Continuing the Halloween festival…

DC Finest: Horror (Sep 9, 2025)

I recently purchased more DC Finest books, as part of their buy two, get one free promotion. This is really the only way that I would pick up these books, since it works out to be about $25 or less per book (full retail price is $40).

I’m still waiting on some books, but the one that I was most interested in, and seeing as it’s the Halloween time of the year, is DC Finest: Horror – The Devil’s Doorway.

As soon as I got the book in the mail, I dived right into it. The second story is a hoot, it has artist Gil Kane (“His Name is Kane”) killing his writer. There’s some commentary about what a ‘hack’ some writers are and how their stories aren’t very good. This is just one of those random, three-page back up story.

If you’re not familiar with these old horror books, they’re often quite short (6 pages at the most) and in one issue, you get two or three stories and some random one or two-pagers. This was a way to meet deadline, since artists and writers can crank out a little story and move onto next month or work on another title.

Famous artists, such as Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson worked on these side stories, so it’s always a pleasure to see their work (almost unrecognizable in some cases).

With this book, it compiles House of Secrets, House of Mystery, Witching Hour, and The Unexpected, all within 1969 to 1970. They’re printed in somewhat chronicle order, so you may get a few Witching Hour, followed by House of Mystery, etc. This can be jarring due to writing and artists styles.

Each of the title have their own storyteller. House of Secrets has Cain, and the companion title, House of Mystery has Abel. The Witching Hour has the three witches (the crone, the mother and the maiden), and Unexpected (a continuation of Tales from the Unexpected) has either Mad Mod Witch or this reaper-character.

Many of these stories are forgettable, but eventually House of Secrets did introduce the world to Swamp Thing… but these titles collected here were before that moment.

As I read more and more, I realized just how tame these stories were. Where was the blood? Where were the ghastly murders? Then it hit me: the stupid Comics Code.

You see, in the 50s, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham accused the comic book industry of corrupting the youth with their immoral comic books, mostly targeting EC comics. His book Seduction of the Innocent was used as proof, and so The Comics Code Authority was formed to censor comic books.

In 2001, Marvel Comics abandoned the Comics Code because they had rejected one of their stories… and by 2011, DC and Archie followed.

Still, these DC Horror comics were of its time, and I’m very happy to see them in a modern printing. I hope if they sold enough of these to warrant a second Horror title. Since these DC Finest are still relatively new to the market, I’m not so sure how successful they are yet. I know DC has printed or slated to print about 60 of these books so far. I’ve only got about 12 books, but I am hoping to get them all (if I can get them at an affordable price of course).

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