Flipping through The Chillingly Weird Art of Matt Fox (2023), presents the full range of Fox’s career from the pulps in the ’20s to unpublished work from his later years and the many decades of comics work in-between.

Several things become quickly apparent, but first among them is that Matt Fox is the master of the skulking weirdo. In nearly every page there is some grinning, bug-eyed creep leering at you. It gets unnerving after a while (Stan Kelly’s much memed Sicko perhaps owes something to Fox). Second is the stiffness of his figures and the flatness of his compositions. Again, unnerving how many of the pieces confront the viewer straight on and feature a claustrophobic lack of interior depth. His work is highly detailed and seems to come from an earlier age of woodcuts, but at the same time, anticipates a lot of stylistic choices that would be made by indie and comix artists in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

Some stand-outs. The ghoul from the cover of the December, 1952 issue of Chilling Tales is a solid gold classic (recently recreated as a ReAction figure by Super7, even) and I agree with longtime follower Jeff Black that it could have partly inspired Sutherland’s illustration of the ghoul in the Monster Manual. That crazy goat demon is the illustration that accompanied “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” for its original publication in Weird Tales in 1951 — not quite what I envisioned, but nevertheless an epic illustration for my favorite Robert Bloch tale. Also, literally every drawing for the never-realized Beelzebub’s Book is a banger — full-page, strange, seemingly semi-autobiographical.

Fox is probably acquired taste, but well worth the effort.