Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s

A reprint of our massively successful collection of pre-Comics Code horror comics of the 1950s.

Although EC is the comic book company most fans associate with horror, during the genre's peak (1951-54) more than fifty titles appeared each month. Four Color Fear collects the finest of these into a single robust and affordable volume. Jack Cole, Steve Ditko, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton, and Wallace Wood contribute both stories and covers, with many of the forty full-sized covers created by specialists Bernard Baily, L.B. Cole, William Eckgren, and Matt Fox.
304 pages of color comics

Basil Wolverton was born near Medford, Oregon in 1909 and died in 1978. His Fantagraphics-published books include Basil Wolverton's Culture Corner and The Wolverton Bible, and his work is featured in Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941.

Comic book historian Greg Sadowski has produced more than a few books for Fantagraphics, including landmark volumes on Alex Toth, Bernard Krigstein, and Basil Wolverton. He resides in Asbury Park, NJ, where he looks after the B. Krigstein archives and plays the music of Django Reinhardt with his acoustic trio, OG Swing.


John Benson has written about comics since 1956, in many venues, and has edited several comics anthologies for Fantagraphics, the most recent being The Sincerest Form of Parody, a collection culled from Mad comics knock-offs. In 1966 he put on the second two-day comics convention ever held. His interviews with pioneering cartoonists such as Harvey Kurtzman, Gil Kane, and Bernard Krigstein are legendary. He has been the editor of Squa Tront, the respected long-running magazine about EC comics and their creators, since 1974.