and it still haunts my nightmares...

Way back in the nineties, nestled in one of the seemingly random cover shots that grace the Overstreet guide was cover art depicting a man being buried alive next to a ghoulish skeleton with eyeballs popping out. Strange Tales #28 from May of 1954!

As a kid, I used to pull the covers over my head and imagine what it would be like buried alive. An awful thought this cover fully exploits in all its horror.

The Jack Katz story from this same issue was used in the U.S. Senate hearings during the Seduction of the Innocent hysteria that comic books were corrupting the youth of America back in the fifties.

I just got it back from CGC yesterday. Interesting to note that CGC didn't note any artist or creators for this issue, or even give it a classic cover designation which I think it rightfully deserves.

Not to plug a site, but a non-graded copy of ST#28 is available for bidding on ComicConnect.com's April auction. It's a rare book, as many of the pre-hero Strange Tales are, so grab it before I do!

Finding this book from my childhood memories was very satisfying, but for a Strange Tales issue even more rare, try finding issue #29. I theorize that bad press from the Senate hearings led to an angry mass of parents destroying copies of issue #29 in furious outrage. Also, it was probably too late to recall the cover of #29 depicting a witch getting ready to boil a man alive, so Atlas, under congressional pressure after the hearings, most likely drastically dropped the print run.

Sadly ST#29 marked the end to the Strange Tales horror covers. They switched to more mystery/mystic covers with issue #30 and eventually the first Comics Code issue for the series started with issue #35.

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