For Your Consideration – Showcase Presents: Secrets of Sinister House
Showcase Presents: Secrets of Sinister House
by Robert Greenberger
From 1968 through 1974 or so, DC Comics produced some moody, atmospheric, and darn right entertaining “horror” comics. It was a period of experimentation as management was changing for the first time in decades and the company suddenly had serious competition from Marvel.
While the House of Ideas largely produced only super-hero books, DC during that time still had their humor, romance, war, western, and mystery books. In attempting to find new audiences, or retain the ones remaining, the company tossed out one new things after another including an odd offering called Sinister House of Secret Love. Before sales could be properly tallied, it was recast as Secrets of Sinister House and it lasted a mere 18 issues before vanishing entirely.
The complete run is now being collected for the first time, an addition to DC’s remarkable Showcase Presents library of releases.
Unlike, say, House of Mystery, Secret Love was a 48-page book that attempted to mix mystery and romance – comics’ first gothic romance if you will. Joe Orlando, who cut his teeth at EC Comics and continued to mine the horror genre with work at Warren’s Creepy and Eerie, had come to DC as an editor. A tremendous teacher and experimenter, he revamped HOM from a super-hero title into a mystery anthology that allowed tyro talents like Bernie Wrightson, Michael William Kaluta, and Howard Chaykin to sharpen their skills and introduce us to a new generation of creators.
Orlando got the best from his people, including newcomers such as his editorial assistant, Michael Fleisher, and veterans, including Don Heck, who illustrated the first story in the collection. The early covers were designed to evoke gothic romance paperbacks with intricate borders and a single image without a lot of type. Jeff Jones contributed a particularly nice one for the second issue, which was written by Len Wein and drawn by Tony DeZuniga.
Feeling his way through the new title, Orlando mixed longer and shorter stories, rounding out issues with illustrated text tales. Readers were treated to a nice variety of stories and talents, such as issue #3’s work from Alex Toth.
Clearly, there was internal dissatisfaction with the book and when the line dropped back to 32-pages for 20 cents, this title was included. With issue #5, the title changed to Secrets of Sinister House although it was hard to tell the difference from the moody Nick Cardy cover and book-length tale from writers Lynn Marron & Michael Fleisher and artists Mike Sekowsky & Dick Giordano.
The romance angle was dropped entirely with the sixth issue with the arrival of Eve as host. She introduced a shorter mix of tales from the Orlando stable of talents and suddenly Sinister House was just another engaging title akin to HOM and House of Secrets. Readers will find work from Alfredo Alcala, Robert Kanigher, Sheldon Mayer, John Albano, Sam Glanzman, Kaluta, Maxene Fabe, Ruben Yandoc, Jack Oleck, Neal Adams, and Alex Niño.
The title cruised for a while, neither great nor terrible. But an editorial shuffle saw the book move to Murray Boltinoff, less bold in his talent choices, but a more commercial editor than Orlando. He ushered Eve out of the house, and used his own team of creators, led by writer George Kashdan. The final two issues mixed in one new story each and rounded the book out with reprints taken from the 1950s which were interesting but tonally bad fits.
And just like that, the Sinister House was no more although Eve endured as a figure seen in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the Dreaming spinoff series. All told, reading through these 18 issues shows the evolution of DC at a key point in its history.
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