Posted By Dan Greenfield on Oct 12, 2024 | 6 comments

In search of a comic that’s as elusive as a ghost…

By JIM BEARD 

I thought it was gone, maybe forever, but I finally got the spirit back—and his name is Spooky.

My very first comics as a kid, the ones my dad bought me before the onslaught of superheroes, were the Casper the Friendly Ghost family of titles from Harvey Comics. My initial offering was The Friendly Ghost Casper #137, gifted to me in October of 1969. It was a gateway drug, my entry into the Enchanted Forest and Casper’s world of friends, foes, and fables. Superheroes came along soon after that but Casper and his pals stood side by side with them for a few years, a cheerful alternative to the “relevance” of the early 1970s crimebuster fare.

I loved Casper’s adventures, but I’m here to tell you that the little guy was kind of a sap, a soft touch for anyone with a sob story. There was another spirit in the forest, a kind of Donald Duck to Casper’s milquetoast Mickey Mouse. That, of course, was the Tuff Little Ghost, Spooky. He was my hero, the little hellion I wanted to be if I didn’t have asthma and wear glasses. And have red hair.

Flash forward to adulthood. I have all the comics I’ve ever had, all the way back to childhood, but for some reason I don’t have my Harveys. To this day, I have no idea what happened to them, or why they’re missing. I had a lot of them and I loved them, but for some reason they disappeared—not unlike Casper and Spooky themselves when the situation went from slim to sticky.

So, several years ago I started seeking out and re-collecting all my Harveys. The problem was that I had to identify them first, so I pored over cover galleries online until the issues I had jumped out at me. That was the easy part; I don’t know what I ate yesterday for lunch but I can remember every darn Casper comic I ever had by cover alone.

So, slowly and surely, through eBay and comics shops and shows, I’ve put my Harvey collection back together. It’s been a joy each and every time I’ve picked up a book to open the cover and enter the Enchanted Forest once more for adventures with my old chums. The stories came right back to me in just the first few panels and I’ve reflected again on how foolish I was to ever somehow let them go all those years ago.

All that said, one issue had eluded me. I had a very fond memory of a particular Spooky story, yet I wasn’t finding it in any of the issues of Spooky I had reacquired. It confounded me. Could I have misremembered it? Was it in some Casper comic instead? I recalled it was different from other Spooky stories, most especially in the art, and there was an element in the tale itself that was so cool to me as a kid… I had to find that story or it would drive me crazy.

The key to eventually finding the issue was in breaking down my reluctance to widen my search. I was dead-set on only looking at Spooky covers and other books like Casper and Spooky. I rejected such titles as Tuff Ghosts Starring Spooky because that wording itself wasn’t giving me any pings on my memory radar. That’s where I made my mistake. Tamping down my stubbornness and feeling my frustration, I looked through Tuff Ghosts covers… and lo and behold, I recognized two images. Digging into the details, I found a back-up story in 1971’s Tuff Ghosts #40 that sounded like it could quite possibly be the story I was looking for.

One eBay sale later and it was. The Spooky tale that attached itself to me like a haunted doll you find at an estate sale and can’t get rid of without an occultist’s help. There on those wonderful cheap, four-color pages was my old pal.

The story itself is a simple little, five-page thing—no Watchmen or Crisis on Infinite Earths here—about Spooky’s efforts to find a new house to haunt and eventually being scared off himself by the weirdos that inhabit one he thought to be suitable, unaware of it being an amusement park “Haunted House” attraction. It’s a lovely, brief piece of fluff stuck in the middle of a “Giant Size” issue of other Spooky, Casper, and Wendy tales. So why the big deal over it, you ask? Two reasons, which may only make any sense to me, but here goes.

First, the art was different from all the other Casper-verse comics I had. Instead of the Warren Kremer/Ernie Colon-style big-head drawings, this was rougher in some ways, and to my eyes even more comical. To this day, I’m not sure who drew the story; I only know that its art is very distinctive compared to the usual Casper stuff and appealed to me more so than the other artists, whoever they were.

Secondly, that one particular element I mentioned before, the one that really stuck in my head for decades. It’s a few panels of Spooky discovering a chute of sorts hidden in a bed that whisks him out of the funhouse. As a kid that boggled my brain and appealed to me 10 ways to Sunday. How did it work? How would anyone know it’s there if the entrance is covered by bedclothes? Was it for humans as well as ghosts? Where could I get one?

This and all the other wonderful attributes of the five-pager, titled “Haunting Up a House,” by the way, came back to me in force when I opened it up and absorbed the issue’s contents. The other stories were also very recognizable to me, making for a few minutes of sheer joy. I had gotten my spirit back and it was a hauntingly good time.

And I’m never going to give up the ghost ever again.

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MORE

— The TOP 13 HARVEY COMICS Ghost Covers – RANKED. Click here.

— The Goofy Giddiness of Disney’s CHILLING, THRILLING HAUNTED HOUSE Record. Click here.

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When JIM BEARD’s not editing and publishing through his two houses, Flinch Books and Becky Books, he’s pounding out adventure fiction with both original and licensed characters. In fact, he’s put words in the mouths of Luke Skywalker, Superman, Fox Mulder, Carl Kolchak, Peter Venkman and the Green Hornet… and lived to tell about it. His most fitting books for the season?  The Sgt. Janus: Spirit-Breaker Saga!