Great art, terrible writing
Just as EC Comics’ Tales of the Crypt had its Crypt-Keeper as host or MC, The Witching Hour has its own trio of hostesses in the form of three witches named Mildred, Mordred, and Cynthia. The first two are traditional ugly old-crone witches, while their step-sister Cynthia is a hot modern witch. In each issue they have a contest to see who can tell the best stories. This doesn’t really work to the series’s advantage, however, since three to five pages of each issue are wasted on this filler material. The witches frequently bash each other’s stories, complaining about how terrible they are, which unfortunately rings often far too true. The only bright side to these interludes is that they are often drawn by Alex Toth.
As one would expect from this genre, every story ends with a “surprise twist.” In almost all cases, however, the twists are clumsy and disappointing. It’s kind of like when a comedian spends a fair amount of time setting up a joke and then flubs the punchline. And for the better part of the book, every story is like that! You would think from the law of averages that they couldn’t be all bad, but in the first 17 issues there isn’t a single story that deserves to be singled out as impressive from a writing standpoint. Only in issues 18 and 19 does the level of quality start to pick up a little.
The art, on the other hand, is fabulous. I assume The Witching Hour was originally printed in color, but the Showcase Presents series only reproduces the black and white art. Here, however, that’s great, because these stories look beautiful in black and white, and the film-noir feel is appropriate to the genre. This is ‘60s and ‘70s comic art at its best, with old-school masters like Alex Toth, Jack Sparling, Gray Morrow, and Jerry Grandinetti making frequent appearances. Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson show up a couple times, and Wally Wood once. Not every artist in the volume is a genius, but the majority of the stories are very well illustrated, and even the worst artists in this book are a cut above the average Curt Swan-ish DC style of this era.
I’m not a fan of DC’s superhero universe, but I do enjoy their old comics in other genres, such as their science fiction stories in Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space. (Strange Adventures has two volumes in the Showcase Presents series, Mystery in Space has none.) I thought I would give this horror anthology a try, but I found the quality of stories vastly inferior to the old EC Comics from the 1950s. I really did enjoy the art in these Witching Hour stories though. DC has also published Showcase Presents volumes of their horror titles House of Mystery, House of Secrets, and Tales of the Unexpected. Perhaps one of those books contains more compelling stories than this one.
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