Oh boy, what a cover! Notice how the shards of glass in the background window appear like jagged teeth, the entire pane creating the gaping jaws of a horrible monster. What a seedy, underworld, down at the docks at nighttime scene. Sharpy’s plot with the cheating wife have gone awry. The husband is crawling out of the water, nails clinging into the wood dock after surviving a horrific car “accident.” A picture worth a thousand words. Myron Fass is credited with cover.
“The Week End of Dread”
While Myron Fass began his career as a comic book artist, he is more known as an editor and publisher of pulp magazines. He began one of the first MAD imitators with a title called Lunatickle. The New York entrepreneur was the foremost publisher of sleazy pulp magazines, putting out titles such as Official UFO, Terror Tales, Horror Tales, Homicide Detectives, Violent World and Movie Lies. By 1964 Fass started the tabloid paper National Mirror which ran until 1973. “He was responsible for almost every bottom-of-the barrel publication to come out in the seventies.”
One panel from a Fass story in Tales of Horror published by Toby Press (June 1952 – October 1954) inspired the Roy Lichtenstein painting “The Kiss” (1961).
Stories inside Secret Mysteries #16 include “The Shadow People,” “Hiding Place,” “The Death Look,” and “The Week End of Dread” feature Rudy Palais art. Palais may have actually ghosted the cover.
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