Beating EC to the punch

[Poztron]

Has anyone else noticed the very odd appearance of The Old Witch as host of a spooky story in Yellowjacket #8, which was published in 1945 (cover date Feb '46)?  Laserguy uploaded it recently and this leaped out at me. There must be some back story here, but I wonder what it is!  Anyone have any ideas?

(The book is found in the Charlton section, though it must have been an early version of Charlton when they had decent printing.) 

[Ami_GFX]

Yes, this is very early Charlton before they had their own printing complex. The address on the inside front  cover is not the same Derby CT address of later Charlton comics when they had an enormous complex that ran printing presses 24 hours a day and housed everything else they did including, I believe, a bowling alley for their staff.

And that does indeed look like the Old Witch. Bill Gaines claimed to be the inventor of the horror comic but it looks more like he was the inventor of the first commercially successful horror comic totally dedicated to horror stories. It looks like the concept was floating around long before he jumped on it including the host and word "terror".

[JVJ (RIP)]

Yes, Pozitron,
Lots of people have remarked on this character over the years. It's amazing to me how much of the comics discussions that we had in the 70s are being rehashed again and again. I guess somebody forgot to write it all down, or else they did and then we lost the notebook where it WAS written. So much info, so few repositories... At least now we have GCD where, we can hope, these types of observations can reside once and for all.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[Poztron]

Yes, Pozitron,
Lots of people have remarked on this character over the years. It's amazing to me how much of the comics discussions that we had in the 70s are being rehashed again and again. I guess somebody forgot to write it all down, or else they did and then we lost the notebook where it WAS written. So much info, so few repositories... At least now we have GCD where, we can hope, these types of observations can reside once and for all.

As these books are made available digitally to people who never saw them before, we are bound to have "rediscoveries" over and over. 
It's just the nature of things.  I was aware of some Golden Age comics during the '60s and '70s, but other present comic fans weren't even born then. I've been turned on to many titles and artists from the GA just in the last few years, even though I was in comics fandom in the '60s. Go figure. The revived Alter Ego has been a big help in that regard.

[Yoc]

Yep, love Alter-Ego too.
And JVJ here can usually be spotted in the credits page. 

[Bob Hughes]

Well, Gaines didn't invent the horror comic because Adventures into the Unknown from ACG came out first.  These are all based on pulp/radio prototypes I believe.

Also Sheldon Moldoff claims to have given Gaines the idea and to have put together a prototype first issue for Gaines, but Gaines turned him down causing Moldoff to take his stuff elsewhere.  Anybody remember where elsewhere was?

The "first" anything is always a difficult claim to sustain.  There's always something else earlier somewhere.
There's even an earlier Old Witch than the Charlton one, although I can't remember the publisher- Quality?

My recollection is that Charlton had really good printing up to the flood.  I don't think the press was ever the same afterwards.

[dhfh]

Has anyone else noticed the very odd appearance of The Old Witch as host of a spooky story in Yellowjacket #8, which was published in 1945 (cover date Feb '46)?  Laserguy uploaded it recently and this leaped out at me. There must be some back story here, but I wonder what it is!  Anyone have any ideas?

(The book is found in the Charlton section, though it must have been an early version of Charlton when they had decent printing.) 

There were a whole bunch of weird ("horror") fiction strips that used the figure of an old witch (often with a cat) as the story narrator.  Quality Comics did indeed have one: Hit Comics had tales told by "The Old Witch" in 1940 & '41, from issue #1 to #14 (titled "Weird Tales" in issue #1). 

Zip Comics had "Stories of the Black Witch" (from 1942 & '43; issues #26, #27, #28, #29, & #34; titled simply "The Black Witch" in the last two).  Blue Ribbon Comics had "Tales from the Witch's Cauldron" (from 1942, issues #20, #21, & #22), the witch here apparently intended to be the same character as Zip's "Black Witch" (not too surprising, since they're both MLJ comics).  There are probably yet more, in addition to the Yellowjacket one.

The trend didn't end with EC either, continuing at least into the 1960's with Gold Key's classic "Grimm's Ghost Stories" series.

They can all probably be traced back to one ultimate source: The radio anthology series "The Witch's Tale", a very popular (and in my opinion, very well done) series that ran from 1931 to '38, starring the old Salem witch Nancy as the narrator with her cat Satan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch%27s_Tale

Though a large number (probably most) of the original episodes are believed destroyed, some have survived, and can be found posted on Old Time Radio websites, as they're considered to be in the public domain.


Cheers,

DHFH

[jfglade]

 I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that a book titled "Eerie" could lay claims to being the first horror comic. However, I'll have to check but I believe "Eerie" was published as what looked to be a one-shot issue, two years or so before ACG and EC had their first horror titles, and did not resume publication again until horror was established as a viable market.

[JVJ (RIP)]

It all depends, jf,
on your modifier for "first". Eerie was the first horror comic. Adventures into the Unknown was the first "continuing" horror comic. You can always find some subset of a genre for which the "first" appellation is valid.

(|:{>

[Poztron]

There were a whole bunch of weird ("horror") fiction strips that used the figure of an old witch (often with a cat) as the story narrator.  Quality Comics did indeed have one: Hit Comics had tales told by "The Old Witch" in 1940 & '41, from issue #1 to #14 (titled "Weird Tales" in issue #1). 

[several more examples...]

They can all probably be traced back to one ultimate source: The radio anthology series "The Witch's Tale", a very popular (and in my opinion, very well done) series that ran from 1931 to '38, starring the old Salem witch Nancy as the narrator with her cat Satan.

Thanks, dhfh, for all the info. From what you say I can see that the old witch narrator was pretty standard fare by the time of the EC horror comics. What particularly leaps out at me, though, from the Yellowjacket #8 story is how close the Old Witch there looks like a "rough" for the later Feldstein-drawn character.

[Yoc]

Isn't it fun to see how much there is to learn about these old books when you stumble across them the first time?
For example when I first discovered DeCarlo art in Ziff Davis' GI JOE books it was so unexpected I jumped up and banged my head! 

[Poztron]

Isn't it fun to see how much there is to learn about these old books when you stumble across them the first time?
For example when I first discovered DeCarlo art in Ziff Davis' GI JOE books it was so unexpected I jumped up and banged my head! 

And it isn't just learning things about specific books or artists. What the GA scans available have also helped with has been achieving a kind of global overview, where we can begin to see the relationships between different companies, the movement of artists and studios between companies, and the permutations of characters and titles as they evolve over the years. And reference sites like GCD and Atlas Tales have played an important role in this, too.  I'm looking forward to the day when all public-domain comics are available. Won't that be something? 

[JVJ (RIP)]

What's really changed, guys,
is that there is now a central repository for this data. So many of us have rediscovered so many things over the years. And some of us have even forgotten that we used to know stuff and gone and re-rediscovered it. Having the GCD should help immensely in the longest run.

(|:{>

[Yoc]

As long as it doesn't turn into Wikipedia sure.

[John C]

What's really changed, guys,
is that there is now a central repository for this data. So many of us have rediscovered so many things over the years. And some of us have even forgotten that we used to know stuff and gone and re-rediscovered it. Having the GCD should help immensely in the longest run.

It's also not just the formal information.  That's certainly useful, but we also have an increasing amount of the source material for discussion and confirmation, and something of a critical mass of people to talk about it.

I think there's also a lot more to be mined along the lines of Poztron's original post.  Even if there's no "human continuity" to establish between these diifferent titles and companies, to me, it's interesting to be able to say that Gaines or Moldoff might have been reading Yellowjacket, or the degree to which it "stuck" with them.  Tracing the "currency of ideas" can be just as enlightening as tracing the people or characters.