American Comics Group may have started in 1943 with some light hearted fare like Giggle and Ha-Ha Comics, but five years later in 1948 they hit pay dirt with the Horror genre. That initial book, Adventures Into the Unknown, became the first continuously published horror comic. It also set the stage for the company to create follow up titles like Forbidden Worlds and this one, Out of the Night. This first issue of that title appeared less than four years after their initial success in horror. The book lasted 17 issues until it saw a title change to The Hooded Horseman. The image on this cover is a wonderful mixture of the macabre and the normal. The couple in the car is obviously trapped, but you aren’t exactly sure how they got there. Did the car run out of gas? The monsters attacking them are a fiendish combination of bats and human heads, obviously organized and working together. Behind the main action, in the background on a cliff, stands an old house in silhouette. Are the monsters coming from this house? Were they deliberately sent to attack the couple? Like all good horror covers, this one provokes the reader with an interesting number of possibilities. What is really nice is that the cover artist didn’t crowd the cover with a lot of the man-bats. They allow the single image of one to dominate the action, but it is terrifying enough. Some collectors value this cover as a precursor to the appearance of Man-Bat in Batman almost two decades later. This issue features a 9-page story with art by Al Williamson, who did his first work for Fiction House at age 15 and went on from there to make a name for himself at EC in the early fifties. During the period that this book appeared, he was also working for Atlas, Dell, Charlton and Harvey as well as ACG. The pages are off-white. The book is CGC-certified VF+ 8.5 by. This is the highest graded copy they have ever seen.