CGC certified: Near Mint- (9.2). Cream to off-white pages. Howard Nostrand cover and art. Bob Powell, Manny Stallman, Joe Certa and John Guinta art.
Quasi-Crypt-Keeper cover by Howard Nostrand, the poor man's Jack Davis. From a Nostrand interview: Q: Did Harvey give out orders to make their stuff look like EC? Nostrand: It was my own idea... [leafing through comic book] All this junk was my idea... This is, you know, pure Davis, this kind of garbage." -Graphic Story Magazine #16 [1974].
Nostrand expands upon his disdain for his own output: "When you turn out such a volume of stuff the quality is going to suffer. There weren't enough competent artists around to turn out good work, so schlock was put on the stands. In a horror story it didn't matter if the story stank and artwork was rotten as long as it showed a lot of guts hanging out and blood-sucking or other perversions." -Ibid.
Nostrand overlooks one consideration: that comics ("the bastard offspring of art and commerce," as Art Spiegelman quipped) is one of those rare artforms in which schlock and brilliance are sometimes indistinguishable.
CGC census: Two 9.2 copies (only two are graded higher at 9.4 each). Top 5 copy. Comparable CGC sales: 9.2 file copy: $355 (Jan. 2003); 9.4 file copy: $725 (Dec. 2012); the most recent sale is a 5.0 which fetched $540 (Dec. 2019).
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