Welcome to the second chapter of “Glimpse into Horror,” a journey into the most twisted and bizarre corners of pulp horror. We return to the United States of the early 1950s—the brief but glorious era of horror comics that predated the Comics Code—a frenetic time when newsstands were overrun by walking corpses, vampires, severed heads, mad scientists, and outlandish monsters.

Between 1950 and 1954, before the advent of the Comics Code Authority, American horror comics enjoyed a period of extraordinary creative freedom; publishers vied to produce increasingly shocking stories and macabre covers, blending supernatural horror, crime, science fiction, dark humor, and sheer oddity. Death was everywhere, justice was often cruel, and happy endings... simply didn't exist.

The undisputed master of this macabre carnival was EC Comics, the publisher behind titles such as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear. Under the guidance of William Gaines and Al Feldstein—and thanks to the work of legendary artists like Johnny Craig, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, and Wally Wood—horror comics achieved a remarkable synthesis of grotesque imagination, visual sophistication, and morbid humor.

Yet EC was merely the most famous player in a much larger graveyard: Atlas, Avon, Harvey, St. John, Fox Feature Syndicate, and countless smaller publishers flooded the market with bizarre and excessive comics. Then, in 1954... the party came to an end: a growing moral panic surrounding comic books—fueled in particular by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s book "Seduction of the Innocent"—led the industry to establish the Comics Code Authority. All the hallmarks of horror comics—blood, killings, tragic and sardonic endings—were banned; within a few weeks, the Golden Age of American horror comics came to an end.

“Squarcio nell’Orrore II” is HDK’s small tribute to those four delirious years defined by cheap paper, garish colors, decomposing corpses, and surreal nightmares: a journey back to an era when comics were ferocious, excessive, and completely uninhibited.