Heading:
Author:
Title: WEIRD MYSTERIES No. 5
Place Published:
Publisher:Stanley Morse [Indicia: Gillmor Magazines, Inc.]
Date Published: June, 1953
Description:

CGC certified: VG- (3.5). Purple Label [C-1]. Off-white to white pages. Restoration includes: Small amount of color touch on cover, tear seals to cover, piece re-attached. Classic Bernard Baily cover. Classic Basil Wolverton "Swamp Monster" story; other stories by Edd Smalle and Walter Palais (brother of Harvey horror mainstay Rudy Palais). GPAnalysis: No recent Purple Label sales. A Purple Label 3.0 ["MA"] sold for $576 in 2013 and a Purple Label 2.5 ["A," cover trimmed] sold for $357 in 2005. For comparison purposes, Heritage sold a Blue Label 3.5 for $5040 in June 2021 and a Blue Label 1.5 for $5520 in February 2022. PBA sold a Blue Label 3.0 for $9000 in October 2021, and a Blue Label 2.0 for $6875 in February 2022.

One of the most lurid covers of the pre-Code era, depicting a mad scientist removing the brain from a severed head. Every detail amplifies the queasy sense of horror: the gaping eye sockets; the rotted, fleshless nose; the jagged incision of the craniotomy; the way the head lolls in the vile, soupy mixture like the devil's own dumpling (one can debate whether the horror is mitigated or compounded by the fact that it appears to be a Neanderthal's head). Lurid, distasteful and unseemly, with a vague whiff of moral obscenity: it's everything one wants in a pre-Code mag.

Publisher Stanley Morse was described by Taschen Books as "the ultimate fly-by-night publisher, and creator of some of the most extreme horror comic books of the early fifties." Years later, when asked about the content of his seedy horror mags, Morse shrugged: "I don't know what the hell I published. I didn't care. I never read the things." — David Hadju, The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. FSG: 2008, p. 190.

"With their generic titles and lack of heroes, horror comics, EC's excepted, offered little to keep readers loyal. The only recurring character in most books was Satan. Publishers, unable to establish a following for a given title, had to compete for the attention of the same readers, month after month, and soon the game in this competition was shock. Horror comics were soon caught up in an upward spiral of gruesomeness. One month's issue would depict a man's neck being slashed, and the next would have a decapitation. The one to follow would show a human head used as a bowling ball or a woman roasting her husband's body parts (head, a leg, hands, feet) on a barbeque grill. 'You did what you had to do — what moved 'em off the racks,' said publisher Stanley P. Morse, who produced several acutely vile horror comics under various corporate names. One of Morse's books, Weird Mysteries, featured a cover picture of a human brain being ripped out of a skull..." — Op. cit.

Consignments welcome for PBA's Fall 2022 Comic Book sale. Pre-Code Horror, Golden Age and Silver Age comics, original art, vintage comic-related photos and ephemera sought. Send inquiries to ivan@pbagalleries.com.