The Fantagraphics EC Artists' Library #4

In "Seance!", a skeptical man challenges a medium to summon the spirit of his supposedly deceased wife—only to find the séance succeeds in ways he never expected. As the room grows still and the spirit materializes, his triumph turns to dread when he returns home to find his wife dead, her death as sudden and final as the moment the spirit appeared.

In "Bats in My Belfry!", a deaf actor desperate for restored hearing seeks out a mysterious healer recommended by a friend, only to agree to a radical procedure involving a bat’s senses. What begins as a desperate bid for normalcy quickly spirals into something far more unsettling as his newfound hearing sharpens beyond human limits—and with it, strange, unsettling changes begin to take hold.

In "Drawn and Quartered!", a disillusioned Haitian artist, betrayed by the art world, turns to voodoo for retribution—only to discover his own portrait has become a living, vulnerable vessel. With the power to inflict harm through his paintings, he must protect his likeness while hunting those who wronged him, walking a razor’s edge between justice and self-destruction.

In "Well-Cooked Hams!", two ambitious American producers attempt to import Parisian Grand Guignol horror to Broadway, only to find their plans thwarted by a theater owner who refuses to cooperate. After they take matters into their own hands, the dead man’s vengeance unfolds in a chilling twist—what was meant to be a spectacle of staged terror becomes a deadly reality, with the stage’s props turning all too real.

In "Bargain in Death!", two desperate medical students make a grim deal to secure a cadaver for their anatomy exam—only to find themselves entangled in a twisted scheme where a man’s staged death is about to become all too real. With a five-dollar bribe and a freshly dug grave, they’re drawn into a chilling game of deception, where life, death, and greed blur in the most unexpected ways.

In "Grounds...for Horror!", a young boy named Artie is locked in the closet by his cruel step-father, Samuel Bricker, as punishment. Trapped in the dark, Artie is startled to find a strange friend named Hozir, a creature who lives in the closet and has his own ideas about justice. As Hozir proposes increasingly extreme ways to deal with the step-father, Artie struggles to keep him in check—until the boy’s restraint is tested when the step-father crosses a line too far.

In "Gas-tly Prospects!", a California gold miner named Whitey finds himself trapped between life and death after being shot by a claim jumper. As he lies wounded and fading, he awakens to a horrifying realization: he’s already dead, and the man who shot him is trying to bury him—without success. The story unfolds with eerie tension as the miner’s ghostly presence unsettles the living man, whose greed and violence begin to unravel in ways he never expected.

In "Survival... or Death!", two men aboard a cargo ship pass the time by engineering a cruel game: a floating barrel rigged with a teetering platform and a trap that sends rats plunging into water, forcing them to fight for survival. As they place bets on which rat will win the brutal contest, the line between entertainment and desperation begins to blur. When disaster strikes and the ship sinks, the true nature of their game is revealed — in the chaos of survival, the line between man and rat vanishes.

In a war-ravaged town where rationing rules the kitchen, a butcher finds a way to profit by selling horsemeat and then tainted meat to the poor while reserving prime cuts for the wealthy. When his son dies after eating the spoiled meat, his wife’s grief turns to cold fury—she takes up a carving knife and, with quiet precision, turns her husband into the day’s special.

In "Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall!", a man recounts the eerie moment he crafted a monstrous being from artificial parts and transferred his consciousness into it, only to find himself trapped in a carnival’s hall of mirrors—where the endless reflections of his own twisted form become a nightmare he can’t escape.

In the quiet shadow of a full moon, a small farm town reels from two brutal murders, and the sheriff swiftly blames a newly arrived Hungarian man and his two sons, executing the father on suspicion. But the sons, certain the real monster wears the badge, begin a dangerous game of deception to unmask the true beast among them—only to discover the horrifying truth lies closer than they ever imagined.

A cab driver wakes from a vivid dream of being chased by a man named Dr. Mueller into a basement lined with caskets occupied by vampires—only to find the doctor himself stepping into his cab. Recognizing the dream as a warning, he leads the man to the very basement from his vision and, in a chilling reversal, drains his blood. Afterward, the vampire cabbie returns to the earthen sod in his trunk to wait out the day.

In "Dead Right!", a doctor puts his friend’s radical theory about consciousness after death to a chilling test—faking a fatal poisoning with an anesthetic, only to find the experiment turns horrifyingly real. As the heart specialist’s life slips away, the doctor’s first-person narration reveals a terrifying truth: the man’s awareness persists beyond death, witnessing everything in eerie detail.

Tight Grip! tells the chilling tale of a trunk that narrates its own dark obsession, watching helplessly as the woman it loves is murdered. When the killer tries to hide inside, panic sets in—and the trunk, in a grotesque act of self-defense, tightens its grip with terrifying precision.

In "Undertaking Palor," a group of curious boys spying through an undertaker’s basement window stumble upon a chilling conspiracy: the town druggist and undertaker are secretly poisoning citizens to profit from their funerals. When Percy’s father becomes the next target, the boys vow to stop the scheme—no matter the risk.

In "Food for Thought," a woman torn between duty and desire schemes to flee with the circus animal trainer, her husband’s telepathic bond with her the only thing holding their act together. When he discovers her plan, he forces the trainer into a lion’s cage, but the wife, left with no proof, watches coldly as her husband is paralyzed during the circus’s final setup—then chooses silence as he begs for help through their shared mind.

In "Operation Friendship," a twisted act of surgical obsession turns a marriage into a grotesque experiment: a man removes 75% of his friend’s brain, preserving it in a jar so he can keep the intellectual companionship, while the friend’s wife unknowingly inherits the remaining 25%—and the body—of her husband.

In "Concerto for Violin and Werewolf," a young violinist arrives in a remote Transylvanian town to visit his reclusive teacher, drawn by a mysterious story he read in a horror comic. As he settles in, unease creeps in—strange nights, fleeting shadows, and the town’s growing silence—but he fails to see the truth hidden in plain sight. The real horror isn’t in the woods or the moonlight; it’s in the music itself.

In "Four-Way Split," a man with a haunted past uses the bizarre legal loophole of a quadripoint—where four states meet—to commit the perfect crime, killing his partner in a place no single jurisdiction can claim. But when the corpse returns, it brings with it a chilling reckoning, each execution method a grim echo of the man’s own twisted logic.

In "Forever Ambergris," a sea captain’s twisted revenge takes a grotesque turn when he engineers the death of a rival by sending him to a plague-ridden island. After the man is consumed by disease and later disgorged by a whale, the captain harvests the corpse’s remains, believing them to be a rare perfume ingredient. He delivers the vile substance to the man’s grieving wife, who, upon wearing it in the privacy of her bathroom, begins to decay before her eyes.

In "Telescope," a lone man and a desperate rat—both survivors of a shipwreck—find themselves stranded on a desolate island, their fates entwined by hunger and isolation. As they circle each other with wary eyes, the fragile balance of survival begins to unravel in a grim, relentless cycle of hunger and fear.

In "Upon Reflection," the grieving mayor of a quiet town, consumed by vengeance after his wife’s death at the hands of a werewolf, leads a search under the next full moon. When the posse spots a lone woman they suspect is the beast, the mayor retreats to his library to consult old texts—only to find himself staring into a mirror, face to face with the snarling reflection of the very monster he’s hunting.

In "The Trophy!", a seasoned big game hunter finds his dominance shattered when a mysterious ghoul sabotages his car with a pair of sudden blow-outs. Awakening to a nightmare of his own making, Clyde Franklin confronts the chilling reality of his fate—his hunting days are over, and he’s become the prize.