Number 1955: Wallace Wood, “The Man from the Grave!”

In Russ Cochran’s 1985 reprints of Haunt of Fear, artist Roy Krenkel gives a nightmarish vision of artist Wallace Wood: “You’d come to Wally’s door and you realize Wally had been up all night. You ring the bell repeatedly. The door finally slowly opens and Wally stands there with an absolutely glazed look in his eyes. He’d be walking like a mummy, and he’d slowly amble in and guzzle some fruit juice and go back to the drawing board. With all his brilliant imagination, everything is done totally automatic, a real frozen zombie way of life. Why it didn’t kill him I’ll never know. The guy was totally obsessed with work, really hung up on hard work . . .”

Bill Mason follows that comment with a paragraph about today’s story: “‘The Man from the Grave’ matches an excellent Gardner Fox script with the best job Wallace Wood ever did on a horror story. Roy Krenkel’s 1972 reminiscence of the young, workaholic Wood corroborates what is already clear from the artwork: that “The Man from the Grave” is not just another assignment to Wood, but a fable of his own life as an artist.”

This is a black line version of the story I found a few years ago on the internet, from The Haunt of Fear #4 (1950):

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