Among comic book fans, the legend of EC Comics loomed large. Even among readers who’d never experienced the books firsthand, there was an awareness of how the company had set a high benchmark for quality, and how they’d been undone and destroyed by the implementation of the Comics Code. There’s been occasional attempts to recapture the magic of the EC line–in particular, Jim Warren’s group of black and white magazines had initially been attempting to do just that. But that ineffable appeal remained elusive. However, in the early 1980s for a brief period of time, one series managed to do just that. This was TWISTED TALES, published by Direct Sales Market newcomer Pacific Comics.
TWISTED TALES was the brainchild of writer/editor Bruce Jones, and it wore its influences on its sleeve. It’s approach to content (four self-contained horror stories of between 6-8 pages), trade dress and even its occasional use of Leroy Lettering made that clear to any member of the audience who cared. But the other thing that TWISTED TALES had going for it was a lack of restraint. “Mystery” comics had become a staple of the American comic book scene, so called because the Comics Code prevented them from publishing anything that could legitimately be referred to as horror. But as a Direct Sales publisher, Pacific Comics didn’t need to submit their books to the Code–they could publish anything they wanted to, and did. The book also hit the zeitgeist at an advantageous time as CREEPSHOW, Stephen King’s tribute to those EC comics of long ago, having opened a short time earlier.
This first issue of TWISTED TALES contained four stories, all of which were written by Bruce Jones. The opener was illustrated by Richard Corben, who had come to prominence at Warren as an artist with a unique style and color approach. Here, though, Jones doesn’t give Corben much space to work. Like the EC books he was emulating, Jones goes overboard on filling blocks of tepid prose, forcing Corben to fit in the visuals around them. As with many of the EC stories, the tale is really told in the final page/ It’s about Oscar Felps, a reposesser for a collection agency who sleeps with a woman whose account is delinquent despite the fact that she tells him that she has crabs. Well, turns out that’s a literal condition, and the next morning, Felps gets eaten alive by the little buggers. It’s very EC, but somehow a bit nastier, a bit more unsavory. But that could simply be the difference between the 1950s and the 1980s.
The second story is illustrated by Alfredo Alcala, an artist who was typically used as an inker/finisher in the States. His style was texture-filled and almost tailor-made for black and white. Here, it’s a bit overcolored, and so loses some of its impact and appeal. The story is a riff on the kinds of tales Jack Kamen would inevitably illustrate. It’s about a gold-digging young woman who only has eyes for the new administrator of the Camp at which she serves as a counselor. She in turn is pursued by an ugly and foul-smelling guy named Willie. When the administrator cheats on her, she winds up marrying Willie as payback. Turns out, though, Willie is secretly loaded, so she and the administrator plot to bump him of so that they can have his bankroll. They drown him out in the Camp’s lake, but he rises once again to take his revenge on the two of them. The last page in particular is especially disturbing, as the woman lays down on her bed in expectation of Willie’s return, telling herself that she “should have let him have me when he didn’t smell so bad”. Ugh!
The third story was illustrated by Bret Blevins and was done at the outset of his career. The drawing is nice, but Blevins’ ink line is inconsistent and the coloring once again too heavy, so the end result isn’t as attractive as it ought to be. The story is a potboiler about a couple, John and Alice, whose car breaks down in the woods, forcing them to get out and look for help. They find themselves stepping successively into one fairy tale situation after another: an old witch in a gingerbread house, a cottage containing three bowls of porridge and an angry bear, and so forth. In the end, remaining behind while John goes to the next house of to find a phone, Alice ends up killed when Red Riding Hood’s granny turns out to actually be a werewolf, and John’s own ending is implies as he heads up a steep hill with a woman named Jill to get a pail of water…
The final tale in the issue was drawn by Tim Conrad, though again the heavy coloring does it no favors. The story is perhaps the most effective one in the issue. It follows a trio of kids trick-or-treating on Halloween. Despite the fact that they’re all a bit too old for this, they dutifully go on about their appointed rounds. But every house they knock at, the inhabitants are utterly terrified by their appearance for no discernable reason. Jones does a nice job building up the slow burn of the mystery of what this is all about throughout the story.
It turns out that seven years before, a group of the kids had set fire to some trash on the stoop of one of the houses as a Halloween prank, and the place burned to the ground with another kid in it–Skeeter. And since that time, on each successive Halloween, Skeeter has come back, and the kids have walked that same pattern once again. Only each time, it’s one of the remaining perpetrators of the original crime that gets burned to death by the others. As a reading experience, while TWISTED TALES wasn’t quite as sharp or original as the EC books it was emulating, it was still pretty effective and lurid. And it’s easy to see why it caused a bit of a stir among fans. Jones followed it up almost immediately with ALIEN WORLDS, his take on one of EC’s science fiction comics–but we’ll get to that in due time.
