A horror comic nerd's wet dream!
When it comes to comics, I'm something of a purist. First, I'm mostly a one-genre kinda guy. As a young kid, I liked your standard super-hero stuff, but I quickly lost taste for it in favor of space-opera, fantasy and war comics. "Sargent Rock", Marvel's "Micronauts" (being a huge fan of the toys, too) and "Conan" were favorites of my tween years.
What really got my blood boiling, though, was my first issue of "Weird War Tales", DC's brilliant mix of war and horror stories, always with a Twilight Zone-style twist. Little did I know at the time, as I was way too young to know anything about EC's notorious horror titles of 1950s, that Joe Kubert et al. were influenced dramatically by "Tales from the Crypt" and its ghoulish companions.
From the time I was 11 or 12, I couldn't get enough horror comics. Fortunately for my innocent, virgin eyes and brain, I lived in the Philippines, where the local military post exchange carried Warren Publishing's "Eerie" and "Creepy" and sorted them not behind the counter, where they would have been in the US, but mixed in with the general magazines. "Eerie" and "Creepy" (and "Vampirella" which, for some reason, I never got into) were decidedly adult books. On a movie rating scale, I'd definitely give them an R or at the very least a hard PG-13 rating for the tamer of the tales. Always graphically violent, usually sexually charged, and often full of nudity, profanity and "grown up" themes of revenge, adultery, crime and death, these were definitely not comics for kids. In fact, their "magazine" format dictated such, as comics for kids were not ALLOWED to be about those things, or show too much in the way of violence or sex, or really to even hint at it. Gaines and EC had been the 1950s sacrificial lambs that led to the infamous Comics Code and the entire industry's relentless self-censorship.
History lesson aside, in the Philippines, I had unrestricted access to these mags. And I couldn't get enough of them. My parents were, at least at the beginning, oblivious to their content, and generally didn't do much censoring of my reading material anyway. My mother eventually found a copy of "Eerie" where a voodoo priestess has sex with a snake in order to raise a zombie avenger in an infamous recurring storyline called "The Spook" and was duly horrified, but though she told me "I don't want to SEE you reading that crap", she didn't make me get rid of my Warren magazines, nor stop me from purchasing future issues. From then on, I just kept them confined to my room.
So, being too young to miss the initial EC wave of scandalous horror and crime comics, I was exactly the right age to hit Warren in its stride. Though "Eerie" and "Creepy" had been around since the 1960s, they were both published well into the 1980s, and back issues could still be had cheap. I loved the stark black-and-white, or at most, ink-tinted greyscale art. The draftsmanship and inking were always of the highest caliber, and I encountered favorite artists like Berni Wrightson, Angelo Torres, Frank Frazetta (whose wife sadly died last week), Pablo Marcos, and many others in what many now consider their prime. "Eerie" and "Creepy" were so much a part of my pre- and early teen years that I look back at them with the warmest nostalgia, probably the way kids from the 50s wax poetic to the point of hyperbole about EC comics.
Dark Horse comics has, since 2007, been producing beautifully reproduced hardcover archive editions of both "Eerie" and "Creepy" which, to any Warren fan, are like the sweetest drug. Reliving those lazy afternoons in my room in the Philippines has been a pleasure that I never expected to be able to indulge as an adult. Dark Horse and Harris Comics even produced a new Creepy mini-series in the early 90s, which I totally missed somehow (I wasn't really aware of newly published comics during those years) but was able to download and read. Though it was a bit of a departure from the original Warren anthology format, instead focusing on an more standard comic story arc explaining the origins of Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie (the "hosts" of their respective mags, ala EC's The Crypt Keeper), they were still fun, and of high quality.
When Dark Horse promised, along with the publication of the Warren archives, NEW "Creepy" stories, I was both excited, and somewhat skeptical. I had been really disappointed by the "new" "Tales from the Crypt" comics put out in 2008 by Papercutz Publishing, finding them very "Goosebumps", "neo-comics" and anime-influenced, and not really in the spirit of the originals at all. Like I said, when it comes to comics, and particularly horror comics, I'm a purist. When you've got a winning format, there's not need to mess with it. Anthology horror comics are like The Twilight Zone or short stories: quick, dirty, shocking and incisive. There's no need for a lot of melodrama, this is pulp.
After adding a couple of the Warren archive volumes to my collection and being utterly satisfied with Dark Horse's respect for the source material, I've been jonesing for the "new" Creepy, if, for nothing else, to have my hopes dashed so I could write it off and free up some brain-space. As usual, I was completely oblivious to its release last week, but, thanks to a reminder about the release, I found some scans and had a look at issue #1 this AM.
I immediately headed to the local comic shop (luckily, we have a decent local one here in Bloomfield, the somewhat pedestrian-named The Comic Book Market) and picked it up for $5.
I'm not exaggerating when I say, This Is The Real Stuff. VINTAGE (or vintage-style) Creepy in every respect, from the excellent old-school black-and-white artwork, to Uncle Creepy and his "new" assistant, Sister Creepy... even down to the fonts and lettering. Berni Wrightson and Angelo Torres come out of the woodwork with new artwork joining a bunch of really promising newcomers. Without spoiling the stories, suffice it to say the writing is top-notch and utterly in spirit with the Warren ethos. My only complaint is that it's only 48 pages, and published in standard comic-sized format rather than as a pulp magazine, but I understand Dark Horse's reasoning for that (marketing, etc.) and it's really a minor quibble to have NEW CREEPY material coming out on a regular schedule.
Now, I'm already salivating over issue #2.