A Halloween edition of Fred Van Lente’s COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH! By FRED VAN LENTE When I was a kid in New Jersey in the late 1970s, I wore out my library card checking out the “Monster Press” books from Crestwood House, with their B-movie poster title fonts and pumpkin-orange spines. I honestly can’t say which I discovered first, the classic Universal and Hammer monster movies aired on Channel 11 WPIX’s Chiller Theater or the kid-friendly synopses of those movies in this slim book series, illustrated with chilling black and white stills and mostly written by Ian Thorne, a male pseudonym for scribe Julian May. The back cover of every book had King Kong throwing up his mighty paws below the list of spine-tingling titles: Godzilla! Mad Scientists! The Blob! Dracula! And my favorite: The Wolf Man. Sure, that image on the Crestwood cover is actually from 1935’s The Werewolf of London, but the book cemented my love for the tale of doomed lycanthropic failson Larry Talbot, indelibly portrayed by Babe Ruth-lookalike Lon Chaney, Jr. I bring up the Monster Press line of children’s books only to underscore the pure idiocy of the original 1954 Comics Code, which specifically prohibited “scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism.” Granted, this ban was instituted primarily to run Tales From the Crypt publisher William M. Gaines out of business, as the industry blamed him for inflaming public ire during his disastrous Senate testimony. But it had the actual effect of pointlessly kicking most movie monsters off the comics stands for the next 17 years under the dubious goal of protecting kids’ psyches. Finally, in 1971, the Comics Code was revised, and saner heads prevailed: “Vampires, ghouls and werewolves shall be permitted to be used when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works written by Edgar Allen Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world,” sniffed the high-minded scolds in the Comics Magazine Association of America. That crack in the crypt door was enough for kids’ favorite monsters to come rushing back onto the comics racks, and Marvel led the way with their own Wolf Man, Werewolf by Night, and the public-domain Tomb of Dracula. In...