CGC certified: Fine+ (6.5). Cream to off-white pages. Iger Shop art.
Cover: man trapped in mausoleum with zombies, compositionally different but thematically similar to Feldstein's cover to Tales from the Crypt #23 (April, 1951). Even as the corpse achieves freedom from his grave, the living man frantically seeks to escape. White flight metaphor? One story shows the dead piled high in mass graves, a fearful image in the postwar consciousness. Back cover ad: "Don't Stay FAT.... No Steambaths, drugs or laxatives." Between the rotting corpses and fat-shaming ads, one senses a visceral disgust for the flesh, a callback to our Puritan heritage (the anti-comics "witch hunts" being another echo of our puritanical past).
In horror comics, human justice is a feeble thing, and only the dead are capable of proper retribution, supplanting the role formerly held by superheroes during the Golden Age. "Death, in the form of an animated corpse, was presented over and over as a judgmental and leveling force, one that made a mockery of human vanity and material greed.... The stories inevitably introduced an element of personal revenge... thus encouraging the reader to identify, rather gleefully, with Death as a sympathetic protagonist." -David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror [NY: 1993].
CGC census: Two copies graded 6.5. Only 2 copies graded higher. Top 4 copy. Comparable CGC sales: No sales in this grade in over 7 years. Most recent sales in any grade: 6.0 sold for $406 (March 2018); 2.5 sold for $164 (Dec. 2018).
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