Monsters From Hell # 1

Monsters From Hell #1

The Bloody Thing!
(Original unidentified, reprinted in Horror Tales Vol. 3 #3, May 1971, Eerie Publishing)

Call of the Monsters
(Original unidentified, 6 pages)

Terror Tunnel
(Original unidentified, 9 pages)

A Hole in the Sky!
(Original unidentified, 7 pages)

Horror Island
(Original unidentified, reprinted in Terror Tales Vol. 3 #4, July 1971, Eerie Publishing)

The Skin-Rippers
(Original unidentified, 6 pages)

The Monster
(Original unidentified, 6 pages)

Web of Terror
(Original unidentified, reprinted in Tales of Voodoo Vol. 5 #7, December 1972, Eerie Publishing)

The only stories I’ve identified so far in this issue happen to be courtesy of Eerie Publishing. It’s tempting to assume that the rest may also be via Eerie, but based on a few other Gredowns which also carry Eerie Publications material I would guess the mix in this issue to be just as varied as they are (see for example Grave Ghost’s Tales #1).

I don’t have any original Eerie Publishing magazines to check but I hope they have information on the original horror comics they reprint. There’s a few internet sites I’ve come across recently which may also have this information, but I just need to spend a bit of time to check them out in this regard.

Like so many of the vintage horror stories reprinted in the Gredowns, most of the stories in this issue have the tell-tale grey-scale shading which says they’ve been ‘amended’ for the reprint edition. When I first came across this years ago I just assumed it was a Gredown stunt, but I have since heard that this is how they appear in the 1970’s US reprint editions. It reminds me of the gray-scale used by K.G. Murray in their Annuals circa 1956-57. At least the charcoal effect in the Gredowns is suitably ashen and grimy for the horror stories – the K.G. Murray effect was often akin to a spotty film overlay – but too often it comes across as a bad copy of a muted colour original.