Ryan B does Faced With Horror

Along with horror titles such as The Vault of Horror, The Crypt of Terror, and The Haunt of Fear, EC Comics was also responsible for being the leading publisher of crime comics in the early 1950's. Sure there had been crime stories on the news stands before, in pulp novels aimed more at adult readers than kids. Books like The Shadow and The Spider were heavy on words and not much on pictures, with a serious, more realistic tone. They featured masked avengers solving mysteries and were akin more to what would later be superhero tales more so than horror comics. EC changed that by having their crime comics such as Two-Fisted Tales and Crime SuspenStories deal with bad things happening to bad people. There were no werewolves or vampires here, but there were adulterous spouses and axe weilding madmen and were just as taboo and envelope pushing as anything the Crypt-Keeper could come up with.

So let's take a look at one of these nasty little noirs. It's a story of crime and vanity from one of the earliest issues of Crime SuspenStories called...

Faced With Horror. 

Ryan B does The Roots Of Evil

So in 1951 when EC Comics launched their very first horror comics, thus giving birth TO the horror comic, and starting the "new trend", DC, like so many other publishers, decided to jumped on the horror bandwagon. The result was The House Of Mystery.

Unlike many of the other followers, however, DC actually knew what they were doing. After all, this is the company whose initials stand for Detective Comics, so they should at least know how to do a good mystery and suspense story, right? Unfortunately, when the comics code authority cropped up and started putting the kibosh on horror/suspense/crime comics, DC decided to yield to them rather than die a premature death like EC did.

Thus The House Of Mystery morphed from a classic horror book into a superhero book with moderately creepy undertones. Tales like the serialized, Dial H For Hero, became the regular in HOM's pages and it seemed like it was in a downward spiral. That is until old EC alumni, Joe Orlando, took over as editor in 1968. He decided to breath new death into the book and return it to it's sinister roots. He also introduced a host to The House (something that every self respecting horror anthology needs).

This mysterious figure was Cain, the proverbial "first killer" who layed his brother low. Cain took over as "able" caretaker (get it?) in issue 175, but it's the issue after that (176 for all you delinquents who flunked math) that we'll be looking at today. Remember I mentioned about The House Of Mystery being taken back to it's roots? Well that's exactly the same subject that today's story is about. It's a gnarled bit of deadwood Cain calls...

The Roots Of Evil.