When I was a kid the allure of celebrity endorsement was a little different. Besides being a little more impressionable I had to look a lot harder for "cool" stuff. That's one reason people are so fond of the back pages of old mags and comics. That was our internet, that was where you had to shop if you liked monster stuff. There weren't conventions twice a month, all we had were those monthly glimpses into geek-ville. Put a monster celebrity name on a product and you could virtually guarantee a geeks attention.
Vincent Price put this to great use in promoting the average persons interest in fine art, Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock are still remembered for loaning their names to anthologies and periodicals. And Boris Karloff himself, the ultimate gentleman of horror, continued to have a monstrous presence long after the Universal Horror film had seen its heyday by becoming the macabre MC of this now much loved and fondly remembered comic book.
Published by Gold Key Comics from 1962 until the 1980s tales of Mystery offered a simply drawn static format that embraced even simpler stories about mysterious coincidences, hauntings and the sort of spooky stuff that gave the publication a rep not unlike that the One Step Beyond TV show. Maybe not as spooky as the covers promised but perfectly in keeping with the sort of stories you'd expect Boris to tell the kiddies round the fireplace. This volume collects the first four issues and also offers a great introduction from Boris Karloffs daughter Sarah. Dark Horse Comics is one of the best archival outfits out there right now for this kind of stuff.
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