When the superhero genre bit the dust at the end of the 1940s — as y’all know, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were the only heroes to keep their books going through the 1950s — horror became comics publishers’ go-to for making money. Even Captain America wen that route, though turning into a horror series didn’t save him.
The Comics Code shut down horror comics, which ranked with crime comics as the genre most blamed for warping children’s brains. Nevertheless, rereading the Silver Age has confirmed my impression that DC and Marvel at the end of the 1960s went the same route.
As I’ve mentioned before, the decade ended with both DC and Marvel looking for the next big thing. Unsurprisingly they looked at horror. DC gave us the definitive version of House of Mystery (sorry Robby Reed!) —
— followed by The Witching Hour —
— and House of Secrets. 
Plus Unexpected, aligning itself with the House books rather than the goofier Jack Schiff style. More anthologies would follow in the 1970s.
Marvel meanwhile tried the same thing with Tower of Shadows —
— but didn’t have the same success. It would, however, strike gold a couple of years later with Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night.
The point of this blog post is not merely to recap stuff I’ve written about but to look at how, like Captain America, superheroes were finding horror encroaching on their turf. A lot of Neal Adams’ covers for the Bat books would have worked fine on House of Mystery.
The Challengers of the Unknown had dealt with sorcery in the past —
— but the tone is much darker now.
Even the Flash got in on the action.
And while the Titans are still mired in relevance with Mr. Jupiter, they’d be spooking up in the early 1970s too.
We’ll see more of this sort of thing before my Silver Age reread comes to an end.
Covers top to bottom by Gene Colan, Neal Adams x2, Bernie Wrightson, Nick Cardy, John Romita, Adamsx3, Nick Cardy
