referred to “Those terrible Matt Fox horror covers” [for Weird Tales].* But as much as I admire Bradbury, I disagree with his opinion of Fox.**

Finally, the aforementioned Bill Everett did a werewolf story for Menace #9 (1954), in a tale of a dog-hater who has the bite put on him.

*Becoming Ray Bradbury by Jonathan R. Eller, page 91.

**More Matt Fox, this time inking Larry Leiber in some early '60s Marvel Comics. Just click on the thumbnail.

Number 1029


Leiber and Fox


Someone did me a big favor by posting online the backup stories from Marvel's Journey Into Mystery #83 to 104. I bought that comic regularly. Among the stories I remember were the five-pagers by Larry Leiber and Matt Fox.

I thought Leiber's art in those days was kind of rough, and combined with Fox's busy pen inking gave the stories their own oddball look. Like a lot of other fanboys in those days I dismissed it as not being up to the standards of Marvel artists like Kirby and Ditko. I didn't know that Leiber would find a career at Marvel, but at the time I also didn't know he was Stan Lee's brother. To his credit Leiber built a career in comics. He worked at it and got better. I also didn't know that Matt Fox's art was what we'd now call outsider art. He had a particular and peculiar vision. His Weird Tales artwork is considered classic, and here are three of my favorite covers by him:



Fox had also done interior drawings for Weird Tales, and comic book work in the early '50s for Stan Lee and a couple of other publishers.

Nowadays I find the Leiber/Fox team's artwork charming, if I may use that word. I like it and appreciate it more now than when I first saw it.

Here are four of the stories from that online source. "The Purple Planet" is from Journey Into Mystery #98, "The Unreal" from JIM #100, "The Enemies" from JIM #101, and "The Menace" from JIM #102.

The panel reproduced on the top of this page gave my high school buddy Ron and I a big laugh in 1963. We thought it looked like some kind of weird alien urination. It was the interpretation of immature minds, but hey, I still think that's what it looks like.