Tim Conrad provides the artwork to this slow burner: Everything’s wrong throughout, and resolves itself perfectly within its horror universe. It’s the most traditionally EC story of them all, perhaps. I had expected a bunch of Warren artists to show up here, but only a small handful, like Alfredo Alcala drops by. You really feel that Jones has honed his horror craft and is extremely enthusiastically throwing everything horrible he knows at the reader. Yes, it’s a very silly joke, but mixing that joke in with Corben’s awesomely gruesome artwork, it’s exhilarating. It’s called infected, and you see, she’s saying that she had… and then we see that she has… While EC comics are an obvious touch-stone here (down to the lettering Richard Corben uses in the first story of the first issue (but didn’t he use that style anyway around this time?)), we’re in the 80s, and things have a more psychosexual tint to them than when Al Feldstein wrote horror comics in the 50s.Īnd that the punchline to the story, so don’t display it if you haven’t read the story, which turned out to be pretty much everybody’s favourite, according to the letter columns. Basically: Do horror in a way that reminds him of what it was like to experience horror stuff when he was growing up in the 50s. In the first issue, writer and co-editor Bruce Jones provides a background to what he’s attempting to do here.

Of course, the eight first issues were published by Pacific Comics before they went bankrupt, so it’s fair to say that Pacific was a more memorable publisher than Eclipse, and I should have done a blog series about them instead. Of all these Eclipsish comics, Twisted Tales my be the ones I remember best from my early teens. Twisted Tales (1982) #1-8, Twisted Tales (1984) #9-10, The Twisted Tales of Bruce Jones (1986) #1-4, Twisted Tales (1987) #1 by Bruce Jones et al.

The twisted tales of bruce jones