If you've been reading this thing for the last 4 years, you'll know that November 1st is what the Celtic called Samhain (or Sow-in). End of summer. Beginning of the dark part of the year. And the night when the membrane between the living and the dead is at it's most easy to penetrate. Today is that day.
Ain't no secret to any readers that as a kid my face was frequently buried in comic books. Some of my fondest memories lay in deposits of four color artwork pressed into newspaper substrate. This may be my age calling, but I'll take the dulled out vintage color over today's glossy hyper-brite, over-detailed stuff that exist today in the format.
Yes, my comic book life blood is known as "The Bronze Age".
Almost as much as I loved the tales of my superheroes and other characters, I adored the advertisements. Especially the seasonal ones. Like legendary artist Jack Davis' Dracula and Wolfman snappin' into a Slim Jim that came around in the fall of 1977's comics. That was the good stuff, folks.
There was one ad that bugged me a bit as an 8 year old though. It was for the horror comic known as Unexpected. It featured a woman performing on stage while half of her face is melting off, and staring from behind her appears to be the individual responsible for it with a twisted, evil grin on his face. I guess it's disturbing in general, but as young as I was, it really weirded me out.
I was never a reader of horror comics minus this issue of House of Secrets that was part of a past Samhain Project. Click on the title, and flash back if you wish to. Otherwise, I subscribed to the philosophy of Sammy from The Lost Boys, and pretty much avoided horror comics as a whole. But this image really got under my skin.
A couple of months back I was at a mercantile, digging through a gentleman's wares which consisted of wall art, vinyl albums, and a handful of longboxes of comic books. And there, in the box farthest to the right, adjacent to a cabinet with slews of Lego mini-figures I found it.
And there it was.
That old familiar inhale of nostalgia. The vibe absorbed when seeing something you once saw so often, but hadn't in decades. That feeling is quite a rush when you grew up with the interests that I had. This particular issue of Unexpected was $1.00 in it's day, some 45 years ago, and the tag on it now only asked for $3.00. It seemed really stupid not to make the purchase. So I did.
However, I still haven't popped it open to read the story behind that stupefyingly creepy imagery. It's not that I'm afraid to, but part of me feels as though I may ruin something by removing the mystery. Maybe I'll peel back the tape and pull the book out of its bag and board for next Halloween.
Anyway. It's November 1st, and it's Samhain. So, as depressing as it is for me to say goodbye to what many are now calling Spooky Season, (and lord knows, I did all I could to hold on to it and make it last as long as it possibly could) I can look forward to possibly reviewing it for next year's Samhain Project.
And what better way to rock in November and Fall, then with Glenn Danzig and Samhain.....
