Dates
- Cover date
- December 1954-January 1955
- Pages
- 36
Editions and covers
- Original editionSource ↗
Creators
Stories
- Telescope · The Crypt of Terror · 7 pages
A man and a rat from a shipwreck wash up on an island and eye each other warily as the only food source available. The starving rat ultimately eats a bird who was eating a fish, while the starving man eats the rat but gets eaten by a shark.
- The Substitute · 6 pages
A man assumes that the body of the governor of the penal colony he is a prisoner in will be sent back to Paris, so he kills him with a poisoned dart from a blowgun and makes plans to switch places with his body in the casket. They nail him in and bury him at sea.
- This Is An Appeal For Action! · A Special Editorial · 1 pages
A letter pleading with readers to fight back against the growing hysteria over how horror comics are responsible for juvenile delinquency.
- Squeeze Play · 1 pages
An assassin hides in a sewer and shoots his target, a steamroller driver. When he tries to escape, he gets stuck in the wet asphalt and the now out of control steamroller crushes him.
- Murder Dream · Tales From the Crypt · 6 pages
A maniac axe murderer assumes his victim's identity in his dreams until he is compelled to return to the scene of the crime to murder the victim's wife as well.
- The Switch · The Witch's Cauldron! · 7 pages
An old millionaire falls in love with a young woman but he doesn't want her to marry him for his money so he tells her he's poor. She rejects him because his face and body are too old looking. He gets a doctor to do a expensive face and torso transplant with a large sum of the money going to the young George Booth who is the body donor. She still isn't satisfied because he still has old legs. He spends the last of his fortune to swap out his legs. Now young looking but poor, he finds out she married the now old George Booth because she only wanted to marry a millionaire and George is rich now.
Reprinted in
Tales from the Crypt (1979), Tales from the Crypt (1990), Tales from the Crypt (1994), The Fantagraphics EC Artists' Library (2012), B. Krigstein Comics (2004), Messages in a Bottle: Comic Book Stories by B. Krigstein (2013), Choke Gasp! The Best of 75 Years of EC Comics (2019)