I've been accumulating issues of "The New 52" The Phantom Stranger for some time but had yet to dip in until I took the day off to renew my driver's license earlier this month. Following a long run I settled down with my endorphins high and a couple of comic books. One of those books was Trinity of Sin: The Phantom Stranger one-shot I had picked up the day before at my neighborhood comic shop.
I've always been a Marvel devotee, but when I collected comic books as a kid I read plenty of DC too. DC might not have done superheroes as well as Marvel, but they did the macabre much better. DC had several titles, Ghosts and House of Mystery come to mind, of new horror (meaning, the comics were not primarily composed of reprinted material), while Marvel could only muster the lightweight Supernatural Thrillers. Pretty much everything else Marvel did in the way of horror, monsters, mystery, SciFi was by way of reprints. (I've been sporadically engaged in the exploration of one of these Marvel reprint titles, Where Monsters Dwell.)
DC also did a better job of butting up against the weakened Comics Code Authority (thanks to Stan Lee's Amazing Spider-Man) in the late Silver Age and early Bronze Age with Michael Kaluta's Watergate-era The Shadow, Spectre, Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing and The Phantom Stranger. Marvel had its superhero monster titles -- Werewolf By Night, The Tomb of Dracula, etc., the best of which was Man-Thing by Steve Gerber -- but they couldn't match DC's dark intensity, captured in this cover of The Phantom Stranger Vol 2 #26, September 1973, by Mike Kaluta:
Below you will find ten scans from The Phantom Stranger one-shot, the cover and nine interior pages. Phil Winslade is the artist; Dan Didio, the plotter; J.M. DeMatteis, the scripter. The interior pages are all suitably dark, transporting me back to the early comicbook Bronze Age of my youth.
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