Pat Boyette's 'An Old Man' & 'Survivor'

Here's a couple of takes on the same story from Mr. Experimental himself, Pat Boyette. It's taken me a long time to get into Boyette's work, being a cast iron example of the kind of thing I hated as a kid. Too weird, too ugly, too out there. I still wouldn't say I absolutely love it as an adult, but what I do love is Pat's willingness to throw everything into the mix, be it odd camera angles and page layouts, or mixing media, colour and black & white as he does here.
An Old Man appeared in Ghost Manor in June of 1976, and it's a great, bleak, mournful tale. Then, in June 1983, Archie Goodwin gave Pat the chance to do it again in Epic, with better production values, and Survivor is even better.

Winnie The Witch

As I say, I love a mystery title with a cackling horror host or hostess, and Charlton had a graveyard full of 'em. To me, it doesn't matter if the actual stories are a bit lame, as long as the framing sequences are good and the host is fun.
Winnie The Witch was sort of a presenter without portfolio, appearing in every Charlton mystery book at one time or another. Ok, she has the single unscariest name any horror host ever had, but she does look good in a miniskirt, which is presumably why the artists preferred drawing her over Mr. L. Dedd, Dr. Graves or Mr. Bones.
She's a hip and groovy practitioner of the black arts, constantly calling the readers 'swingers' in a way that suggests her dialogue was written by an out-of-touch white male over the age of 40, and if she doesn't pop up in the actual stories as much as you'd like, it is fun to see how cleverly the artists insert her in the page layout for no other reason than that she looks cool. Take, for instance, her first appearances here from Steve Ditko and Pat Boyette. As well as a rare starring role for Winnie, and a just as rare team-up for the Charlton horror hosts as she hangs out with Midnight Tales' Professor Coffin & Arachne.
Note also here, the strangest Bronze Age ad ever run in any comic of the time, far creepier than any of the stories, and one that Winnie probably should've introduced as well.

The Tarantula

Weird Suspense Featuring The Tarantula was another cry for help from Michael Fleisher, the writer once described as 'bugfuck crazy' by Harlan Ellison, and was another misguided misfire from the much maligned Atlas Comics.
Fleisher and gang probably thought: Kids like monsters, they'll like a monster hero. But what they forgot is that the best monster heroes are, in some way, sympathetic looking. Morbius, Swamp Thing, even The Zombie, are all designed to not be too horrific.
Give the kid's a frisson of fear, let them enjoy grossing out their parents, sure, but let's not go overboard here.
I vividly remember seeing the Atlas line the day the first issues came into our local newsagents, and how repulsed I was by Ironjaw and The Tarantula especially. I reneged and bought Ironjaw 'cos Neal Adams had contributed a Conanesque frontis, but there was no way I was gonna buy Weird Suspense, not even with a Dick Giordano cover. It looked Horrible.

So how does it read today? Actually pretty good all told, IF it had been a back-up buried somewhere in Creepy. As a newstand, kid friendly colour book, it's the right story in the wrong format. I mean, not only is The Tarantula revolting looking, but he eats people. He's a hero who eats people.
And as for using him to shill Flintstones toys, alongside the equally nightmare inducing Moorlock 2001? Yeah, that's really not gonna work out...

You have to give Pat Boyette credit for the art though, I never liked his work as a kid, but here he does exactly what's needed and I defy anybody not to feel a shiver at the scenes of giant tarantula's roaming the countryside, plucking screaming victims and carrying them off to feast.
Like pretty much all the Atlas books, the third issue brought a turnaround, with Gary Freidrich taking over the scripting, and introducing a Karen Pageish secretary who's secretly in love with The Tarantula's alter ego, Count Lycos, and a sense of them actually being two separate indiviuals and that eating people might be, I dunno, a bit wrong.
That's all nonsense of course, and Fleisher's madness is preferable, but still, as an adult The Tarantula's great, but as a kid: Uurrrr! Yuk!