DC Showcase Presents House of Mystery/House of Secrets

Sergio Aragones on an EC style horror book? That I have to see.

Yeah, I think these titles have a looser feel than the other DC Silver Age stuff, a chance for talent to get away from the rigid superhero storylines and strech out a bit. Love the story in the first House Of Mystery Showcase where Gil Kane gets trapped in his own comic!

Speaking of Showcase, it's been ages since I bought any. Have there been any great semi-recent additions?

The art's nice, but don't go into these expecting stories of the quality of Tales From the Crypt or their ilk. They're very neutered, and most of them just aren't very good, but there's a lot of great pencilers in the series.

As far as the Showcase books go, I generally prefer DCs weirder Silver Age output. I find their superhero books at the time (save one exception) to be very dull, but they were putting out a lot of great, offbeat titles like Unknown Soldier and Haunted Tank that are worth checking out now.

Yeah, I think they're worth looking at if you're a fan of some of the lesser known giants of the Silver Age, just temper your expectations. It's not gory, blackly comedic morality tales. It's mostly just standard ghost story stuff.

And the one DC superhero whose Silver Age book I really like is Metamorpho, because that series is just weird and silly and funny.

I can sell you on Metamorpho with one sentence.

No, the sentence was

"Metamorpho saves the Earth from a midget space cyclops by playing an electric guitar that shoots lasers."

Yeah, there's some gorgeous art in the Silver Age stuff (which would be better served with colour, ahem), but storywise the stuff tends to be cringingly formulaic - Justice League is perhaps the worst offender, I think, because it covers that era before there was even the slightest pretense at making these heroes have differing personalities, so it's just seven variations of Blandman knocking about. Teen Titans has some value for the Youth Culture Roffles, Superman is pretty golden because of its outright insanity, until you start to realise how much the comic had to adapt to a more Archie type sensibility, at which point it all starts to make sense and becomes somehow less interesting. Aquaman is funny because, hey, Aquaman. But my fav superhero Showcase is easily Captain Marvel - it's closer to, like, funny animal comics from that era than actual superhero comics, and thus a lot less weighed down by the genre's conventions.

But dude, Brad, Haunted Tank??? I actually had to stop reading that thing because of its agressive stupidity, around the time that the Haunted Tank defeated some nazis with the help of a turtle. As far as 60's military comics go, The War That Time Forgot is my joint: extremley formulaic too, at least at the begining, but by the time the robot sidekick shows up it's all smooth sailing (also I love the idea of these countless US soldiers being washed up on that dinosaur island, without ever running into each other.)

Fuck you, Haunted Tank is awesome.

I will say though, of all of the various Essential/Showcase/etcetera reprints that have come out, my absolute favorite is Dark Horse's reprints of The Savage Sword of Conan. GORGEOUS art and great stories. Definitely worth picking up for anybody that's a fan of the character or adventure comics in general.

This is the deal with pretty much all Silver Age comics (and most Golden Age too, actually) - they are all basically batshit insane when described on paper, and it gets pretty hard to sort the funny-on-paper-tedious-for-reading stuff from the truly insane/hilarious/actually quite awesome stuff. I mean, give me the pitch of a Haunted Tank fighting nazis with a turtle and I'd wanna read it, too!

Rating the Showcases I own:

Jonah Hex
Shazam!
Superman
The War That Time Forgot
Batman
House Of Mystery
Teen Titans
Elongated Man
Phantom Stranger
Green Lantern
Haunted Tank
Justice League

I know that DC probably isn't going to do anything from the 80's on because they'd have to pay more royalties, but I do so wish they'd at least do some more 70's stuff.

There was a lot of crossovers between DC's horror titles and the humor book PLOP! Sergio naturally did a lot of work for Plop and I'm guessing some of it leaked over to the House titles. Or maybe it was vice versa.