At 47, I'm Finally Getting into the Tales From the Crypt Comic Books from the 1950s
As readers are well aware, I did not spend a lot of reading comic books when I was in high school and college. I was too busy doing wicked slam dunks, wowing passerby with amazing skateboard tricks and smooching pretty girls.
I was a Fonz-like apogee of coolness who dismissed comic books as nothing more than funny talking animal stories for children.
I didn’t need to read comic books like some juvenile delinquent when I could experience the best of comic books in mediums I adored, like film or television.
Oh, but I loved television as a child. Despite the fact that I got laid constantly I nevertheless developed an intense interest in naked breasts.
seems wholesome!
That’s what led me to an iconic 1980s horror anthology called Tales From the Crypt. It was the perfect combination of classy and trashy. It was executive produced by some of the biggest names in Hollywood yet was unabashedly, unashamedly vulgar and profane.
I’d grown up loving The Twilight Zone. Tales From the Crypt seemed like a logical next stop. It was the seedy Id to The Twilight Zone’s respectable ego.
Both horror anthologies imparted important moral lessons but where Rod Serling used metaphor and science fiction to deliver sermons on Liberal tolerance Tales From the Crypt promoted the idea that humanity is a disease and that everyone deserves to die a horrible death.
I was the perfect age for Tales From the Crypt. When it debuted in 1989 I was a thirteen year old voyeur with a predilection for compulsive masturbation but by the time its finale aired in 1996 I had matured into a nineteen year old college kid with a predilection for compulsive masturbation.
Tales From the Crypt was there for me when I was a teenager. In the decades that followed Tales From the Crypt would be comfort food for me that reconnected me with one of the most beloved parts of my childhood. I would continue to love Tales From the Crypt and I would continue to masturbate compulsively.
Incidentally, this website will be ten in just a few years yet remains stubbornly unpopular and persistently, pervasively and frustratingly non-lucrative.
I wonder sometimes why this site never seems to attract new readers and then I remember my sense of humor and how it isn’t for everyone, or even anyone some days.
I hungrily, happily devoured Tales From the Crypt. I loved Demon Knight, the first and best Tales From the Crypt. I tolerated Bordello of Blood and have listened to all of the Crypt-Keeper’s albums (he has quite a few, strangely enough).
I even watched the entirety of Tales From the Crypt-Keeper, the children’s cartoon that ran for three seasons in the 1990s. And I am a fan of the British Tales From the Crypt movie and its sequel The Vault of Horror.
I did it all backwards: I experienced everything but the legendary comic books that inspired the series and everything that followed.
Why? As I stated earlier, I always thought of comic books as something the dorks me and my fellow jocks beat up in high school liked but I was recently at a comic book store and saw a collection of The Vault of Terror, one of Tales From the Crypt’s sister series.
I bought a pair of volumes and found myself, at the age of forty-seven, getting into a comic book. I’m pleased to report that the comic books were every bit as good as I’d hoped.
It’s easy to see why they scared the shit out of scolds, busybodies and moralists. At a time when American life was supposed to be wholesome, safe and idyllic E.C. Comics depicted modern American life as a wild rumpus of depravity, violence and lust.
But there is an artistry to the seediness that’s nothing short of breathtaking. The artwork is beautiful in its ghoulishness and horror. The dialogue is gloriously nasty and cynical.
It’s pulp elevated to the level of pop art. And Jack Davis! I never tire of looking at that man’s work and he did some of his best for Tales From the Crypt and its companion volumes The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror.
Even without The Crypt-Keeper puppet or gratuitous nudity Tales From the Crypt is riveting. It has a Crypt-Keeper but he’s not a puppet but rather a ghoulish man who narrates the stories with his rivals The Old Witch and The Vault Keeper.
That’s why I think a Tales From the Crypt reboot is a fine idea, even without the Crypt-Keeper because there are so many great, cinematic stories from these comic books angrily begging to be adapted for television or film.
I never thought I would write these words but I’m honestly starting to wonder if comic books might not just be for little kids these days.
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