House of Secrets #152, DC Comics, June/July 1978 – Artist: Vincente Alcazar.
House of Secrets #152 combines the great visual effect with actually being pretty unsettling.
I thought Four Color #152 was very bold and striking, and Action Comics #152 has an eye catching appeal to it, must be those gorgeous blues.
Unexpected gave us another great cover and what the heck is up with Girls’ Romances!?
A great comic book cover matching each day of the year, 1 through 365. Please chime in with your favourite corresponding cover, from any era.
That might be some nice art Walt, but the color and shading sucks…uninspiring as Horror covers go. C minus
David, I think its effective. Consider tge target audience, 12 year old boys, and I think the brown and dark colors, and contrast, might be effective on the stands. Like a scary movie or a nightmare. You have to hand it to DC, they were experimenting beyond traditional “colorful” covers in these horror titles. Just like they used them often as a tryout for young artists like Wrightson, Kaluta and friends….
its funny, I thought it was Colon art when I first saw it. Its true Bud, I did/do appreciate DC and Charlton Horror books of that era
Walter, to follow up your thoughts yesterday about Nick Cardy…i agree, he was doing powerful, innovative work. Even if you can’t compare his storiy art with Neal Adams, and on some I tgink you could, I think you can do that with his covers. Cardy was on a par with Adams. Yet Neal was a relatively young buck…he’d only done Ben Casey in the papers for a few years before leaping into comics.
But Cardy…as Nicolas Viscardi, he was doing work in the early 1940s, for Quality’s Police Comics, Lady Luck backups in the Spirit section, tons of work across all the Fiction House titles.
Yet he came into his own in Neal’s period, now a veteran illustrator. Cardy was born in 1920, making him 58 years old when he drew this. Adams was born in 1941…21 years younger than Cardy.
Others artists like Tuska had their best years in the 1940s. George was in all the books early in the Golden Age, doing extremely competent work. I didn’t think a lot of his much later Marvel work, but some do like it. Poor Mort Meskin was brilliant in the Golden Age, but was mostly hacking it out later on, and cruelly treated by editor Mort Weisinger for it. Again, not all bad in later days, but a shadow of the innvovator he was in the 1940s on Vigilante and other strips.
Many artists settled into their style and stopped pushing the boundries. Another one who just got better and better was Gil Kane.
When the comics code loosened and the regular comics publishers were able to make scarier comics it seems works like this were emulating what was going in in adult comics from Warren and Heavy Metal.
Good point about Cardy’s age Bud and the fact that he kept pushing his art style. Perhaps comic artists are like rock stars doing their best work in the 1st decade then touring casinos and amusement parks in their later years. It’s hard being continually creative.