In the early 1970s, when DC Comics publisher Carmine Infantino surveyed the then-current comic book industry landscape, he saw traditional superheroes — long a mainstay for his company —  seemingly in decline, while other well-established genres, such as romance, war, and westerns, were managing to hold on at best.  About the only sector that could be said to be actually thriving was the mystery books — the label “mystery” in this case having next to nothing to do with conventional crime or detective fiction, but rather signifying supernatural horror — or, at least, what passed for it under a Comics Code Authority that didn’t allow the word “horror” to be used in the title of a comic or even an individual story, despite the 1971 revisions to the Code that allowed “literary” monsters such as vampires and werewolves to appear in the color comics of DC and most other publishers for the first time since 1954.  Read More