Skywald's Nightmare Issue 7 reprint by Gwandanaland Comics

 

TITLE-Nightmare issue 7
SOURCE-Gwandanaland Comic TPB

Nightmare was one of the 3 b/w magazine sized horror comics that Skywald published in the early 70s. While the art and stories were not always at the level of the Warren mags,like Creepy and 1984/1994,Skywald was a good second place in the B/W Horror Comic vein. Thankfully Skywald forgot to put a proper copyright notice on their magazines. Which means they are all Public Domain. So Gwandanaland Comics,a publisher that specializes in PD comic collections,a few years ago started reprinting all the Skywald mags. What I have here is cause I didn't read the description closely. I had already ordered a few volumes of Scream,another Skywald Horror Mag,and wanted to get some issues of Nightmare. I didn't read the description on Amazon closely. So instead of ordering a TPB that reprints 4 or 5 issues of the magazine,what I got is a thin TPB that reprints issue 7 of Nightmare.

In this issue we get 8 stories and one article. The article is on Dracula in cinema. And mostly talks about Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee.

The first story is The Penitent,wrote by Ed Fedoryi and the art credited to Ferran Sostres. Never heard of either creator. The story is told to us by a man with a long white beard. He is in prison and claims to be innocent. From what he tells and shows us it appears that this Prisoner lives in a world full of fantasy elements like dragons and Lizard-men. But like the Pre-Code horror comics these stories were inspired by we get a twist ending. Sadly it is a twist that sucks.

Group Jeopardy ,Script by S.F. Starr art by Amador,is up next.A group of people with various mental issues are at a place way out in the woods. And their doctor is trying to help them with their issues. But there is a mad killer on the loose who kills using a brutal bear hug. Thankfully the twist in this story is way better than the one in the first story.

Our third tale is The Giant Death Rat. At a wharf a group of rats are trying to get on a cargo ship that is headed to the new world,AKA North America. A few weeks after the ship is out in the ocean someone in the kitchen sees one of the rats. The captain gives an order to find the rat or everyone on board will die of the Plague. They don't find the rat,but not long afterwards one of the sailors comes down with a deathly illness. By the end of this 7 page story all but a few of the sailors are either dead or dying from the plague. The ship is set on fire to prevent the plague from spreading. And we go back to the wharf. The rats tell us how they are glad they didn't go on the ship since one of the humans aboard had the plague. Decent twist ending on this one and great art.

Batting clean up,aka Fourth,is GASP! A 3 pager that feels like a story rejected by every horror publisher so far. The twist at the end is just dumb. This one has art and script by Donald Brown. And yea the art isn't good and the story sucks.

After the 4th story is the 6 pager on Dracula in Cinema. Nothing in here any horror fan didn't already know. But I'm sure back when this came out and we didn't have as easy an access to info this article might have been pretty good.

5th story is The Alter of Blood. Which has the best art of story in this issue. That gorgeous art is by Pablo Marcos and Bob Kirschen is the writer. The story sadly isn't as good as the art. A demoness in Hell is trying to take over all of Hell. This 6 pager I am betting was aimed at the teenage boy audience that wasn't old enough to buy Playboy but could buy a horror comic.

A Father's Lament is our 6th story. Script by Ed Fedory and art chores are handled by Frank Cueto. A father and his son are off hunting in the woods. They find a body of a man. This man has a large ax in the middle of his chest. In the body's pocket they find a journal. Learning that the man was hunting a werewolf.  A werewolf that killed his family.  After what appears to be years of hunting this killer werewolf the man gets the upper hand and burys a silver ax in the chest of the lupine monster. This is where we learn the werewolf is the son. Our father and son team of hunters are shocked by this story they read. And the father let's his greed get the best of him. He removes the ax from the body's chest. Planning on selling the ax since it's head is silver. The son tells him to not do this since it is cursed. But the father ignores his son. And the story ends with the hunters talking about how hard it must have been on the father to kill his son,even if he is a killer werewolf,and off in the distance we see the werewolf alive again and about to attack the 2 hunters.

Lucky number 7 is Artifacts. A Sci Fi short story I have seen done many times before. A new World War happens. Most of mankind dies. The small band of survivors leave some sacred artifacts hidden in a cave. A few hundred years later some aliens that look like Vaughn Bode Lizards land on Earth. Go into the cave and find these artifacts. One of which is a metal disc. This is opened and inside they find a reel of 35mm film. The Bode Aliens rig up a projector and we see that this film reel is a Looney Tunes short!!  Script and art on this one are handled by Dennis Fujitake. Loved the art and the story was decent,even if I have read/saw variants of it for decades.

Our final story  is scripted by Al Hewetson with TORRENTS handling the art. I do wonder who TORRENTS is. This is a Sci Fi story heavily inspired by the mythos of HP Lovecraft.  And while it has some really nice looking art the story is crap. Like the Alter of Blood story this is one where you are better off looking at the art and making up your own story to go along with it.

Now with any Gwandanaland Comic you have to remember all they do is either find scans of the comics or get the comic and do the scans themself. They do not touch up the art or alter it in anyway. With their Skywald stuff the only thing that is changed is the ad pages and some of the text pieces are removed. This reprinting a single issue of Nightmare means it has 70 pages. IIRC it was like 8 bucks on Amazon. The bit of looking I have done on Skywald stuff is any issue of their horror comic mags in decent shape will run you way more than 8 bucks. So this reprint from Gwandanaland is a great deal.

The art in almost all the stories is really good. With GASP! being the only one with what I would consider bad art. Out of the 8 stories in the issue 3 of them I found to be pretty damn good. The others went from readable to Skip the story and just enjoy the pretty art level.

If you enjoy horror comics. And have read all the Creepy and Eeries stuff give one of the Skywald collections from Gwandanaland Comics a try.