Scary Tales #28

Charlton's Scary Tales #28 (1981) delivers a genuinely unsettling cover by Steve Ditko: a massive, red-skinned, beak-faced demon looms in the foreground, radiating a burst of otherworldly light, while a terrified man and woman recoil in the background — a ghostly cloaked figure lurking ominously behind them. The cover teases a story called "The Gift to Gifford," promising it's precisely what you want for Christmas, which is the kind of delightfully twisted holiday sentiment only a horror anthology could pull off. Inside, writer Joe Gill and artist/inker Demetrio Sánchez Gómez bring the chills, making this a fine example of Charlton's reliably eerie 1981 output.