The First Groove Ghoulies

A decade after Universal Pictures established their connected monster universe in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, there wasn't a gathering of ghouls like this until Comic Media's Horrific comics in 1953. The first seven issues of Horrific were a standard anthology of terror tales, but Issue #8 took a major turn when they introduced not one, but a full set of five horror hosts. The main one was the charismatic Teller of Tales who was an average chemist named Walker that was in the usual comic book lab accident which after he awakens from a coma learns he has the power to read minds and foresee the future. The next is Victor Vampire who recalls his origin as John Doe with his wife Jane trying to survive on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. The placeholder couple rescue a drowning man named Lance Bloodman who turns out to be a vampire that passes his curse on to John which gets so bad for him that once they reach civilization, he leaves his wife to go feed of homeless people. Victor eventually gets taken in by Teller to hang out in his old mansion to spin yarns with the rest of his crew which consisted of Walter Werewolf, Freddie Demon, and Gary Ghoul. Each one of them would tell stories that fit their motif like Walter narrating stories of animal people, or Freddie dealing with fables of demonic forces. Some of the stories in Horrific didn't have any of the hosts in it like Sewer Horror which is silly considering they just introduced five emcees in the same issue. This went on for five more issues until the series stupidly changed its title to Terrific for its last installment which still had our groovy ghoulies acting as nasty newscasters of terror. We never learn how these five fiends got together, or the origin stories of the other three repulsive roommates. This would have made for a pretty lively 60's Saturday morning kids show, but the residents of the Horrific house were overdoing it trying to showcase an entire quintet of monsters in a single issue. There's a monster mash, but this was an overstuffed casserole of creepy cliches.