Eerie #1 – Quick Review

By: David Lapham, Bill Dubay, Christopher A. Taylor, Bruce Jones (writers), Lapham, Dubay, Rafa Garres & Richard Corben (artists), Nate Piekos (letters)

The Story: Eerie is back (after a long time).  Does Dark Horse have enough original material to justify publishing this AND Creepy?

Quick Review: All right…what the heck is going on here?  This first issue of Eerie in decades isn’t “bad”, but one does wonder at the publication strategy that Dark Horse is employing with Eerie and its sister publication, Creepy.

The problem with Eerie #1 is reprint material.  There are four short stories in this issue and two of them are reprints from the old Warren Publishing Eerie magazine.  That is not an appealing strategy.  Dark Horse publishes outstanding quality archival reprints of both Creepy and Eerie.  Or…..if you’re a traditionalist, through the magic of eBay you can track down almost any issue of the old magazines for $15-20/each (although that ashcan Eerie #1 will set you back a pretty penny).  There would even be some merit in reprinting some of the old stories in floppy, single-issue comic format for folks who don’t want to plunk down the bigger bucks for the archival hardcover collections.

Creepy Comics #6 – Review

By: Joe R. Lansdale, Christopher A. Taylor, Alice Henderson, Dan Braun, Craig Haffnet, Archie Goodwin (writers), Nathan Fox, Jason Shawn Alexander, Kevin Ferrara, Garry Brown, Neal Adams (artists), Nate Piekos (letters) & Shawna Gore (editor)

The Story: Another issue of the reborn horror anthology from Dark Horse.

What’s Good: If you’re not getting Creepy, you’re doing comics wrong.  This issue nails the formula again by giving us 5 short-stories of horror goodness with excellent black-and-white art.

With anthologies, the overall grade is mostly related to (a) how good the “good” stories were and (b) how sucky were the “bad” stories.  The weakest of this issue’s stories (“Mine”) was still pretty cool and had great art and the high points (“Commedia Del Morte” & “Fair Exchange”) were really awesome.  Perhaps Dark Horse shouldn’t get full credit for Full Exchange by Archie Goodwin and Neal Adams since this is reprint material from the original 1960’s Creepy Magazine, but Commedia Del Morte was a real tour de force.  After reading Commedia Del Morte, you’ll see clowns as both scarier and more heroic than you ever did before.

Another thing that is precious about Creepy is that no one is trying to launch a new creator-owned series off any of these tales.  Even though I generally enjoy anthologies like Dark Horse Presents or Strange Tales from Vertigo, you know that those stories are usually pitches for ongoing series OR they are pitches that no one liked quite enough to turn into an ongoing series.  That’s never a problem with Creepy, there are just outstanding short stories with a definite ending.  Even when the concept is cool, the story has an ending.  Someone could easily turn the concept for Commedia Del Morte into a miniseries, but I strongly doubt we’ll ever see that.  Even though I enjoy continuity based superheroes as much as anyone, there is something special and powerful about these Creepy stories’ ephemeral nature.  And, these stories are basically timeless.  Go read the 60’s Creepys if you doubt me and compare how fresh they seem compared to Batman of that same era.