Pre-Code Classics: Beware #2

This handsome PS Artbooks hardcover collects Beware: Chilling Tales of Horror issues 8–14 (March 1954–March 1955), gathering some of the most delightfully unrestrained horror comics from the pre-Code era in one volume. The featured cover art — penciled by Sid Check and inked by Frank Frazetta — is a vivid showcase of the period's boldness: a decaying, skeletal corpse lunges from a nighttime graveyard, torch in hand, while a terrified woman in red flees against a full yellow moon, the whole scene captioned with the tantalizing promise of "The Bell Tolls Death." If you have any appetite for the lurid imagination that defined early-'50s horror comics before the Comics Code changed everything, Volume Two is a thoroughly satisfying plunge into the macabre.