Welcome to 31 Days of Horror Comics, where I will spotlight some of the best horror comics around, as chosen by a bunch of my favorite horror comic writers and artists around!

Today's creator is Alisa Kwitney, who was an assistant editor on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman under Karen Berger. Later, Kwitney was the main editor on The Sandman spin-off, The Dreaming, where she wrote a particularly strong one-off issue with Michael Zulli that introduced Cain's wife (the proverbial "madwoman in the attic")...

Kwitney had written novels before her time at Vertigo, but in the years since, she has been a prolific novelist. She recently returned to comics and has done some fine work, including the recent Mystik U miniseries with Mike Norton and Jordie Bellaire...

Alisa's suggestion is "The House of Endless Years" from 1969's House of Secrets #83 (the brilliant Gray Morrow did the cover, which spotlighted into the story we're featuring today).

The issue is perhaps most notable for being the first one where DC credited the creators on the comic, due to an amusing quirk with the Comics Code Authority's ban on werewolves (they wouldn't allow the term "wolfman" be used, but if the story was told by MARV Wolfman, that'd be allowed, right? So they worked in a fact that one of the stories was told to Cain, the host of the series, by a "Wolfman" and then it cut to the credits, with Marv Wolfman listed. Once Wolfman was credited, you couldn't NOT credit everyone else).

Anyhow, this story was by Gerry Conway and Bill Draut. It opens with two tween girls looking for the younger brother of one of the girls, who has wandered into an old house nearby supposedly owned by an old witch!

The "old witch" keeps trying to warn the girls to get out of the house before it's too late, but the young girls refuse to listen to their elder and when things get physical, their dog causes quite a problem...

Dark stuff.

Here's Alisa's excellent write-up of her choice...

"Back in the nineties, when I was working as an editor for Karen Berger's Vertigo imprint at DC, I had the idea of collecting all my favorite old horror stories from The House of Mystery and the House of Secrets. I was an avid comics reader as a kid--and omnivorous, devouring everything from Archie to romance comics to the Legion of Super-Heroes, but the campy, spooky, justice-served-in-a-drippy-skull flavor of seventies horror was my all-time favorite. Welcome Back to the House of Mystery contained ten DC's classic horror tales--the crème de la gloopy ectoplasmic crème of the stories I'd read with a flashlight under the covers as a kid. (There was also a new framing story by Neil and Sergio Aragones.) Of the ten, two stand out more vividly than any others. The House of Endless Years, by Gerard Conway and Bill Draut begins with two tween girls and their dog staring up at a gothic ruin of a house. Peggy and Judy are searching for Peggy's kid brother, Neal, who has gone into the house. The two brave girls--Judy, the blonde, is the leader, and doesn't blink an eyelash at the swarm of bats that explode out of the basement. She also stands up to the old hag who is keeping Neal prisoner and refuses to let the girls into the lowest level of the house. "Stop!" the hag warns. "Go no further! You must leave at once before the change is irrevocable!" Unfortunately, the dog, Tippy, barks at the old woman, causing her to fall backward down the stone stairs and dissolve into dust. Once dog and girls descend to the bottom of the stairs to investigate the dusting of the hag, they discover the true, horrific power of the house--it drains the youth from its inhabitants. The girls are now hags themselves, the image made doubly creepy by the girlish hairstyles framing their yellowed, heavily-wrinkled faces.

In the final panel, our off-screen narrator, (presumably Cain, the horror host) says: "And what can you do, children, as the years flow by, but listen...listen to a cry from the wold you left behind, and to which, you now realize, you can never...return!"

Some horror stories lose their sting with repetition, but this story is more powerful now that the story is itself a cry from a world to which I can never return."

What a great write-up, Alisa. Well above and beyond the call of duty!

Thanks for that and thanks for the great suggestion!