DC Comics The House of Secrets: # 141 September 1976

By Craig: I spend a good portion of my everyday life doing the same mundane tasks that most other people have a habit of doing. I get up in the morning and brush my teeth, wake up in the shower, and fill a travel mug full of piping hot coffee for the road. I am never late for work. In fact, I am always at least a half an hour early. I have never been late to work in the 30 or so years that I have been a card carrying, tax paying member of the work force. I cannot understand how someone can be late. Of course, I do not go out late at night and party, or even stay up watching television until after midnight like some folks that I know. I wake up at 0500 every morning when it is still dark and one can still see shadows, real or unreal, dancing along the street lit walls of city buildings... the ghosts and spirits of yore. It is still dark when I get to work. I usually sit around sipping my coffee and watch the eastern sky come to life and the stars and planets lose their brightness as daylight takes hold of this side of the Earth. It is during this time of the day that I am able to contemplate the realities of existence and attempt to solve the world's problems. It is in this short meditative time allotted to me before the grind of production that I become philosophical. Sometimes my thoughts are truly Earth shattering...at least they are to me in my reality. I think of ways that just might be able to solve world peace...or a means to prevent cancer by some radical dietary measures. Usually, however, these meaningful thoughts are pushed aside...or better put, are "trumped" by fleeting thoughts that lay on the periphery of my consciousness. The meaningful thoughts are bullshit anyway. There will never be "world peace" and "I" will never find the cure for cancer. That is why the intellectual part of the mind is soon pushed aside by the mindless bunk that sits there on the periphery always ready to invade. For instance, the other morning I was thinking of a way to contain the Ebola virus when suddenly my mind said fuck it and I started to think of a comic book that I read when I was 8 years old. First it was EBOLA and then suddenly it was "Matt! Look out! He's got a knife!"

      I think that a good portion of my being was influenced by the comic books that I read as a child. I have a warped sense of humor which adds to my warped sense of reality which of course is my distinctive reality. How Ebola evolved into a 38 year old comic book goes beyond the realm of linking two events together. Was it because I somehow associate a certain comic book that I was reading with "Legionnaire's disease" which just so happened to take place the summer that the comic book was published? I don't know...I can only conjecture. Not that it matters anyway. The comic book in question is the DC published issue of House of Secrets # 141 from September 1976. One of the stories in that issue (which I still own a copy) is called "Exit Laughing" It basically tells the tale of a nerdy college student who reluctantly agrees to a bet with some fraternity brothers to sleep in an old haunted house. The nerdy student, whose name is Ernie Cass is terrified by the experience after being confronted by a ghost, who was really just the leader of the fraternity named Matt Sawyer dressed up in a costume. Ernie ends up fleeing in terror from the house much to the amusement of Matt and his fraternity brothers. Years later at a class reunion Matt and his wife stumble upon the introverted Ernie and Matt recounts the events of that night long ago. Ernie, however is shocked by the revelation. He had always believed that he had really saw a ghost that night and as Matt laughs once again at Ernie's naivety Ernie gets angry and pulls out a knife and stabs Matt to death. The last caption shows the police walking off with a crazed looking Ernie. One of them mentions his escape from a lunatic asylum the day before.

      Why I remember this story 38 years after first reading it I cannot say, but I can recall countless stories written in these comic books from that impressionable time of my life. I now sit in my bedroom and flip back the eerie cover of the comic which shows a ghost advancing on a man who is trying to get away. I am immediately brought back to the year of the American Bicentennial. There is an add for Hostess Snack Cakes. "3 Free Baseball Cards On Specially Marked Boxes Of Hostess Snack Cakes!!!" Three players capture the limelight in this add. The ladies man Steve Garvey lunges for a ground ball in one card, while Joe Morgan and Carlton Fisk stand with the bat at the ready getting set to smash one out of the park in the other two cards. All three players now senior citizens, and long retired from a sport that they once dominated. A few pages later and there is an advertisement for "Daisy BB guns". In this day and age would it still be legal to advertise a gun add in a comic book directed mainly at a youthful audience? I do not know, but I suspect that these days someone from DC comics would be sent to Guantanamo Bay as a terror threat. Then there is an add for "The Secret of Teaching yourself Music" which shows a Brady Bunch type mom sitting at a piano with a guy sporting a Shaun Cassidy hairdo who is strumming on a guitar.  On the back page of the comic there is an advertisement for Browning Bicycles featuring the True Story of the now forgotten John Rakowski who pedaled his way around the world in the mid 1970s. All of these advertisements bring me back to a time when it was Legionnaires disease that was making the headlines instead of the now dreaded Ebola virus. I toss the comic book on the nightstand and turn off the light. Tomorrow will be another day.