The Fabuleous Fifties

Horrific Beauty

Saturday Leftover Day.

Between 1951 and 1957 Tony DiPreta did 150 to 200 stories for Stan Lee. He started out in the crime comics, but soon found his own style and niche in the horror comics. Even though the Stan Lee books did use symbolic splashes (preferring to start the action in the middle of the story instead) DiPreta always managed to give his splash panels a symbolic feel. Towards the end of his stay at Timely/Atlas, he started doing humor work, most notebly working on Homer, the Happy Ghost in a much lighter style. Before that he did Crime, Horror, War and Western stories, all in the same lushly inked style. His strong point seems to have been characters faces, which made him so uitable for the horror books. Some people have commented that his work for Atlas was hackneyed and stylisticly stagnant. I can only say that he made every story he did extremely readable and I consider it the high point of his career. Hre are another few of those stories. I have added one story from his Gleason period, so you can see the developmet in his style. It's from 1949, only just before he made the jump to Timely/Atlas. At first he worked in the same style there, but he sound came into his own.

Crime Does Not Pay #82:










Adventures into Terror #11:






Adventures into Weird Worlds #16:







Marvel Tales #117:






Astonishing #46:






Western Outlaws #4: