House of Secrets #92

House of Secrets #92 (On Sale: April 1, 1971), has an amazing cover by Bernie Wrightson. Bernie had done five horror covers for Marvel by this time, but to be honest, they sucked, every one of them. This is his first cover for DC and he hit it out of the park and at the same time, birthed a new DC hero and rebirthed the swamp creature genre (I know, Savage Tales #1 with the Man-Thing hit the stands in January, but I know it never hit the stands in my town and was impossible to find). This is a fitting cover for one of the classic comics of the past 60 years. If you do not own this book, you wish you did. April is staring with not a bang, but an explosion!

We begin with a frontispiece by Gerry Conway and Bernie Wrightson. In the graveyard behind the House of Secrets, Abel invites the reader to join him in hunting for a snipe, while his brother Cain lurks behind a gravestone laughing at his gullibility.

Next up is the story that launched a genre and brought tears to my 14-year-old eyes. "Swamp Thing" is by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson and Bernie captures the haunting sadness of the creature like no one else may have been able to. While the Man-Thing seems like a mindless child, the Swamp Thing is all about emotional pain.

A mossy, muddy, grotesque creature with the saddest eyes you have ever seen, shambles through the swamp till it comes to a clearing and sees a house upon a hill and it only makes him sadder. He remembers the "soft, golden lady" who lives there and wonders what she is doing. Linda Olsen Ridge is being toasted by her husband Damian on their six-month anniversary, but we learn that she has another man in mind this night, Alex Olsen, her dead first husband and the best part of her life, and it is another anniversary that her thoughts focus on, the night she gave him a golden bracelet as a symbol of their undying love. Alex and Damian were scientific partners till the day the lab exploded and Alex died.

Damian senses that Linda is thinking of Alex and he remembers back to their partnership, their friendship, and how he longed and lusted for his friend's wife. How he rigged the lab to explode to get rid of the only thing standing between him and the woman he desired above all others. How Linda never knew that Alex was not killed by the explosion and how he dragged his torn-up body to the swamp and buried him alive. How he slowly went from bereaved friend to something more, something he had long desired.

Not feeling well, Linda retires to her room, but Damian can sense that she is starting to suspect something, that she is flinching from his touch, and that it will only be a matter of time before she realizes what he did to Alex. As much as he loves her, his "own neck comes first" and so he decides to kill Linda before she can turn him in for Alex's murder. Back in her room, she feels eyes upon her, even though Damian is across the house. When Damian comes to see how she is doing, he brings a hidden hypodermic needle, and as he stands poised to kill his unsuspecting wife, the swamp creature breaks through the window and attacks!

Damian is no match for the monster's strength and the creature chokes him to death. He turns to Linda and holds out his hands trying to explain to her, wanting to tell her the truth, but his vocal cords no longer make sounds and Linda is terrified. The fear in her eyes is more than he can bear. He looks to his wrist where once a beautiful golden bracelet resided and cannot remember what happened to it. The sad-eyed creature leaves her and returns to the swamp that is now his home. "If tears could come, they would."

Bernie Wrightson would later say, "I recall Len [Wein] offered me the "Swamp Thing" short story to draw that night. The deadline was really tight and I remember doing most of the work on a weekend. I had help from [Michael William] Kaluta, [Jeffrey Catherine Jones], [Alan] Weiss, and Louise [Jones]. I remember that to save time we photographed the whole thing."

For fun, you can search the Internet and see the photos that became this classic story, with Michael William Kaluta as Damian, Bernie as Alex, and Louise (Jones) Simonson as Linda.

Now this is and it isn't the Swamp Thing that would return in a year and a half; this story takes place in an older time and pertains to characters with slightly different names than what was to come. I think when DC saw the sales for this book, the series was a no-brainer, but this was at the time a genre that had been pretty much ignored for decades, and DC wisely moved the series to the current era. Reprinted in DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #9 (1981), Roots of the Swamp Thing #5 (1986), Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis TPB (1992), Roots of the Swamp Thing HC (2009), Roots of the Swamp Thing TPB (2012), Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Omnibus HC (2017), Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Vol. 1 TPB (2018), and Swamp Thing Halloween Horror Giant #1 (2018).

Next is "After I Die" written by Jack Kirby and Mark Evanier and drawn by Bill Draut. A wealthy man named Maxwell James is obsessed with what happens after death. His obsession grows stronger when he arrives at his wife's deathbed. She begs her husband to take care of Hal, her brother-in-law but is shocked when he realizes that she sees something utterly horrifying in her final moments. 

After his wife's death, Maxwell makes increasingly callous attempts to pursue this mystery, even paying to see a critically injured child and angrily storming out when the child makes a full recovery. Finally, Maxwell loses his patience and attempts to kill his wife's brother-in-law Hal with a gun. In the ensuing struggle, Maxwell is fatally shot and begs Hal to look into his eyes. As Hal obeys, he sees the reflection of the terror beyond death in Maxwell's eyes and is driven to permanent insanity. I think this is Mark Evanier's first work at DC.

Next up is "It's Better to Give..." by Virgil North (Mary Skrenes), Alan Weiss, and Tony DeZuniga. A homeless man named Smilin' Sam encounters a crying boy in the town dump who is upset that he has broken his balloon. The homeless man remembers that he's got a dime on him and so he gives it to the kid and tells him to get another balloon. The kid thanks him and tells him that he'll pay him back someday. Shortly, Sam notices dimes starting to fall from the nozzle of an abandoned bathtub and can't believe his good fortune. 

He gathers them up and goes into town to eat at a fancy restaurant, donate to the Salvation Army and buy new clothes. A criminal observes that the man has run into some money and follows him back to the dump to relieve him of it. The criminal kills Sam just as the little boy shows up and accuses the man of killing his friend. The man threatens to hurt the kid if he ever squeals and the boy swings his new balloon at the man who laughs at the boy but stops laughing when the new balloon begins to grow so large that it engulfs the killer completely. The boy then approaches the balloon with a large pin and pops it. The killer has disappeared and Able shows up to explain that it is better to give than to receive especially when you are dealing with a young warlock.

We end this classic issue with "Trick or Treat" by Gerry Conway and Dick Dillin. The story opens with a painter (perhaps) taking what he calls "magic paint and canvases" from a gallery. We see a guard on the ground, perhaps dead. He takes the items back to his place where he says that according to legend, whoever follows the instructions and paints the canvases according to the numbers provided will have their life changed. He follows the directions and paints a knife-wielding ghoul. He thinks it is pretty creepy but does not care as he knows his life is about to change. In the background we see the ghoul step out of the painting, knife in hand. I have to say this is some of the strangest Dick Dillon art I have ever seen.

The entire book has been reprinted in DC Silver Age Classics House of Secrets #92 (1992), House of Secrets #92 [Variant] (1993), Millennium Edition: House of Secrets 92 (#20) (2000), Showcase Presents: The House of Secrets Vol. 1 TPB (2008), and House of Secrets (Facsimile Edition) #92 (2019).

Edited by Joe Orlando.

House of Mystery #192

House of Mystery #192 (On Sale: March 9, 1971), has a nice cover by Neal Adams.

We begin with our cover story, "The Gardener of Eden" by John Albano and Jim Aparo. When Dr. Eden and his new wife move into their new home, it comes with Boris, a deformed workman, who at first scares Eve, Eden's wife. Eve eventually feels sorry for the deformed man and when he begins to get on the Doctor's nerves, Eve makes him the gardener. As the months fly by, the garden is transformed, but the Doctor begins to feel jealous of all the time his wife spends with Boris.

In a fit of rage, Dr. Eden murders Boris with an ax. When his wife proclaims innocence, she only pitied Boris, he repents and makes the body the recipient of the first artificial computer-fed brain. Afterward, Eden falls asleep only to awaken strapped to the operating table.  It turns out the new brain has made the dim-witted gardener into a completely new person with ambitions of conquest. He has already replaced Eve's brain and plans to do the same to the doctor as well in order to begin building a new army of perfect thinkers. As Cain muses about Boris we see him sneaking up on Cain, scalpel in hand.

That is followed by a "Cain's game Room" by Lore Shoberg, later known as Lore Orion, a country music composer mostly associated with Tim McGraw. for whom he not only wrote songs but drew album covers. Shoberg's comic work was signed simply "LORE."

Next, we have  "Image of Darkness" by Robert Kanigher and Gray Morrow. Cain awakens at 11:00 one night to the sound of something breaking in the room of tenant Andrew Foster. He rushes to the room to find his girlfriend, Susan, smashing an ancient mirror in his room and accusing him of cheating on her. When Andrew sees the broken mirror he breaks down.  he explains that before he came to Cain's house, he lived in a different time, in a different body. When he walked the streets, people threw things at him and children taunted him for his misshapen, hunched, and hideous body. But one day going through his basement he found an old mirror and when he cleaned it, it cleaned the ugliness from his body. He left the basement, not as a hideous monster but as a handsome young man.

He emerged into a new time, modern times. He moved into Cain's house and that night he went out dancing and met Susan. He brought her back to his room but at the stroke of midnight his body reverted to its old form and so he ran away from Susan. The next morning he was transformed back into his new body and returned. However, each night at midnight he would have to leave. Susan thought he was seeing someone else and so acted out. Now, with the mirror destroyed, he will transform one last time. 

Susan says she does not believe a lying word he has said, but as the clock strikes midnight, he reverts to his old, ugly self and is sucked back into the mirror and back to his own time. Susan tells Cain that she did not care how he looked on the outside, that he was beautiful inside.

Something must be said about the artwork here. It is not the standard Morrow we expect and I see the hand of another in the pencils, perhaps Howard Chaykin who assisted Morrow at one time.

We end with "Nobody Loves a Lizard" by Virgil North and Don Heck. North is the pseudonym of Mary Skrenes. Little orphan Bobby was always considered a strange kid. His parents were rumored to be witches and he loved to make pets of the lizards and snakes and frogs he found. One day when caught with a new pet lizard, Bobby is put in a closet where he finds a talking lizard caught in a mousetrap. The lizard says he was sent by his parents to help him. Bobby remarks that his parents are dead but the lizard says he will explain everything later. The lizard says that someone is coming to adopt him but that Miss Evans, who locked him in the closet, is going to try and stop it from happening. When she comes to him with some milk (drugged to keep him quiet), Bobby locks her in the closet and presents himself to the couple.

He meets the beautiful Mrs. Green and as he leaves with her we see the long green tail peeking out from the bottom of her dress. This is Mary Skrenes's first professional work and she came to DC Comics under the tutelage of Dick Giordano. Skrenes is best known as co-creator (with Steve Gerber) of Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics. She worked on other Marvel books such as The Defenders and Guardians of the Galaxy. She was the creator of and inspiration for Beverly Switzler, the companion of Howard the Duck. She wrote a half dozen horror stories for DC under the name Virgil North, and began a long collaboration with Steve Skeates. According to Skeates, a number of his mystery stories were actually co-written with Skrenes, but she insisted on submitting them under Skeates's name alone because of bad blood between her and editor Joe Orlando.

Skrenes wrote several episodes of Jem, GI Joe, and Transformers in the 1980s. In 2004 she reunited with Gerber to write the short-lived comic Hard Time. 

The entire book has been reprinted in Showcase Presents: The House of Mystery #1 (2006) and House of Mystery: The Bronze Age Omnibus #1 (2019).

Edited by Joe Orlando.