David Smyth reviews Haunted Love #1…
Haunted Love features rotting tales of supernatural Pre-code romance from putrid horror comics from the vile horror comics of the 1950s. Lurid lust! Vicious violence! Creepy kisses! The zombie-fied Haunted Love #1 is just the first of 3 throbbing issues that will set your horrid hearts afire. Haunted Love will make your Valentines Day massacre and gory gift giving to your vile Valentine unforgettable and unforgivable.
IDW’s Haunted Love is a collection of horror/romance stories first printed in the 1950’s. If you like your women duplicitous and your men incorrigible, then this could be the book for you.
In the opening tale, ‘Crawling Evil’ (art by Igor Shop), a jilted Grandmother raises her granddaughter to hate men. When the spiteful old lady passes away, the young woman realises that she was a witch. Determined to follow in her meemaw’s footsteps, she learns how to transform a man into a man-headed worm – using enchanted kisses.
In the second adventure, ‘The Ice Man Cometh’ (art by Ed Goldfarb and Robert Bears), the greedy wife of an ice salesman plots, with her ice delivering lover, to kill her husband because he won’t buy her a fridge-freezer. This is not a joke.
In the third tale, ‘Lady or Tigress?’ (art by Leonard Frank), a zoo owner pays the price for not knowing if the woman upon whom he is forcing himself is a Lady…… or a Tigress!
In ‘The Dead are Never Lonely’ (art by Jim McLaughlin), a movie star who marries men for money and titles, only to immediately dump them in favour of boozing and casual sex, is taught a terrifying lesson after her insane new husband buries them alive in a crypt.
‘Nothing Can Save Her’ (art by Nick Cardy) recounts the terrifying tale of a man providing inadvisable amounts of blood transfusions to a woman he hit with his car. But is she everything she appears to be? (no, she’s a wench, just like all women in the 50’s apparently).
In ‘The Weirdest Suicide Pact of all Times’ (art by Jack Sparling), a frantic wife begs to see her incarcerated husband at bonkers-o’clock in the morning. The ending to this tale is slightly ruined by the title, and would not be out-of-place on an episode of Futurama’s ‘The Scary Door’.
Finally in ‘Marriage of Death’ (art by Ken Bald), Death unsurprisingly gets hitched. When a young woman marries a Frenchman named Le Mort, she is unjustifiably horrified to learn that he’s Grim Reaper. This story differs slightly from the others as it features a woman who isn’t an unmitigated bitch; she is, instead, a complete moron.
Haunted Love is a fascinating collection of curious short stories from a simpler, but not necessarily better, time. It was a time when violently grabbing a woman and smashing her face into your own was called romance, and doing so would probably spell your doom.
For fans of 1950’s pulp horror, Haunted Love will no doubt be a welcome release. For anyone else it will hold little draw beyond being an interesting peek into the post-war world of misogyny and casual racism. It is a world where the growing empowerment of women seems to have terrified comic book artists, to the point that they felt anything in a skirt was out to get them. In this sense it is an intriguing collection, but has little additional value. It suffers the same problems as most ‘golden age’ comic books – the comic book craft was still in its infancy which, combined with archaic printing technology, meant that clumsy exposition was needed to plug the gaps where the graphics aren’t strong enough to tell the story on their own.
That’s not to say the men working on these stories weren’t talented. They were, and without their work the industry as we know it today would not exist. They are as important to comics as your Grandmother is to you – there would be no you without her. But that doesn’t make her any less of a fossil.
It seems unfair to grade a book that contains sixty year old horror stories. If you are a fan of the genre, then Haunted Love was probably already on your radar. No grade, good or bad, will change the fact that you were already picking it up. Conversely, if you aren’t a fan, then a 10/10 won’t change the fact that you will more than likely spend the money on one of several Avengers titles. But a review demands a rating, so a rating must be given. Haunted Love is great – if you like that sort of thing.
Rating: 6/10
David Smyth
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Originally published February 24, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
