The Many Ghosts Of Pat Boyette!

For a few brief months in 1973 it seems, the editors at Charlton handed creative control of the covers for many of its ghost books to veteran talent Pat Boyette. In the issues of Ghostly Tales and Ghostly Haunts for May Boyette not only painted the covers but redesigned the logos for both books. He did the same for the June issue of Ghost Manor. Even the price of twenty cents is given a specific look for all three of these special issues.

Here is another comic with this distinctive Boyette styling, this issue of Haunted though pre-dates the others above by several months.


These changes are exceedingly moody and rather handsome to my eye, but they were also exceedingly short term. The very next issue for all three titles saw these changes disappear and brought a return to what had been before. Maybe it was never a wholesale change, but merely an experiment. Perhaps the sales on these issues were terrible. But it's intriguing to wonder what might've happened to the whole look of Charlton's Bronze Age ghost books if Boyette had been allowed to give the line such a distinctive style.

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