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Tuesday, May 27

Black Magic


Here's another of the comics I had as a kid. It's a DC book from 1973. This one has stories reprinted from an earlier series of the same name. All the art is by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. The cover is a real knockout!

The stories are interesting in that they're a bit tamer than EC comics, and tend toward less gore and in some cases less supernatural and more naturally explained story lines. Such as the 3 pager "BIRTH AFTER DEATH" in this issue. The tag line says "The incredible true story of a man who was born five years after his mother died...", yet the twist is she was buried alive and awoke when grave robbers opened her coffin.

I read this quote on a webpage today: The accent was on mood not rotting corpses "It was too close to reality for me," Kirby commented, "I'd just gotten back from the war." (http://www.stevestiles.com/kirby2.htm)


Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the series:

Black Magic is the name of a fifty-issue horror anthology comic book series published by Prize Comics from 1950-1961. Its numbering continued for three more issues as the humor comic, Cool Cat.

DC Comics published a nine-issue series reprinting material from the earlier series by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. The new incarnation featured new covers with the same logo as the earlier issues of the Prize series and ran from 1973-1975. The reprint issues generally grouped the stories by theme; for example, all the stories in issue #1 dealt with intolerance toward human oddities, while all the stories in #4 were about death.
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Fun stuff!!

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