House of Mystery #186 June 1970

 "Do You Dare Enter THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY?"  

So asks the devilish figure of Cain on the cover of #186 of the DC Horror anthology, dated July 1970. And what a cover it is... a beautiful Neal Adams rendition of Pan, both statue and living version. I am beginning to understand the reverence afforded to Adams. He is not an artist I am yet over-familiar with, but my Bronze Age research seems to throw his name up frequently and I have been impressed with the little I have seen so far. The angle at which this image is framed and its effectively simple triangular composition make it a stand-out cover. The movement of the figures, particularly Pan, lend it dynamism and the shadows are so effortlessly brought into relief by the moon's glow.

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Even the pinks and blues of the crazy-paving pathway do not distract from the central impact of the picture, instead awarding the piece with a cute visual trick that invites the viewer to walk themselves into the picture.

Two decades after this issue was published the characters of Cain and Abel started appearing with some regularity in Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN. I started SANDMAN mid-way through A DOLL'S HOUSE, which along with HELLBLAZER and SWAMP THING were the first on-going US comics I bought as a student in the late 80s/early 90s. This is, I believe, the first issue I bought with cover art by Dave McKean--

I didn't realise at the time how much of DC's back catalogue Gaiman, Moore et al were plundering-- my own comics reading had been dominated by UK titles. As such my only knowledge of the characters of Cain and Abel and the Houses of Mystery and Secrets has been through the pages of SWAMP THING and SANDMAN. I am intrigued therefore to be newly acquainted with these iconic locales and their fraternal keepers as I embark upon reading for the first time these 50 year old Horror anthologies. Here is how the brothers first appeared when revived by Alan Moore and artist Ron Randall in SWAMP THING #33--

HOUSE OF MYSTERY #186 contains just two stories, both introduced and commented on by Cain. We open with his complaints about a noisy neighbour, Mr Konassos, who lives in a spooky house nearby with his cat. Wearing ear-muffs, a night-cap and spotted pyjamas, I am struck by the ring Cain wears on which are inscribed the letters 'DC'. The story, written by Robert Kanigher is drawn by Bernie Wrightson and is titled THE SECRET OF THE EGYPTIAN CAT.

Wrightson, as usual, is on wonderful form, giving the bad-guy Konassos more than a fleeting resemblance to Horror heavyweight Boris Karloff. 

The Egyptian princess Isha's vulnerability is presented well and the story-line centering on attempted rape seems unusually grown-up for a comic principally aimed at children.

As an aside, the panel in which Konassos towers over the poisoned cat, his head and torso completely in shadow -apart from his mad, staring eyes- reminds me of modern artist Eduardo Risso and the way he later used the same technique in 100 BULLETS.

The narrative itself jumps uncomfortably from ancient Egypt to modern times, but Wrightson's art is the story's saving grace, and it has deservedly been reprinted several times over the years in other collections. Fittingly the bad guy comes to a gruesome end, but the idea that his abuse had lasted thousands of years before his victim hit upon a way-out is as unconvincing as it is unpalatable and seems only to have been included to fit the 'noisy neighbour' concept.

The second story, NIGHTMARE, written by Jack Oleck, is illustrated by Neil Adams, and features the statue of Pan depicted on the comic's cover. The horrific opening page depicting a hoard of demons encircling Pan and a screaming girl would fit easily into the hideous hell-scapes conjured up years later in titles like SWAMP THING or HELLBLAZER.

I can quite imagine the nightmares such an image might have evoked in its young readership back in 1970. I myself once woke up screaming having made the mistake of reading about Anton Arcane's damnation in SWAMP THING ANNUAL #2 just before bed.

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NIGHTMARE is a story about (spoiler alert!) the end of innocence. The sweet and innocent Judy can see that the statue of Pan in her garden is more than just a statue, but of course the adults can't. The artwork in this story is little short of remarkable. The following panels bring to mind Arthur Ranson's later artwork on JUDGE ANDERSON--

By turns Adams successfully evokes the innocence of childhood in the character of Judy, her heart-breaking loneliness, the coldness of her governess, the playfulness of Pan-- and all in a single page! (see below)  What cannot be ignored is that he also manages to hint at the darker sexual subtext in this tale of a 'little girl who yearns for companionship'...

The depiction of the beautiful place 'on the other side of the wall' foreshadows elements of SANDMAN and lulls the reader into a false sense of security before the nightmarish horrors to follow. 

In the following pages the usual tropes are all to be ticked off - lightning, creepy castle, bats - all of which would surely have resonated with its young readership at the time as being the substance of horror stories. As an older reader it's impossible to ignore some of the Freudian symbolism - a phallic tower thrusting upwards, the character climbing staircases, then falling from a great height.

 

But the splash image taking up two-thirds of the page when Judy finds herself surrounded by demons, its combination of menace and vulnerability, is where Adams' art makes its biggest impact. This is the moment where Judy is about to lose her innocence. In the foreground Adams has prominently included a selection of toadstools or mushrooms-- as well as the customary associations with magic and hallucinations, their inclusion in art traditionally symbolises rapid change or growth. But Judy's open legs, her nightdress pulled tightly across them while the yellow eyed creatures march towards her suggests something far more transgressive than was acceptable in any publication with the Comics Code seal on its cover. And yet it was passed. I can only guess that if this issue ever did come up for scrutiny by the 1970s guardians of moral order this story -and this image in particular- went straight over their heads.

Apart from the high standard of artwork on offer, what strikes me most about this particular issue of HOUSE OF MYSTERY is that both stories deal with quite adult themes - rape and control in the first story, sexual awakening in the second. And both stories focus on female protagonists. I am excited to see how representative this issue is of the series as a whole, and also of the other anthology titles published at the time.

This issue also contains some pretty lame single-panel jokes and a letters page curated by Cain himself. Here is probably the best of the jokes...

As for the letters, I was particularly struck by the missive from David Blehar who refers to his recent purchase of back issues of HOUSE OF MYSTERY from a second-hand store. Or rather, as someone who has bought more than his fair share of such items himself over the years, I was struck more by Cain's caustic response, which in these troubling times seems particularly macabre. He describes second-hand comics as 'germ contaminated' and suggests that anyone who buys them deserves their fate -- to become infected and die...

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