MARVEL HORROR COMICS - 1970S - My parents weren’t visual arts people, they were music people. I was starved for imagery growing up. Luckily for me, a lot of families had a stack of comics & if I was really lucky they had some horror titles mixed in with the Archie, Spider-Man, Porky Pig & whatever other 70s books they had lying around. The heyday of horror comics was in the 40s & early 50s but due to fifties moral panic over comic books (amongst other things) the industry made their own Comics Code in 1954, & the horror titles in particular we’re neutered & never recovered. Fast forward to the freewheeling seventies & how they bled into the 80s. By this time comics had been thoroughly relegated into the “dumb kids stuff” world, but there were still gems & they had figured out how to push the comics code as much as they could. Marvel comics made a huge number of horror titles, many of them emulating the Horror Comics magazines (like Eerie) which in turn were a copy of the old pre-code EC comics (like Tales From the Crypt) (which if you want to go further were the comics versions of the pulps). The main thing I remember about seventies comics is that they had this weird energy to them, like a men’s bathroom at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. They tried to control the natural disgusting state of the human male left to their own devices with a urinal cake…