Grass Menagerie

You sought somewhere shady to nap
Who'd-a thought this cool glade was a trap
The shadow of death
Has bad fetid breath
You're caught, little lady. Oh crap!

Tomb of Terror #7, 1953. Art by Lee Elias. Title by David Cairns.

The Killing Bore

You yearned for those faraway thrills!
So turned to the stars to get chills
New worlds to explore
Space girls and much more
But learned that the Martians like...drills?!?

Planet Comics #9 (1940). Art by Nick Cardy.

Assault Water

While Doris just stands in the boat
The horror's cold hands squeeze your throat
The dead should stay down
Instead, you will drown
It's morbid, but that's all she wrote.

Another great Tomb of Terror cover by Lee Elias from 1954.

Amorphous in the Undie-World

He's a gruesome and black-hearted chappie
The view from the back is quite crappy
From regions chthonic
Egregious, demonic
In a putrid and cack-stinking nappy.

David Cairn

The first issue of Tomb of Terror, 1952. Cover art by Warren Kremer.

Granny by Flashlight

This mummified pair, like a crash-site
So crumbly and scary and ash-white
In their gauze-swaddled death
Make you draw in your breath
As they come in the glare of your flashlight.

David Cairns

Another 1950s Harvey horror comic comic by artist Lee Elias.

Decompose Yourself

Skin starts to turn red and corrode
And parts of the head soon explode
It's horror, and...YIKES!
This gore's sold to tykes!
Such art surely led to the Code.

Tomb of Terror #15, 1952. Lee Elias, artist. After horror comic books became the target of Senate hearings on juvenile deliquency and the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent, the comic book industry created the self-imposed Comics Code Authority, which censored and proscribed the content of comic books. Code-approved comics carried the CCA seal on their cover.

Headroom Farce

The air's full of heads, mean and grinning
They're scary, undead, green and thinning
Is the closet so cluttered
Because it's been shuttered?
Beware, when these dread tops start spinning!

David Cairns


Tomb of Terror # 11, 1953. Art by Lee Elias. Title by Donald B. Benson.

Frontal Globe

In a Jovian's sphere she is trapped
As her mauve captor leers at her, rapt
His eyestalks are popping
At thighs that are whoopping
Quite a trove for this weirdo -- squidnapped!

David Cairns


Planet Comics #44, 1946. Artist: Joe Doolin

Adolph Hitter

Cap fights the manure master race 

Let the mighty endure some disgrace
The readers get pumped
When the leader gets thumped
A right to der Führer's fat face!

David Cairns

Captain America #1, 1941. Art by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scram

In space, you can zoom on a sled
And race against doom, death or dread
When your beau faces whacking
And his foe needs a smacking
Your mace will go boom on their head.

David Cairns


Planet Comics #54, 1948. Artist: Joe Doolin.

Throwaway Culture

With their scales and their colorful trunks
They're failures and dullards and punks
The Queen's green-skinned boys
Careen like cheap toys
Sent sailing by skull-smashing hunks.

David Cairns and Surly Hack

"Renegade Queen of Mars". Planet Comics #10, 1940. Art by Dan Zolnerowich.

Amazon Primed

In his tin-plated grip squirms the blonde
She's thin, a mere slip from beyond
She strains, looking cute
In her chainmail swimsuit
To girls skinny, half-stripped, he responds.

David Cairns

Planet Comics #8, 1940. Cover by Charles Sultan.

Heavenly Body Heat

Her spacesuit is highly impractical.
And yet, it is totally tactical.
Though decent and pure
More readers she'll lure
When drawn to imply she's sex-actable.

Donald B. Benson

Bumpkin Batch

A stereotypical hick
Take a very hard whipping to lick
It's a real inbred brood
Who unfeelingly feud
Undeterred by this strip-cartoon kick.

David Cairns


Captain America #11, 1942. Art credited to Al Avison and Syd Shores.

Science Ick-tion

It's purple and fuzzy and shrieking!
It burps, something scuzzy is leaking!
Slimy trail, with a rag wipe
It wails like a bagpipe
While chirping and buzzing and reeking.

You strangle that pain from beyond!
You'll mangle each veiny, wet frond!
If the thing had a neck
You would wring it like heck
This fang-featured brain just got brawned.

David Cairns

Planet Comics #2 (1940). Artist: Will Eisner (and studio?)

Guilt-Edged Gold

Some comics in Golden Age prime
Were loaded with violence and crime
On cheapest pulp printed
Quite vulgarly tinted
And BEST OF ALL, only a dime!

Donald B. Benson

Fight Against Crime #20 (1954). Maybe the tail end of the Golden Age, but it sure is violent!

Whip Replacement

At work this guy likes it on top 

But at home he does not wield a crop 

To relax he submits 

To whipcracks and hits 

And pleads with his mistress, "Don't stop!"

Mystic Comics #6 (1941). Artist: Alex Schomburg.

Red Skullduggery

His favorite thing is a bomb
He throws 'em with joyful aplomb
His personal goal
Is total control
In sexual terms, he's a "dom".

The Red Skull began his fictional life as an adversary of Captain America during WW2. "The Return of the Red Skull" from Captain America #3, by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby.

Gulp Fiction

Unfortunate hack, this poor chap
A tortured and lachrymose sap
Sunk in gloom, wrote suspense
Full of doom, short on sense
Some scorchers, some lackluster crap.

David Cairns

By all accounts (well, the exhaustive biography First You Dream, Then You Die) noir and suspense pulp writer Cornell Woolrich had a miserable personal life.

Cornell Liquor

He knows a quite a lot about drinking
His prose comes while blotto and stinking
But while bobbing afloat
Somehow novels get wrote
Writing flows as the bottles keep clinking.

David Cairns

Alcohol figured into both the life an fiction of Cornell Woorich.

Heaven Can Grate

Her porcelain beauty's quite smashing
But warning! Red lights should be flashing
Her love, unrestrained
With blood is soon stained
Ignore her and--wait--what's that splashing?

Cornel Wilde and Gene Tierney in John M. Stahl's masterpiece, Leave Her to Heaven (1945).