Terror Tales, 1971

Let's name a few of the many things wrongs with this cover...

Awesome cover. I definitely want to pick this one up. Problem is, in none of the stories do you see a werewolf driving a wooden stake into a chick vampire. In fact, the only werewolf story in the book doesn't even have a vampire in it, much less one killing the other. Boo.

And I'm pretty sure he's not hitting the heart, maybe try a few inches your way, big guy.

Also, the second story is Ghostly Gardner? Could that be less scary? Beware my haunted eggplant! Blah.


But the book does redeem itself somewhat for my whopping 60 cents.



One Very Wide Coffin presents the charming tale of Jack and Bertha Spratt. Jack hates Bertha because she has grown grossly fat during their marriage. The artist ain’t screwing around either.



She looks like she wears a wristwatch on her ringfinger. She can even get one wheezing sentence out unless she's eating. Jack leaves Big Bertha and decides to hide in his remote cabin until she gives him a divorce.



"Fattie, Fat Face?" Harsh. Bertha refuses to grant him a divorce and tells him she is coming to the cabin. Jack begins to fixate on murdering her.



Now that is a line for the ages: Too bad it ain’t against the law for your wife to be fat, it ought to be! There is about six women’s studies theses wrapped up in that little line. Jack rigs up his shotgun so that it will kill Bertha when she opens the door, but she doesn’t show up. Instead, while hanging around the train station he meets a svelte blond. This is of course Bertha, because weight-loss, a dye job and talking funny would fool me into not recognizing my wife of many years. She then calls him up and reveals herself.



Although you must be pretty starved for female attention to call this beautiful.



She looks like she’s getting ready to drain his bone marrow so she can reinforce her exoskeleton.

After a car accident and a bump on the head he forgets about the death trap and leads them to the cabin for a “second honeymoon.” They enter and are killed by a blast of powerful air.



A blast so powerful in fact, he gets blown into the previous panel. Which means this shotgun sends people back in time! Shouldn't his hand be able to warn the rest of his body that the gun trap is still armed? Maybe that would be a temporal paradox...

So these kinds of horror comics are always little morality plays, but what’s the moral of the story? I can see why the husband got killed (hint: he's a dick), but why did the wife die? Is it because she was vain now that she’s thin? That she’d take an ass like him back? That she fooled her husband into flirting with her? And, would the wife really want to get back with him? Wouldn’t she just show up all thin and dead-eyed skull-face and tell him to piss up a rope?

And think about the rest of the story… your wife is a gigantic food-crazed maniac… the best way to get her to lose weight is go hide in your hunting cabin and scream obscenities in the phone when she calls? OK, I guess. Wait till Jenny Craig finds out about this.