I’ve written about how much I enjoy following the comics months hashtags over the years, even though I completely miss some and overindulge on others. And in some cases, I can’t even remember what the theme of the month was.

But I always remember that October is #HorrorComicsMonth.

Because duh. It’s OCTOBER.

Anyway, when I was younger, horror comics weren’t something I really paid attention to. My LCS did stock reprints of Tales from the Crypt and other EC classics (some of which I’ve read here) and DC was certainly chugging along with their mature readers books that would evolve into Vertigo, but for the most part, my attention was on superheroes. Plus, gone were the glory days of DC’s 1970s horror line, a few of which I’ve got here. But now that we’ve got these designated months, I am more willing to grab a random horror book out of a cheap bin at a convention or one of my comics store’s tent sales (I’m really hoping that they do one this Thanksiving).

This time around, I have Ghosts #61 and 85 from DC; The Unexpected #191 (which is a three-in-one dollar book that includes The Witching Hour and House of Secrets), also from DC; and two of Gladstone Comics’ reprints of some 1950s EC books: Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror (which also contains stories from Weird Fantasy). And while I enjoyed all of the comics that I read, I think this is one of the first times I really saw the difference between the stories published by the two companies. Now don’t get me wrong, I always knew that EC’s 1950s horror comics were very violent, always dark, and were some of the primary examples in Frederic Wertham’s crusade against comics in the early 1950s. But man, the difference …

That’s not to say that the DC stuff was subpar. In fact, The Unexpected had some really solid stuff, including some outstanding art (including one story drawn by Marshall Rogers and Bob Layton). The stories in that issue of course have your typical weird twist endings and are not as gruesome as anything in Tales from the Crypt, but “The Harpies are Coming” about a guy who gets ESP and uses it for fun and profit, “The Darkness Beyond” where a guy’s efforts to lure a girl into a Satanic ritual go completely awry, and “The Dead Do Cry” about some weird mad doctor (with the Rogers/Layton art) are all Bronze Age horror nuggets.

But man, those Gladstone reprints of the EC stuff? So good. I’ve been working on getting as many of these as I can get my hands on–for a reasonable price, that is–and I am really looking forward to seeing them pop up at my LCS. The Tales from the Crypt issue has a solid werewolf story; another about a decaying bride and her cad of a husband; and The Vault of Horror has “Whirlpool”, which is an unsettling tale of a woman’s madness. If you can find any of these, snatch them up.

So, the verdict?

Keep: The Unexpected, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror
Not Keeping: Ghosts