|
|
|
||
|
||
| "Cuentos de Brujas" Nº39, Editora de Periódicos "La Prensa", 31 January 1955. I chose this one as a sample of the magazine final stages, with the infamous Comic Code menacing in the near future, sales down and general debacle about to dismember the comic universe almost for good... The cover is by Howard Nostrand (no trace of signature, but I could bet on it), the only artist of the Harvey group that could rival Bob Powell. Both masters contributed with inner art also, in a magazine that still maintained its standards in this field. But the scripts had by then become a pale shadow of former masterpieces of the genre. With their pretended "surprise endings" (maybe an imitation of the E.C. style), and their lack of "horrific fantasy", they retained very little of the charm that used to make the Harvey horror comics stand high above other comic books of the same sort. Even humor was introduced, a clear signal of decadence in that kind of books. Things would continue by this descending path until the end ("Cuentos de Brujas" would still keep going in its Mexican edition, using stuff taken from other sources instead of Harvey's, mainly the Farrell group), not without an occasional little "jewell" now and then, but always well under the standards of its years of glory. A comic book, all in all, worthy of collecting in its complete run, despite this final decrease in quality, which, on the other hand, was general for all comic books in the late '50s. | ||
|
||
    |
