TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN: House of Mystery Monday with Mike Kaluta !

My faithful followers know that I announced that there probably won't be any new posts this month as I wanted to focus on working on all of my still unfinished Halloween / Horror / Shocktober posts instead. But one thing led to another and after working on the first two of these posts I started putting all of the still unposted artwork in my DC Comics horror folder in order. Which led to me finding a lot of new original artwork and while I am still working on that I wanted to do a new post to get some original artwork by one of the most underrated and underappreciated comicbook artists who worked on a lot of DC Comics most famous horror anthology titles out there. And as the well versed comicbook afficionado can easily surmise I am talking about Mike Kaluta who did most of the covers for HOUSE OF MYSTERY issues that featured I ... VAMPIRE stories.

And it's about time since the first and only time I featured Mike Kaluta in a spotlight was more than ten years ago . He worked on other DC Comics horror anthologies like THE HOUSE OF SECRETS or SECRETS OF HAUNTED HOUSE but Today we are focusing on his work for HOUSE OF MYSTERY.

By the way, while putting the material in my DC Comics horror folder in order I have also matched up the covers from Williams Verlag's HORROR title - at least the ones I have thanks to the fine guys from the German Comicguide - with the corresponding covers from the american titles and there will be another GOODBYE GERMANY post about that ( or more than one, we will see ) although I still haven't figured out of I should put the covers in the order of the american comics or in the publishing order of HORROR which would be easier. But that's a problem for another day.

Speaking of problems, using only Mike Kaluta's I VAMPIRE covers from THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY I would not have the necessary 23 pictures for a full one post. Thankfully the rest of those covers were done by another master of the comicbook art, none other than the great late Joe Kubert.

And since you can never have enough Joe Kubert artwork on your blog - especially since he has done his share of covers for DC Comics horror anthology titles - I am also including those in this DC horror spotlight.

As for I ... VAMPIRE, I really don't know much about the character only that Lord Andrew Bennett teamed up with Batman in issue 195 of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD ( which I read so I know the basic premise of the series ) and that DC Comics did a reboot during their NEW 52 initiative where it seemed that they tried to take the series into the TWILIGHT territory with a lot of cover that featured the main character shirtless.

Andrew Bennet was co - created by J. M. DeMatteis and Tom Sutton ( another underrated artist who was the first the draw Vampirella and about whom I have written quite a few posts ) and I know that J. M. DeMatteis did a Marvel graphic novel called GREENBERG THE VAMPIRE.

Which - apparently - was his initial concept for the series and in that Andrew Bennet's name would have been Greenberg but editor Len Wein wasn't so keen on that name while he liked the rest of the concept.