Fiction Pulp Fiction Department:
Back in the early 1950s, Mental Comics Group (then known as Mental Comic Group-- your guess is as good as ours) jumped on the Horror bandwagon pioneered by EC Comics. This was a decade before they hit the jackpot by jumping on the next bandwagon, namely superheroes. Their first Horror title, Dread of Night, was actually a rebranding of Wild Western Tall Tales-- a relic of the previous bandwagon. Dread of Night #17 (April/May 1952) was in fact only the fourth issue under that name. It contained the standard four stories by uncredited creative teams, most notably "The Curse of Drowned Greed," wherein a hard-boiled gigolo discovers that his intended victim's reclusive, invalid husband is not so feeble and not so human. These issues are all classics that any collector would want to own, but, sadly, they were only printed in a far-off corner of the Polyhedriverse and you can't get there from here.
© 2026 by Rick Hutchins
