Help! Can you identify these two horror comic book stories from 1960s-1970?

Cafe Society
1

There are two stories I read as a kid/young teen back in the 1960s/1970s that stuck in my mind for years. I’ve never been able to identify them or the issues they were in, though, despite asking on online forums all over.

This site has one of the best Mass-Mind Agglomerations on the Internet, so if anyone can identify one or both, I would be really thankful. You are my last hope.

Story #1 appeared sometime between 1970 - 1975, I think, in one of the B&W large-format comic book magazines that were popular at the time. I think it was one of the Warren magazines (Creepy, Eerie, or Vampirella), because that was mostly what I read, but there’s an outside chance it could be Skywald or one of the other publishers.

It was set after an apocalyptic war. The protagonist is a young man who has been drafted into what remains of the U.S. Army, which patrols through the devastated cities. There is some kind of infection that turns people into flesh-eating zombies (so this was an early iteration of the Zombiepocalypse genre), spread by eating contaminated food from old canned goods. The army spends its time destroying infected food supplies (which makes them unpopular with the civilian population, which is starving) and killing the zombies. Fraternization with the civilians is forbidden, but the protagonist is attracted to a young woman he repeatedly sees in the ruined city. He eventually sneaks away to be with her, only to discover that she is fronting for a group of zombies (her family?) that attack and kill the young man at the end.

Story #2 appeared somewhere between 1965 - 1969, in (best guess) one of the Gold Key horror comic books like The Twilight Zone or the Boris Karloff one. (Could also be a DC, Marvel, or Charlton comic, but I don’t think so) Another young man notices a strange alien-looking man (I think either green-skinned and/or glowing) who informs him that he is actually an alien from the same planet, a prince who was hidden on earth as a baby to protect him while an interstellar war was going on. That war is over, and now it’s time for him to return to his home world and assume his rightful place as ruler of the planet. The young man wants none of this, he has a girlfriend on Earth and is planning to get married. He brushes him off, but keeps seeing him everywhere he goes. The alien has some kind of hypnotic device he keeps trying to use to gain control of him. Finally the hero jumps into a cab or something, and the alien is the driver and uses the hypnotic device to put him into a trance. In the last panel, the girlfriend is wondering where he is and notices a glowing UFO-like object going up into the sky.

If I were to read them now, they would both probably be pretty laughable, but they scared the snot out of me as a kid.

Anyone have any ideas?

2

No idea, but I know what I’ll be reading tonight to see if I have either story.

3

Thanks!

4

Can’t help you, so I hope you don’t mind if I hijack a little bit. I’ve got some memories of comic horror gems too, but don’t remember who published them.

One was illustrated by the legendary Steve Ditko. A collector has a passion for rare books, and his wife is constantly yelling at him for wasting her father’s inheritance money on them. He tracks down the owner of a rare book he just has to have. The owner refuses to sell, so the collector strangles him and takes the book. He returns home with the book and a vapid smile. His wife screams at him again, but he just blows her off and goes to his study. As he reads the book, he sees illustrated scenes of previous owners of the book being killed, then the killer being killed for the book years later. He eventually sees the reenactment of him strangling the previous owner, and finally one of his enraged wife behind him with a huge axe, ready to behead him. Stayed in my psyche till this very day.

5

I’m good with using this as a thread to identify remembered stories.

6

Okay, I’m getting bells ringing in my head about Story #1. I can’t place it specifically, but it seems that I’m remembering that this was something done by Richard Corben. It certainly seems like his style of story-line. Maybe expand the search into Heavy Metal and/or 1984 magazines.

Then again, I may be wrong.

7

Maybe, but my (fractured) memory is that it was done by another artist - I remember the artwork not having the clean lines I associate with Corben but more of a pen and ink wash technique, a little expressionistic. It definitely had the feel of some of the horror underground comix like Last Gasp Funnies, and Corben did some work for those, but I’m pretty sure this was in a full-size commercial B&W magazine. I remember reading this in high school (probably around 1972 - 1973, but could be as early as 1970 - 1971), before Heavy Metal and 1984 were published. I could be wrong too, of course.

8

Bump!