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Posted in: Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: BKK Unzine, bleeding cool, house of mystery, vintage comics
BKK Unzine and Bleeding Cool Pick Apart House of Mystery #149
Bleeding Cool and BKK Unzine, Bangkok's premiere online indie comics site, picked apart an issue of House of Mystery #149 from 1965
Article Summary
- BKK Unzine and Bleeding Cool revisit House of Mystery #149, a 1965 DC Comics sci-fi anthology classic.
- Martian Manhunter and other tales feature art by legends like Joe Certa, Alex Toth, and Dick Dillin.
- 1960s House of Mystery reflected US surrealism and anxiety, echoing The Twilight Zone’s body horror.
- Hands-on comic analysis reveals forgotten creators and uncredited stories in vintage comic history.
There's nothing more Proustian than getting to touch a physical copy of a vintage comic like, House of Mystery #149. It's a time machine in decaying yellow newspaper with its sharp smell of acid as the cheap paper decays. Bleeding Cool and BKK Unzine, an indie online comics site and workshop in Bangkok, Thailand showcasing independent comics creators in Southeast Asia, teamed up to look at a nowhere-near-mint copy of the DC Comic from 1965 in one of BKK Unzine's weekly YouTube vlogs.
House of Mystery was one of DC Comics' post EC Comics, Comics Code Authority era anthology Science Fiction comics. #149 featured a Martian Manhunter story as well as writing and art by several classic old school artists from the 1950s and 1960s. It didn't feature credits for the writers and artists and we were left guessing who created those stories. We assumed The Martian Manhunter stories were written by either Gardner Fox or John Broome but apparently it was really Dave Wood with art by Joe Certa, two creators who are now largely forgotten. We successfully identified Alex Toth whose use of blacks, negative space and composition were unmistakable. Other near-forgotten aritsts in this issue included Dick Dillin (who pencilled the majority of the Justice League of America comics through the 1970s), Shedlon Moldoff and Henry Boltinoff. You can feel collectors cringe at our hands touching those decaying pages.
The stories in House of Mystery in the 1960s were part of a post-war wave of genre stories that expressed America's uncertainty. Some of them may have broadly followed the old EC Comics morality tales where a man messes with something he shouldn't faces the consequences, but they expressed an anxiety in uncertain times. House of Mystery was in line with many of DC's other titles including the Superman and Batman lines where borderline Body Horror occurred – people in these stories found themselves unwitting transformed into other creatures, got plagued by giant insects and so on. House of Mystery and DC Comics in general were part of the same wave of surrealism in American pop culture that birthed The Twilight Zone. These stories were hallucinatory and psychedelic before LSD and the Hippie movement exploded in the latter part of the 1960s. They caught the wave of social and psychic change in the zeitgeist. To open up this comic was to enter a time machine back into that time in America, even if you were really standing in a studio in Southeast Asia.
The chaps at BKK Unzine are unself-conscious lovers of comics without the odd political baggage that currently suffuse the West. It allowed us to look at that issue of House of Mystery without any agenda beyond an act of amateur cultural excavation.
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