Midnight Tales #15

Charlton's Midnight Tales #15 (1975) serves up a deliciously unsettling cover by Wayne Howard: a bearded man in a dark suit holds open a door — ostensibly showing off closet space — while his speechbubble cheerfully notes there's "plenty" of it, but the doorway opens not onto a wall but onto a swirling cosmos of planets and stellar light. The couple being shown the "room" clearly hasn't bargained for a portal to the universe, and that gap between mundane real-estate patter and cosmic horror is exactly the kind of dry wit Charlton's horror anthology did so well. With "The Magician!" promised inside from writer Nicola Cuti and artist/letterer/inker Richard Larson, this issue looks like a fine example of 1975 Charlton at its eerie, imaginative best.