Ghastly Terror!: The Horrible Story of the Horror Comics

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, but nothing new
Review: After having read New England Comics's Tales Too Terrible To Tell collection, and a lot of the wonderful EC reprints from Russ Cochran/Gemstone, I have to reassess this book. While Sennitt keeps the book moving, his work is extremely derivative. His anti-EC bias is also way off base, and just plain old tiresome after a while. I did enjoy his stuff on Warren and Skywald, but he's no athority on pre-code.

For that, the above-mentioned TTTTT, and Mike Bentons Illustrated History of Horror Comics (if you can find it cheap) are recommended.



Rating:
Summary: I loved it!
Review: I really loved this book. I found it refreshingly non EC, as many other works seem bound to push EC and nothing else. Ghastly Terror goes places the others don't. A plus is that it is filled, not just with information, but also many images from the pages of interesting and rare old horror comics. The history is completed in a chronological and not overly rhetorical fashion. Break the mold and check out a fresh look with this one. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Problematic
Review: Mr Hilliard's review is right on the money. However, it should also be mentioned that a good deal of the information on pre-code horror appears to have been simply lifted from the hard work conducted in Tales Too Terrible to Tell--a reprint/history series from the 90s.

Rating:
Summary: A Horror Comic Collector's Wet Nightmare!
Review: Stephen Sennitt is a very entertaining and informative writer, and is obviously obsessed with his subject matter. He doesn't waste time dissecting horror comics academically. He just gushes knowledgably about a subject he loves. A very fun read and a really good over-view!

Rating:
Summary: Ultimately Unsatisfying
Review: Stephen Sennitt, the author of "Ghastly Terror!: The Horrible Story of the Horror Comics", declares in his intro that this book is meant to be an "enthused appreciation of horror comics", and not a scholarly review of the subject. And, as with much writing about the comics medium, he succeeds only in his enthusiasm. This is both a blessing and a curse, as he waxes poetic about the Skywald magazines of the seventies, but then denigrates a large body, thousands upon thousands of pages of work in the form of DC and Charlton titles, to less than a page shrift, because he found them not at all interesting when he read them. In the case of several artists working for both Warren and Charlton, Steve Ditko and Tom Sutton, he seems compelled to malign their Charlton work, irrespective of some of the mind-bending cover work Sutton was doing at that time for "Ghost Manor." One feels that Sennitt has never even seen these works. Indeed, it seems as though his research led him only to what he was interested in prior to his writing, not to any point of discovery. While hoping for some insight into the horror comic genre as a whole, we are given, as in the case of Warren and Skywald, list upon list of stories that appeared in titles along with synopsis and author credits. Similarly with his view of the pre-code comics, we are given insight into grotesque covers and story lines sans any real attempt at analysis. This is compounded by artwork from referenced works being often a good six to eight pages before their mention in the text. Very aggravating to the reader to be flipping back and forth. This is compounded by the fact that in several occasions the descriptors do not match the art reproductions - as titles clearly seen in the art are mistitled in the captions underneath. All of which mars some fantastic reproductions of art you will not often see. In fact, I would hazard to say this is some of the best black an white reproduction of color panels that I have seen in a long time. Which makes the book that much more frustrating. It begs for someone to say something meaningful about these works. Unfortunately, this seems common in, all too common in books about comics - this tendency to let enthusiasm curb discussion. He describes the latter period of Warren magazines as full of lesser scale stories, yet their is no adequate explanation as to why. What makes these lesser works? Art? Story? Sennitt's opinion? It is frustrating. And his dismissal causes errors to creep into the text as well, as he describes Dell and Gold Key as separate companies during his dismissal of DC and Charlton books of the seventies. Which leads one to wonder about the accuracy of his pre-code index at the end of the book, which one really doesn't want to contemplate at all.

Altogether, Sennitt is an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying text redeemed somewhat by its reproductions.