Men call him....The Phantom Stranger!



I first discovered the Stranger in the pages of the Legends cross-over when I was first shedding my Marvel Zombie ways and exploring DC comics (rather than DC characters in other medium) in depth for the first time in high school (I had random DC issues as a kid but nothing steady until high school). Soon afterwards I discovered Secret Origins #10...



...and I was hooked. The sense of mystery and intrigue about him was so compelling to me. I quickly sought out issues of his series (they were cheap then) and assembled nearly the entire run, devoured everything I could get with him in it (he brought me to Moore's Swamp Thing) and the Kupperberg/Mignola mini as well.

Part horror host, part supernatural tour guide, part humble powerhouse, there were so many different stories you could tell and few ever tapped the full potential of the character. I absolutely despised what DC did with him in the new52, stripping him of all the mystery and intrigue and tying him into the Iscariot legends just missed everything that was appealing to the character, settling him down and making him a closet family man was even more utterly unfathomable (even J.M. DeMatteis whose work I mostly enjoy a lot couldn't save that wretched misstep by Didio). But in terms of his classic appearances, and stories, the Stranger is among my absolute favorites.

-M

I always preferred The Munsters, myself, but I've never read any of the comics.

My 8 year old has been enjoying the Dell Bewitched comics recently, but that's a little further outside of the horror genre.

I don't recall Gahan Wilson ever drawing the Addams Family.  When did he do that?

Week 4: Werewolf by Night

I guess I'm just a Bronze Age Ploog fanboy. I was exactly the right age for the Marvel horror boom. This was the first Mike Ploog work that I ever saw, and I was hooked from the start. He didn't do the cover on the first Werewolf story, but he did most of them for the next year or two, as well as the interior art.













And some interior pages:

2. Simon Garth, the Zombie in Tales of the Zombie #1-9, by (primarily) Steve Gerber and Pablo Marcos
Some things just push your buttons. 
When I started reading comics in 1971, I was really more a monster fan than a comic book fan. I bought comics to satisfy my monster fix.
I quickly became more of a superhero fan, but I was still very receptive to monsters in those early collecting days. And I was especially receptive to this ad:

This was something I had to have! The logo, the character design, the very concept thrilled me! I wasn't sure how you could make a zombie into the star of a comic book, but man, I wanted to see them try! I've always been a sucker for off-beat ideas, and this was undoubtedly going to be one.
...
Unfortunately, I never saw Tales of the Zombie #1. Or #2. I saw most of the other Marvel black & white monster comics, but this one eluded me. I'm not sure when I finally spotted an issue, but it might have been #5:

...and I was not disappointed! This comic was fascinating--Steve Gerber managed to imbue this ongoing saga of a cursed corpse, at the control of whoever held the matching amulet of Damballah, with humanity, pathos, and chills. 
Some time later, I found a copy of the first issue, and was delighted to learn that it was spun out of a reprint of an old Atlas story. For some reason, I always loved the idea of taking this kind of long-forgotten one-shot concept and turning it into an ongoing epic. So, apparently, did Steve Gerber. He wasn't responsible for initially converting Bill Everett and Stan Lee's short into a continuing series, but he did something similar with Defenders villains the Headmen.



Gerber's scripts were perfectly supported by the artwork of Pablo Marcos. Pablo's drawings had plenty of weaknesses that were obvious to me even then, but I loved the effect he brought to this series, the decay of corpse flesh, the sweaty wetness of Louisiana, the dirt, the flames, the textures...

I didn't get to enjoy the Zombie for long. Far too quickly, the end came for the comic and for Simon, in the touching finale, written by another favorite, Tony Isabella. Simon returns to life for 24 hours, setting this straight as best he could, before passing on to his final, well deserved eternal rest. I hated to see it end, but I was glad to see it end so well. 
With any other Marvel comic, I could have expected a quick revival (and indeed, one was scheduled for the never-published issue 11), but the Comics Code insured that this wasn't going to happen in Marvel's color comics, and their B&W comics were being pared way down. So I made my peace with the end of Simon Garth, who had so quickly become one of my favorite horror comic characters. 

Jim Corrigan AKA The Spectre. 

This could easily have been my number one.  Corrigan got placed here, at least in part, due to external reasons.  

This is mostly due to the amazing work of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, who tuned in one of the absolute best comics of the 90s with their work on The Spectre.  Though it also is due to the work of Fleischer and Aparo on Adventure Comics, one of the more chilling code approved features.  

And when I say Corrigan I mean it.  Corrigan is much more interesting than The Spectre and they are somewhat distinct from each other.  Ostrander and Mandrake give us a man who needs to make a journey to understand himself.  And at the conclusion he gets the opportunity for closure from that understanding.  But along the way...there's some pretty horrific stuff.