Four Color Fear

40 stories make up this collection of 1950s-era horror comics, which should have something to please everyone within its already-yellowed pages. Yes, this is a book published by Fantagraphics, so of course it is designed to stand out on the bookshelf. A softcover book with sturdy binding, excellent paper, 300+ pages, and a $29.99 price tag make this a must-have.

Four Color Fear's Cover, featuring "The Corpse Who Came To Dinner."

On to the contents. The list of creators working on these short stories is often a little difficult to be sure of, as these comics were made before credits were all too common. However, it’s known for sure that a whole bunch of comics luminaries were involved with these creepy tales: Bob Powell, Jack Cole, Basil Wolverton, Al Williamson, Wally Wood, and Joe Kubert all lend a hand in at least one of Four Colored Fear’s stories.

The subtitle of this book is “Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s.” Editor Greg Sadowski must have had quite a time selecting the stories to include in this volume. With EC Comics’ horror titles getting so much attention over the years, Sadowski wanted to divert some of that focus onto the many other companies that were doing their best to frighten people before the infamous creation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954. 


There was definitely plenty of material out there...so much so that some tough choices had to be made in choosing what to select for inclusion in Four Color Fear: no stories published by Atlas Comics are reprinted here (but Sadowski mentions that there are hopes to make another horror book completely focused on the work of that publisher due to its voluminous output) and there are no stories by the inimitable Steve Ditko (but Sadowski points readers to another series of Fantagraphics publications in the Steve Ditko Archives to rectify that omission).

The standard rules of any anthology still apply to Four Color Fear. Some stories are simply better than others. But Sadowski clearly wanted to do his best to adequately represent what the horror comics of the era were like outside of the EC standards. What horror tropes aren’t touched upon in this book? We have zombies, vampires, voodoo, psychological horror, monsters of various shapes, sizes, and deformities, some stories with a tinge of humor, demons, skeletons, cold-blooded murder, graphic violence, you get the picture. Know what you’re in for before you get to reading these comics. 

How about some words about a handful of the stories that stood out to me:

“The Corpse That Came To Dinner” 

It’s true that a lot of the stories here are the classic “twist ending” type of horror tales that became EC’s bread and butter. Well, I really can’t think of a more fun twist than the one in this story. Not to mention how undeniably creepy the artwork by Reed Crandall and Mike Peppe is. Imagine sitting down for a nice turkey dinner with a freakish ghoul who tears his food to shreds and holds a deep grudge against you. You’re trying to sleep when in the middle of the night the zombie is banging a drum as loud as he can. He just won’t leave you alone because he feels that he has every right to be in your house and you just can’t get rid of him.

“Chef’s Delight” 

There is an evil French chef named Francois. He is famous for his signature dish of stuffed cow’s heart. He cheats on his wife and spends lavish amounts of money on his mistress while he lets his son die of appendicitis and repeatedly beats his wife. His wife goes crazy and arms herself with a meat cleaver. You can supply the rest of the details for yourself.

“The Thing From The Sea” 

Murder at sea, except the guy didn’t quite die. He’s walking along the bottom of the ocean and waiting for vengeance, and boy does he get it. Featuring some visceral Wally Wood art.

“The Wall Of Flesh”

This story had a genuinely creepy premise as related in the title. A mad scientist story about greed that ends pretty badly for the bad person (sometimes things go badly for everyone in these stories, but this one has some kind of justice left intact). Bob Powell also has some great ways of showing the passage of time in this story that just has to be seen.

“The Slithering Horror Of Skontong Swamp”

Maybe this was the most truly frightening story in the book. Goldie Ricon is a tough criminal who is on death row. The way prisoners are sometimes disposed of at this particular jail is that they are led into a dismal swamp. Goldie, being as tough as he is, escapes the swamp but only after coming into contact with a host of zombies. He can’t escape the thought of them and finds himself back in prison awaiting execution by the electric chair. He gets fried and then he learns the mystery of the zombies in the swamp...

Great news: Fantagraphics has sold through the first printing of the book and a second edition, with this nice new cover, is going to be available soon.

Besides the high quality restoration of these long-lost comics, Greg Sadowski includes about 20 pages of endnotes. There are specific details on how certain artists came to work on certain projects, and other things that amateur comics historians (such as myself) really can appreciate. 

One last thing to mention is that the middle of the book is a selection of over 30 horror comic covers from the various publications that Four Color Fear’s stories came from. They are presented on glossy paper and you really get the feeling that Fantagraphics found some thousand-odd copies of each of these comics, ripped off the covers, and sandwiched them into the middle of this brand new book. It’s just another testament to the superb work that this company does with everything that they do. Now if only they could get that Comics Journal #301 to ship...I’ve been waiting on that for about a year!