Swamp Monsters (Chilling Archives of Horror Comics)

I gave this two stars because it's printed on good quality paper and the presentation is great. The stories selected are, however, even by the standards of the time period, pretty bad. I wasn't expecting something life-changing from this volume, but the title is misleading unless your definition of what constitutes a 'Swamp Monster' is a lot broader than mine. I did enjoy some of the artwork, but I have to say that if I had seen this in a shop somewhere (as opposed to pre-ordering it from Amazon based on the title, description, and cover illustration), I would have saved my money. I might have picked it up a few years down the road if I'd found it in a 5 buck box at a convention. It should have been called "Strange Swamp Tales" or something similar rather than trying to cop market share from Swamp Thing and Man-Thing fans by using the title they went with. That fact alone almost cost them another star from my review.

This is a typical IDW reprint. You are either going to love it or hate it. Quality is on par with previous reprints but NOTE the book is 127 pages long and NOT over 240 pages long. It is a slim paperbound volume. Besides a few notable cover artists..Matt Baker...LB Cole. The only story art by a name artist is by Basil Wolverton. Venture into this swamp at your own risk.

They've really outdone themselves with this compendium. Dark. Swampy. Murky. Welcome to the age of horror comics when such things were permitted and presented without apology. If you swim near Innsmouth or like to dip a toe into the metaphorical backwaters of the bayou - CCR playing in the background, of course - you'll love this.

I am really enjoying this pre code horror series by Yoe books. Each book has a theme, this one is Swamp Monsters, the first book was Mummies. Nice size, similar to an old comic book & soft bound with good color on vintage feel paper. Usually some covers are reproduced as well. I look forward to the next one which will cover Ghost comics. I hope they will do a Frankenstein themed book as well.

This is an excellent collection of vintage horror comics. Highly recommend to any fan of the old horror and swamp thing

In the early 1970s, within weeks of each other, Marvel created Man-Thing and DC created Swamp Thing. Both were new horror strips about scientists who had been transformed into creatures that lived in the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and both companies insisted they hadn’t known what the other was up to. This unlikely argument was thinly supported by the cliched inevitability of reviving the swamp monster genre after the relaxing and rewriting of the comics code, initially revised to accommodate responsible anti-drugs stories and the realities of 1970s America, but ultimately mostly resulting in a horror comics revival of previously forbidden zombies, vampires, and werewolves. This book features some of those early ’50s swamp creature stories that were removed as a genre by the introduction of the Comics Code censorship body. If you couldn’t be crass and horrific, there wasn’t much point to the swamp monster comic.Unlike the Ghosts and Mummies collections in this series, which are also great fun, there is no existing mythos for swamp creatures, so the writers are obliged to be a little more creative. And so they are, with an assortment of ghastly hybrids between men and apes, frogs, zombies, blobs, many of which used to be men that had gone missing, and including, memorably, a murderous serial killing woman and an alligator. In fact, there are two stories with women transforming into alligators (revenge for all that luggage perhaps). There are voodoo witches, ghosts of witches, a castle full of creatures and a captive woman, and um, giant sentient moths. Yeah, moths. The stories get madder, and more creative as they go on, until the insane “Swamp Terror”, which closes the collection and adorns the cover.This is probably the best of the three collections, although the others are fine. The art is crude, busy, and functional, while the stories are clumsy, with flat dialogue, proceeding simply from A to B, but the stream-of-consciousness style of the writing brings creative one-of-a-kind results. In an era where comics appear to be empty inside from front to back, all this is more appealing and satisfying today than it might have been during the Silver Age, when things—and Things—had moved on, and comics, thanks to Stan Lee and James Warren, were a little more sophisticated. As silly as they are, these atmospheric yarns do kinda grab ya, and you feel as though you’re getting some bang for your buck.Purchased on Amazon.co.uk

The stories, art and reproduction are decent enough. They've done a good job finding different kinds of swamp stories. The only real disappointment is that it is a little thin and soft bound. Also the last story is one that has been reprinted a couple of times before.