Today in Comics History, January 19: Happy birthday, Edgar Allan Poe!

Happy birthday today to the Master of Macabre (sit down, Stephen King): Edgar Allan Poe! (Always remember than his middle name has an "A" in it. Sometimes comics don't and I've corrected that error in the artwork!) Born on this day in the spooky, spooky year of 1809 (scary, huh, kids?), Poe's oeuvre includes moody works you have to read in high school like "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Purloined Letter, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" "The Masque of the Red Death,,""Annabel Lee," "The Bells,", and the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which to my vast disappointment, has nothing at all to do with shrinking down to the size of an ant.

Wikipedia (the encyclopedia where you can scribble on the pages!) tells us that Poe

is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

Well, all this and more, yes, Wikipedia, but citation needed, what you didn't mention is how much vast influence Poe has had on the everyday common-or-garden comic book! (A: A lot.) And since I can't cover every appearance of Poe or story he's had adapted into comic books, I figger I'm gonna just sit back, plop on my LP of The Alan Parsons Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Amazon ad) and spread out a few of my favorite Poe-influenced comic books for you, if we can just get rid of that BLOODY RAVEN TAPPING ON MY CHAMBER DOOR!