Ghastly Graham Returns from the Grave . .

Another aspect of this project that wasn't fully realized was a focus on Pre-Code horror comics. Pre-Code refers to the days before the institution of the Comics Code, which was a censorship body of the comics industry. The 1950s were filled with gory and often brutal horror comics directed at kids, young adults, and the college set. Many of these comics were particularly grotesque and can still, even today, make one want to hurl. Though I feel many of these books were truly horrifying, they are shock-fully entertaining. The formation of the Comics Code killed the horror genre for about ten years, nearly destroyed its main target, EC comics, and came close to obliterating comic books altogether. Fortunately that didn't happen. If you're a comics fan, you know the name of EC, and its publisher, William Gaines, very well. For those not in the know, you still are familiar with the stories they published as many of them were adapted for television on HBO's Tales from the Crypt in the 1990s. One of EC's best known artists was "Ghastly" Graham Ingels, an illustrator whose work was often described by the term, "wet horror". His corpses, madmen, witches, and ghouls all looked as if they had sprung from moldy, damp graves. My interpretation of the hand of one of Ingels resurrected undead does not do him justice. Check out his work online . . . it'll give you the heebie-jeebies.