Like I've often said, DC mystery titles may not've always had the best stories, but they sure had the best hosts.
Sure, EC were first with The Crypt Keeper, The Vault Keeper and The Old Witch, and from our generation, you gotta love ol' Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie, but beyond telling their terrifying tales, you never actually saw them
do anything.
By comparison, DC's books always had great framing sequences for their spooky storytellers, like here at
The Witching Hour, where old school hags Mildred and Mordred, and their groovy younger sister, go-go sorceress Cynthia, constantly try to out-scare each other with their own spine-chilling stories.
( And isn't
'It's Twelve O'Clock...The Witching Hour!' the greatest come on to a comic ever? Only it's replacement
'It's Midnight...The Witching Hour!' beats it... )
To me, it's kind of irrelevant how good or bad the stories are, I just want to get back to the fun framing story. And not only because most of them are drawn by Alex Toth or Bill Draut, but because they're a lot of fun in and of themselves, like this inaugural piece from ish 1:
Or this one, where an old flame of Cynthia's shows up at the castle:
Or even this one, where the gals try to settle the issue of who's scariest once and for all, by inviting themselves round the neighbours, in much the same way The
Munsters used to do:
Later on, Cynthia managed to convince her stick-in-the-mud sisters to leave their moldy old castle, and move to the city, which gave rise to loads more spooky gags, but unfortunately, by this point the gals had been relegated to just one page at the start of each issue, drastically reducing the individuality of the book.
A shame, as I'd read a whole book about these three, as long as it was in this style, and they hadn't been re-jigged into The Dreaming or any nonsense like that.
