Warren Magazine Reading Club! 6 6

[The Lions Den]

On 1/27/2023 at 10:17 PM, OtherEric said:

That's likely to cause spine ticks or worse structural damage, but not sure if it will impact the color...

Rise and shine! 

While I'm reluctant to say this cover is an actual variant cover, I can't deny that the cover color has variation. And I do see similarities to the cover of Vampirella #4, where the price, pdc code and "A Warren Magazine" are a different color than the background color (and for some odd reason the exclamation point is in yellow, it actually makes my head hurt to wonder why...)  

I think what you said earlier sums it up very well: "They resort to reprinting a particularly weird Famous Monsters cover. And not really good weird, just weird weird!"  

[Axe Elf]

I'd just like to say, before I close out the CREEPY #20 week, that I have my eye on a couple of cheap CREEPY #20s in their "brown state" that I think I can get for about $15 total, shipped.  I plan to experiment with exposing them to sunlight and to a UV light source (sunlamp) and see if they turn green over the course of a few weeks (or less) or not.

I will edit/update this post with the results of my experiment(s), if I actually go through with them and if I discover anything interesting, so as not to derail any other issue's discussion a few weeks down the road--but I'll let you know if there is an update!

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UPDATE #1 - February 2, 2023

$16.57 including shipping and tax from daBay landed me these two copies of CREEPY #20.

I had intended to expose one to sunlight and the other to a UV lamp, but apparently my sunlamp is no longer working, so that part of the experiment is on hold for now.

Since the second one seems to be slightly darker brown (and the first one seems not only lighter in hand, but a little further along the path to greenness as well), I chose it to be exposed to sunlight.  It also has a large water stain along most of the left side of the book, so we'll be able to see if that affects the pattern of discoloration, if any.

I rigged it inside of a frame that blocks the top margin above the logo, and about an inch of the left side of the book, so any changes in coloration should leave a "shadow" of the original brown in those areas (including much of the waterstained area).

And then hung it inside the glass sliding door that faces south to receive maximum sunlight.

And now we wait...

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UPDATE #2 - February 16, 2023

After two weeks, I think I'm starting to see a little "greening" along the left side of the cover art, but the obscured areas to the far left--and especially the top strip above the logo--appear to be the original shades of brown.  (The second image is the original, the first image is after two weeks exposure as described above.)

I actually thought there might be more "greening"--or at least fading--after two weeks of direct sunlight (although winter sunlight hours are shorter), so I'm kind of wondering if the poly bag it was in is affording it some degree of UV protection?

So I hung it up again, this time OUTSIDE the bag, with nothing but the glass between the magazine and the sun, and I'll check it again in another two weeks.

Stay tuned...

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UPDATE #3 - March 2, 2023

After a month, we can really start to see the difference between the covered and the exposed areas of the test copy (left; original scan on right):

I'm seeing enough "greening" in the exposed areas to conclude that exposure to UV rays causes the red inks to fade more quickly than the yellow and cyan inks, leading to UV-exposed copies of CREEPY #20 appearing more greenish than others.   It's kind of interesting that the "40c" text in the bottom right got REALLY green!

I could leave it up longer to see just how green it could get, but I think I've seen enough to reject the null hypothesis--so there will be no further updates.

Parenthetically, it seems like there was more change in the last two weeks, when the book was exposed to the sun unbagged, than there was in the first two weeks, when the book was hung in the window bagged, suggesting that these poly bags do offer some measure of UV protection.  However, I did not control for number of sunny days versus number of cloudy days in each fortnight, so that's not conclusive.

Edited March 3, 2023 by Axe Elf

[OtherEric]

On 1/28/2023 at 9:40 PM, Axe Elf said:

I'd just like to say, before I close out the CREEPY #20 week, that I have my eye on a couple of cheap CREEPY #20s in their "brown state" that I think I can get for about $15 total, shipped.  I plan to experiment with exposing them to sunlight and to a UV light source (sunlamp) and see if they turn green over the course of a few weeks (or less) or not.

I will edit/update this post with the results of my experiment(s), if I actually go through with them and if I discover anything interesting, so as not to derail any other issue's discussion a few weeks down the road--but I'll let you know if there is an update!

Looking forward to the results, it should be interesting.

[Axe Elf]

EERIE #15 - June 1968

According to the Warren Magazine Index...

15. cover: Vic Prezio (June 1968)

1) The Graves Of Oconoco! [John Benson/Pat Boyette & Rocco Mastroserio] 7p

2) Wardrobe Of Monsters! [Otto Binder/Gray Morrow & Angelo Torres] 8p   reprinted from Creepy #2 (Apr. 1965)

3) The Demon Wakes [Archie Goodwin/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico] 6p

4) Under The Skin! [Archie Goodwin/Jerry Grandenetti & Joe Orlando] 7p   reprinted from Eerie #5 (Nov. 1965)

5) The Doll Collector! [Dave Kahleer/Gutenberg Mondiero] 8p

6) A Change In The Moon! [Clark Dimond & Terry Bisson/Jeff Jones] 8p   [story credited solely to Dimond.]

Notes: The first issue since #12 to feature new stories.  The Fraccio/Tallarico (they always used the penname Tony Williamsune for Warren) art was new but the original Archie Goodwin story was probably a leftover from his tenure.  According to Clark Dimond, at this point artist Jeff Jones hadn’t been paid for his last three Warren stories and Jones apologized to Dimond for the quality of the artwork on ‘A Change In The Moon!’.

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Four new stories!  Maybe we're seeing the light at the end of the Dark Ages here.  Prezio comes through with another cover illustration of an interior story, a couple of new artists appear, and even a new Goodwin -script!  Kinda sad to hear that Jones half-ed it because he hadn't been paid for his work, though.

Like several of the early EERIEs, I do have a 2.5ish undercopy of this issue, so I'll be physically reading this week's issue again!  In fact, the only issue of the next 8 EERIEs for which I DON'T have an undercopy is #20--so I'm going to be reading a LOT of physical issues over the next couple of months!  I'll have to take a candle or a lantern into a closet or something and really get into it...

Gotta say I'm looking forward to the cover story.  My wife has a modest collection of Barbie dolls, but none of them look anything like THAT doll...

[OtherEric]

Eerie #15 thoughts:

Cover:  A reasonably effective image by Prezio as far as it goes, but WAY too much of the cover taken up by text, and rather ineffectually purple prose at that.

The Graves of Oconoco:  Nice art by Boyette & Mastroserio over a decent story by Benson that doesn't quite perfectly gel, but tries to present an interesting counterpoint between the two scientists.  I'll give it points for ambition, and it still works, just not as well as I think the author hoped.  Sadly, this is our last art by Mastroserio, whose death will be announced in the next issue of Eerie.

Wardrobe of Monsters:  I said it was a story when we first saw it, and I stand by that.  Minus further points for using a photo of an Eerie mask to outro the story.

The Demon Wakes:  We get the introduction of "Tony Williamsune" (their standard collective pseudonym is misspelled here) over a -script by Goodwin that may have been left over from before he left.  I'm guessing it was a combination of a -script and a detailed plot for the artists, which Goodwin would have seriously trimmed down in editing.  With that said, there's once again a neat core idea and it's a decent piece, just not as good as it could have been.

Under the Skin:  I'm still not a fan of Grandenetti, so not impressed with this choice of reprint either.

The Doll Collector:  Mondiero draws all of two stories and two covers for Warren, and Kahler is a one-story wonder across the entire GCD, not just Warren.  The story is decent but doesn't really feel like Warren style horror to me, not sure I can quite nail down why not.

A Change in the Moon:  Jones may have apologized for the quality of the artwork but I don't see why.  This story is excellent, with a marvelously executed twist and beautiful art.  

There's too much in this issue that I had to damn with faint praise for me to call this issue a return to form.  But compared to the Creepy #20 this is a massive step back in the right direction, particularly with the excellent Diamond/ Jones story closing the book.  I think I would have felt I had gotten my 40 cents worth had this one showed up in my mailbox as part of a subscription... which hasn't been the case with the last few issues.

 

[The Lions Den]

On 1/29/2023 at 1:01 AM, OtherEric said:

There's too much in this issue that I had to damn with faint praise for me to call this issue a return to form.  But compared to the Creepy #20 this is a massive step back in the right direction, particularly with the excellent Diamond/ Jones story closing the book.  I think I would have felt I had gotten my 40 cents worth had this one showed up in my mailbox as part of a subscription... which hasn't been the case with the last few issues.

At least the cover is easier to look at...for a couple different reasons.  

[Axe Elf]

Before I get on with my EERIE #15 review, I'd just like to point out that the CREEPY #20 Experiment is underway as of today; details updated in the linked post.

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Still no Loathsome Lore or other frontispiece, but the letters page is back with a vengeance as one of the most entertaining Dear Cousin Eerie features in memory!  The first letter starts out as one might expect, with righteous indignation over paying good money (well, 40 cents, anyway) on EERIE #13, only to find that it was full of reprints of stories that had been seen before!  Kudos for not ducking the issue--sort of--but then Cousin Eerie offers up one of his longest replies ever, which sort of DOES duck the issue, with a drawn-out story about the death of Uncle Gory, who had made a fortune selling human skulls to the Captain Company, and how the trip to Transylvania to settle the estate had taken longer than they thought, and it will never happen again because all the money from Uncle Gory's estate was going to be spent improving the magazine!

(Deep breath.)

Anyway, ha-ha, way to deflect the matter with humor--but then the very next letter complains that the Captain Company has been sold out of human skulls since issue #8!  After a joke about getting a head, Cousin Eerie assures them that the supply of human skulls will soon be re-established, thus tying together the first two letters.  Well done!

Next letter suggests that EERIE get NBC to let them do a full-length, whole-book story based on Star Trek!--and wonders what "Nor Custom, Stale" means.  Cousin Eerie doesn't know either.  The absence of a story inside EERIE #13 relating to the text about being scared of the #13 was explained as being planned, but not used--but Cousin Eerie promises it will be used in the future (so keep your eyes peeled).

All in all it was probably the most fun I've had reading a letters page so far.

I guess when I find myself thinking that the letters page is going to be the highlight of the issue, things haven't been going well of late.  But as @OtherEric concluded, this issue turned out to be a big step back in the right direction.

That said, I wasn't too impressed with the -script of "The Graves of Oconoco," which relied on too much mumbo-jumbo hand-waving ("the forms of energy released by this cyclotron are not fully understood!") to explain why extracting nutrients from soil would bring long-dead creatures back to life again.  But I too had read ahead an issue or two in the Warren Magazine Index, so I was able to appreciate the piece as Mastroserio's last work (an advantage that people reading it when it was first printed would not have had).

On a side note, the motivation for trying to extract nutrients from soil was based in the fear of overpopulation, which I remember being talked about in ominous tones when I was a kid; if not in the late 60s, at least by the 70s when I really started to become aware of larger social issues.  Yet at that time, the world population was only about 4 billion--and we were worried about overpopulation?  We're closing in on 8 billion people now; I guess we developed technology to deal with the greater demands on resources at the same pace that the demands grew?  I don't know.  But we seemed to be more worried about it as a society back then, with half the number of people on the planet as there are now.

Anyway, back to the book, "The Demon Wakes" was the highlight of the issue for me.  Maybe it's because it had the familiarity of an old Goodwin -script, maybe it's because it was a solid psychological horror story, and maybe it's because of the art that was at the same time as horrifying in its depiction of violence as it was as whimsical as "Where the Wild Things Are."

The demon is named "Moloch" who is a foreign god mentioned in the Bible, apparently worshipped by way of child sacrifices.  Wikipedia says "Moloch" has been used figuratively in reference to a person or thing that requires or demands a very costly sacrifice, which is in fact what the "Moloch" locked away in our hero's mind did in fact demand.  Best story in a while.

"Doll Collector" was pretty fun to look at, if nothing else...

...although they also used that pic of the Cousin Eerie mask (which @OtherEric called out for being pasted over Uncle Creepy for the outro of "Wardrobe of Monsters") for the intro to this one.  I guess they couldn't even afford to pay anyone to sketch Cousin Eerie for these panels!

I was thrown a little at first in trying to figure out who the titular doll collector really was, since the one on the cover didn't seem to have titulars like the one in the story did--and then the male doll collector entered the plot.  I still don't really know what made her stab the doll with scissors before she realized they were animate, though; that was kind of a weak point for the plot to turn on--and how exactly do dolls "perform" on stage?--but the irony of how the gold digger who collected men became the property of a man who collected people was pretty delicious.

I can kind of see why Jeff Jones apologized for the art in "A Change in the Moon."  It's not BAD, per se, but it does seem a little raw or unfinished in places, though he kind of hides the lack of detail with the use of extreme contrasts at times.

I am really growing to appreciate his style, though, and this really isn't a bad story to round out the issue.  Where did the guy/werewolf who kept saving her come from?  Was he always just stalking her, or what?

Anyway, yeah, that was a refreshing read for me, and it's always fun to get my hands on a physical undercopy I can read--and it definitely feels like Warren is headed in the right direction again!

[Axe Elf]

CREEPY #21 - July 1968

According to the Warren Magazine Index...

21. cover: Gutenberg Monteiro (July 1968)

1) Creepy’s Loathsome Lore: Trees! [Bill Parente/Bob Jenney] 1p   [frontis]

2) The Rats In The Walls [Bill Parente?/Bob Jenney] 10p   from the story by H. P. Lovecraft

3) Room With A View! [Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko] 6p   reprinted from Eerie #3 (May 1966)

4) The Immortals! [Ron Parker/Sal Trapani] 8p

5) The Creepy Fan Club: Bill Parente Profile/The Choice [Bill Parente & Bill Eddy/Nicola Cuti, Steve Smith, Doyle Sharp & Louie Estrada] 2p   [text article/story w/photo]

6) A Reasonable Doubt [Ron Parker/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico] 6p   [all of the Fraccio/Tallarico art done for Warren was credited to Tony Williamsune]

7) Swamped! [Archie Goodwin/Angelo Torres] 8p   reprinted from Creepy #3 (June 1965)

8) Timepiece To Terror! [Bill Parente/Gutenberg Mondiero] 7p

Notes: Editor: Bill Parente.  Parente was an EC fan (as were Goodwin, Jones, Ivie, Dimond, Benson, Parker & many other of the early writers) and his appearance as editor was a sign of growing stability for the company after several very shaky months.  Like Goodwin, he would write many of the stories during his time as editor but there was only one Archie Goodwin and Parente’s stories did not display the quality of the Goodwin Era.  The cover for this issue was probably the worse single cover Warren ever published on their comic magazines.  Absolutely awful.  ‘The Rats In The Walls’ was not from the Christopher Lee paperback series of adaptations so I’m assuming Bill Parente did the adaptation.  New editions of Creepy’s Loathsome Lore & The Creepy Fan Club appear for the first time since Goodwin’s departure.  Future writer & artist Nicola Cuti appeared on the Fan Club pages.  Fan Louie Estrada’s art was quite nice, both here and in future editions, and one wonders why he wasn’t offered an art assignment.  The Fraccio {pencils} & Tallarico {inks} art debut as Tony Williamsune {a combo of their first names} would begin a long run of stories for Warren and although their artwork was often sneered at by fans, on occasion they were quite good.  Of course, you had to accept that all of their monsters and aliens tended to look like melted wax candle figures.

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Worst cover on any Warren comic magazine ever, eh?  I don't think it's that bad; at least it has rats.

The Index also seems to be pretty critical of the "Tony Williamsune" artwork, but I didn't think that Moloch in last week's "The Demon Wakes" looked like a melted wax candle figure.  He looked more like a critter from "Where the Wild Things Are."  So we'll see what they put forth this week as one of four new stories for this issue, but I was liking my first exposure to their work last week.

We also get the first Fan Club and the first Loathsome Lore in a while, and the terrifying topic of the Loathsome Lore we've waited so long to read is...  trees??  Oh, how horrifying.  But I hear their bark is worse than their bite.  heh

I notice the Index uses both "Montiero" (in regards to the cover) and "Mondiero" (in regards to the last story) for the artist's last name, so I don't know which is correct.  Further, it's odd that the artist appeared to do a cover related to the "Rats" story, while providing the interior art for an entirely different story!

[OtherEric]

Creepy 21 thoughts:

@Axe Elf, the index correctly reproduces the name both times.  I think Monterio is correct, but not certain... I'm going by what GCD says.

Cover: I don't understand why the indexer feels this is the worst Warren cover, it's not a masterpiece by any means but in my opinion it's not bad, with some interesting use of color.

Loathsome Lore:  Nothing terribly thrilling, but at least it's new and meets basic competence standards.  There's really only so much you can do with one page unless inspiration strikes, and it won't always on a recurring feature like this.

The Rats in the Walls:  One of only two actual Lovecraft adaptations we ever get in the Warren mags, since we're not counting "Wentworth's Day".  It's a decent adaptation that side-steps the infamous problems of the original, but suffers by comparison to the adaptation of the story that appeared about four years later in the underground Skull Comix #5.  That version was drawn by later Warren mainstay Richard Corben.

Room With a View:  I'm never going to be a fan of the mixed in reprints (I have more tolerance for the all-reprint issues), but I'm also not going to complain about Ditko's work, either.

The Immortals:  A dystopian SF story.  It gains more points for being something atypical for what we've really seen in the Warren magazines so far than it loses for being a fairly cliched dystopia, so we'll mark it in the win column for this issue.

A Reasonable Doubt:  Plays far more true to the facts than a lot of stories like this in setting up the twist.  Which isn't a terribly high bar to clear.  Not spectacular, but solid.

Swamped:  Similar to Ditko, I'm not going to gripe too much about a Torres as a reprint choice.

Timepiece to Terror:  Decent twist, competent writing and art, but nothing terribly impressive beyond that.  Hits the good filler story level but not any higher.

A much better issue overall than #20, which was never going to be a high bar to clear.  I would call it a pretty average issue, honestly; but it gets there by nothing being particularly great or particularly bad, rather than a mix of both balancing out.  Which, to me, is about the least interesting way to be an average issue.  I don't feel like I would have been wasting my 40 cents but I doubt I'll ever remember a thing about the issue five minutes after reading it.

 

 

Edited February 5, 2023 by OtherEric

[Jayman]

This was yet another issue that surprised me when I finally saw a copy in person. As a kid always seeing the tiny black & white back issue pics that were poor quality to begin with, it was hard to tell. It always looked to me that the rats were supposed to be invisible or transparent like ghosts and just outlined in white, (especially the one on top of his hand) so you could tell they were rats. It was a shock to see the cover not as I imagined. For that reason alone, I quite like this cover. 

Edited February 5, 2023 by Jayman

[Artifiction]

On 2/5/2023 at 11:12 AM, Jayman said:

This was yet another issue that surprised me when I finally saw a copy in person. As a kid always seeing the tiny black & white back issue pics that were poor quality to begin with, it was hard to tell. It always looked to me that the rats were supposed to be invisible or transparent like ghosts and just outlined in white, (especially the one on top of his hand) so you could tell they were rats. It was a shock to see the cover not as I imagined. For that reason alone, I quite like this cover. 

Is it just me or does it have kind of an Eerie Pubs. vibe to it? I like it, too!

[Axe Elf]

Yeah I'm not upset about the cover either.  It may not be a Frazetta, but it doesn't look any worse than the run of Prezio covers (especially CREEPY #18), and it doesn't take long to see that it relates to an interior story--the first panel of the first interior story, even...

But directly relating to the cover is about the best thing I can say about "The Rats in the Walls."  It's supposedly an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, but I can only hope that the adaptation is a bad one (kind of like CREEPY #19's Kipling adaptation), because too much is left unexplained or inadequately explained--like what the heck the rats have to do with anything in the first place?!?  Assuming Parente did the adaptation, I'm not too impressed with his first effort.  He even fails as an editor by leaving out a word in the introductory narration to his first story:  "It's one of the best (from) one of the greatest of them - H.P. Lovecraft".

Why would murders cause the ancestral home to vomit forth wave after wave of emaciated, filthy, and diseased rats?  (The ones in the pic look a lot fatter and healthier than that description.)  I kind of got confused between what was a flashback and what was current in the story, and I assume the near-human creatures whose bones were found in the crypt were somehow connected to the ancient horrific rites described? I didn't really see any actual explanation for them--I assume it was tied to why the first child was born with cloven hooves or something.  And then in the last three panels, the real or imagined sound of rats in the walls makes the guy snap--he starts running for his life--and then he stops to strangle someone and subsequently blames the murder on the rats?  I must be missing something.

The two reprints featuring solid stories--and superb art by Ditko and Torres--are quite possibly the highlights of the issue, but I don't really have anything new to say about them.

"The Immortals" was ok; though it seemed more like the kind of sci-fi fare that would later be more prominently featured in EERIE than in CREEPY.  The ending wasn't that much of a twist--like all the immortals look, act, and talk the same; did he think he'd get to retain his individuality if he became one?

Parente fails as an editor again with the title to "A Reasonabe [sic] Doubt," but I appreciated the "Tony Williamson" art as much this week as I did for their "The Demon Wakes" debut in EERIE #15 last week.

I found it immensely amusing and ironic that the first story after a Fan Club contribution about Lizzie Borden is a story about Lizzie Borden!

I'll give Parente credit for trying (sometimes maybe too hard) to sound like Goodwin with his use of ample alliterative adjectives, though, and the humor he infused into what I assume was an autobiographical description of himself for the Club sounded a lot like the style in which Goodwin had written previous features.  It looks like Parente is piloting the use of tiny avatars to distinguish his replies from the letters on the Dear Uncle Creepy page--and I kind of like that.  The ongoing inquiries and complaints about the reprints and other penny-pinching measures is getting old, though.

"Timepiece to Terror" wasn't a bad ending to the issue, and the "Mondiero" (or whatever his name is) art struck a good balance between the comical and the horrific. 

The daylight savings time twist was kind of humorous, but it tortured the plot a little in that the demon has to be described as showing up at 1am rather than say the midnight hour, which would be more traditional for these sorts of things, but which would have rendered the daylight savings time twist moot, and of course the pocketwatch would presumably only work in that time zone for which the descriptions applied.

Maybe the most pathetic feature of this issue was the Loathsome Lore on...  wait for it...  trees!  I mean, I understand nature contains all kinds of horrific things--quicksand, flesh-eating bacteria, tardigrades, etc.--but trees?  What's next, a Monster Gallery featuring the Monarch Butterfly?

C'mon Uncle Creepy, as horror goes, a feature on trees was pretty much a face "plant."

[OtherEric]

On 2/9/2023 at 3:51 PM, Axe Elf said:

Yeah I'm not upset about the cover either.  It may not be a Frazetta, but it doesn't look any worse than the run of Prezio covers (especially CREEPY #18), and it doesn't take long to see that it relates to an interior story--the first panel of the first interior story, even...

But directly relating to the cover is about the best thing I can say about "The Rats in the Walls."  It's supposedly an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, but I can only hope that the adaptation is a bad one (kind of like CREEPY #19's Kipling adaptation), because too much is left unexplained or inadequately explained--like what the heck the rats have to do with anything in the first place?!?  Assuming Parente did the adaptation, I'm not too impressed with his first effort.  He even fails as an editor by leaving out a word in the introductory narration to his first story:  "It's one of the best (from) one of the greatest of them - H.P. Lovecraft".

Why would murders cause the ancestral home to vomit forth wave after wave of emaciated, filthy, and diseased rats?  (The ones in the pic look a lot fatter and healthier than that description.)  I kind of got confused between what was a flashback and what was current in the story, and I assume the near-human creatures whose bones were found in the crypt were somehow connected to the ancient horrific rites described? I didn't really see any actual explanation for them--I assume it was tied to why the first child was born with cloven hooves or something.  And then in the last three panels, the real or imagined sound of rats in the walls makes the guy snap--he starts running for his life--and then he stops to strangle someone and subsequently blames the murder on the rats?  I must be missing something.

I find this an interesting case study, comparing your and my reactions.  You weren't familiar with it, I have multiple copies of the story in my library, the earliest being from 1945.  And that's despite it being one of my least favorite Lovecraft stories.  So I was completely able to follow it, and glossed over storytelling gaps you stumbled on. With that said, Lovecraft rarely explains things in detail, and frequently has gaps where the reader has to fill in their own guess for what exactly happened or caused something.  So a good chunk of the ambiguity was definitely deliberate, but I'm not sure where the line between deliberate ambiguity and poor adaptation is.

[Axe Elf]

EERIE #16 - July 1968

According to the Warren Magazine Index...

16. cover: Barry Rockwell (July 1968)

1) Eerie’s Monster Gallery: The Number 13! [Bill Parente/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico] 1p  [frontis]

2) Dracula’s Guest [E. Nelson Bridwell/Frank Bolle] 7p   from the story by Bram Stoker, reprinted from Christopher Lee’s Treasure Of Terror (Sept. 1966)

3) Big-Time Operator [E. Nelson Bridwell/Ric Estrada] 8p

4) Sara’s Forest [Roger Brand/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico] 6p

5) Evil Spirits! [Archie Goodwin/Johnny Craig] 10p

6) Eerie Fanfare: In Memoriam, Rocco Mastroserio 1927-1968 [Bill Parente/Richard Corben, Rocco Mastroserio & Bruce Jones] 1p   [text article]

7) The Monument [Archie Goodwin/Alex Toth] 6p   reprinted from Eerie #3 (May 1966)

8) Ahead Of The Game [Archie Goodwin/Jerry Grandenetti & Bill Draut] 8p   reprinted from Eerie #2 (Mar. 1966)

Notes: Editor: Bill Parente.   Size increased to 56 pages.  A quite good issue!  Cousin Eerie’s head was obviously pasted over original host Christopher Lee’s in the opening story.  The Goodwin/Craig story was an unpublished story from 1967.  Richard Corben & Bruce Jones made their comics debut on Eerie’s first fan page, although Corben may have been working on his first underground work, Tales From The Plague, prior to this.  Today Jones is known primarily as a writer, but he started off as a quite good artist in the Al Williamson mode.  The fan page also announced the death of Warren and Charlton artist Rocco Mastroserio.  Best stories are ‘Evil Spirits’ and ‘Big-Time Operator’.

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I believe that this is the first time that ANY of the Warren titles we've been reading has been published in consecutive months (EERIE #15 was dated June 1968)!  That, as much as anything, may signal the improving health of the company by this point.  But just as we're starting to get issues that have more original stories than reprints again, we're a mere two weeks away from another CREEPY Yearbook chock full of reprints!

Sigh...

The Index sounds optimistic, though, and the debut of the EERIE Fan Club sounds both exciting and ominous, featuring both the debut of Richard Corben and the death of Rocco Mastroserio.  I think this issue features the debut of yet another new cover artist--and again I get to crack open an undercopy and feel the pages in my fingers as the words run through my brain, so I'm looking forward to that again as well.

And finally we get to read what the cover of EERIE #13 promised--why the Number 13 scares us!  (Although following up a Loathsome Lore about trees with a Monster Gallery about a number isn't a particularly strong rebound.)

[OtherEric]

Eerie #16 thoughts:

Cover:  Barry Rockwell only does two stories and this one cover for Warren.  The cover is moderately effective, but makes me feel like a lot of work was done in production to get it to be effective.  Very text-heavy, and it looks like parts have been blacked out on my copy under the text.  Hard to really assess the artist here.

Monster Gallery:  Clearly this was the bit intended for issue #13, it would have worked well there but it's hard to see a number as a monster, at least for me.

Dracula's Guest:  As I've indicated before, the reprints from the Christopher Lee book are all new to me, and this is a decent adaptation of the story.

Big-Time Operator:  Bridwell and Estrada both end their very short Warren tenures here.  The story is actually pretty good, and very much in the EC tradition.  The art, however, doesn't fit the story well.  Estrada is normally better than this in what I've seen of his work elsewhere, but it's very underwhelming here.

Sara's Forest:  Very good story and art here, but not a lot to say beyond that.

Evil Spirits:  Johnny Craig's last story for Warren, left over from a year before.  A very effective, moody piece that provides an appropriate farewell.

Fan Fare:  I don't normally comment on the Fan pages, but this one deserves comment.  We get an obituary for Rocco Mastroserio, who died shockingly young at the age of 40.  As I've said, he's an artist who has grown enormously in my esteem over the course of the reading club, I really should track down some of his other work.  This is followed by the debuts of two Warren mainstays, Richard Corben and Bruce Jones.  Corben, in particular, is possibly the single artist most associated with Warren, and Bruce Jones is a major writer for the company, frequently working with Corben, although he appears here as an artist.

The book finishes with a couple of reprints that didn't overwhelm me the first time but also aren't in the "why did they ever publish them" category.

A quite good issue, with a sense of passing the book on to the next group of creators, given that we have multiple farewells followed with the debut of two names that will loom hugely over the rest of the reading club, even if it's a little while before they start becoming regulars.  There's still a sense that we're in the dark ages, but it's just as clear that they're figuring out the road forward.

 

[Jayman]

Always felt this cover had a Pulp feel to it, or at least an Eerie Pub. vibe more so than a Warren book.

[OtherEric]

On 2/12/2023 at 11:36 AM, Jayman said:

Always felt this cover had a Pulp feel to it, or at least an Eerie Pub. vibe more so than a Warren book.

Head in a jar is more of a pulp cover trope than a comic one, although both use it occasionally.

[FoggyNelson]

On 2/9/2023 at 6:51 PM, Axe Elf said:

Yeah I'm not upset about the cover either.  It may not be a Frazetta, but it doesn't look any worse than the run of Prezio covers (especially CREEPY #18), and it doesn't take long to see that it relates to an interior story--the first panel of the first interior story, even...

But directly relating to the cover is about the best thing I can say about "The Rats in the Walls."  It's supposedly an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, but I can only hope that the adaptation is a bad one (kind of like CREEPY #19's Kipling adaptation), because too much is left unexplained or inadequately explained--like what the heck the rats have to do with anything in the first place?!?  Assuming Parente did the adaptation, I'm not too impressed with his first effort.  He even fails as an editor by leaving out a word in the introductory narration to his first story:  "It's one of the best (from) one of the greatest of them - H.P. Lovecraft".

Why would murders cause the ancestral home to vomit forth wave after wave of emaciated, filthy, and diseased rats?  (The ones in the pic look a lot fatter and healthier than that description.)  I kind of got confused between what was a flashback and what was current in the story, and I assume the near-human creatures whose bones were found in the crypt were somehow connected to the ancient horrific rites described? I didn't really see any actual explanation for them--I assume it was tied to why the first child was born with cloven hooves or something.  And then in the last three panels, the real or imagined sound of rats in the walls makes the guy snap--he starts running for his life--and then he stops to strangle someone and subsequently blames the murder on the rats?  I must be missing something.

The two reprints featuring solid stories--and superb art by Ditko and Torres--are quite possibly the highlights of the issue, but I don't really have anything new to say about them.

"The Immortals" was ok; though it seemed more like the kind of sci-fi fare that would later be more prominently featured in EERIE than in CREEPY.  The ending wasn't that much of a twist--like all the immortals look, act, and talk the same; did he think he'd get to retain his individuality if he became one?

Parente fails as an editor again with the title to "A Reasonabe [sic] Doubt," but I appreciated the "Tony Williamson" art as much this week as I did for their "The Demon Wakes" debut in EERIE #15 last week.

I found it immensely amusing and ironic that the first story after a Fan Club contribution about Lizzie Borden is a story about Lizzie Borden!

I'll give Parente credit for trying (sometimes maybe too hard) to sound like Goodwin with his use of ample alliterative adjectives, though, and the humor he infused into what I assume was an autobiographical description of himself for the Club sounded a lot like the style in which Goodwin had written previous features.  It looks like Parente is piloting the use of tiny avatars to distinguish his replies from the letters on the Dear Uncle Creepy page--and I kind of like that.  The ongoing inquiries and complaints about the reprints and other penny-pinching measures is getting old, though.

"Timepiece to Terror" wasn't a bad ending to the issue, and the "Mondiero" (or whatever his name is) art struck a good balance between the comical and the horrific. 

The daylight savings time twist was kind of humorous, but it tortured the plot a little in that the demon has to be described as showing up at 1am rather than say the midnight hour, which would be more traditional for these sorts of things, but which would have rendered the daylight savings time twist moot, and of course the pocketwatch would presumably only work in that time zone for which the descriptions applied.

Maybe the most pathetic feature of this issue was the Loathsome Lore on...  wait for it...  trees!  I mean, I understand nature contains all kinds of horrific things--quicksand, flesh-eating bacteria, tardigrades, etc.--but trees?  What's next, a Monster Gallery featuring the Monarch Butterfly?

C'mon Uncle Creepy, as horror goes, a feature on trees was pretty much a face "plant."

Excellent drawings‼️👍

[Jayman]

On 2/12/2023 at 4:06 PM, OtherEric said:

Head in a jar is more of a pulp cover trope than a comic one, although both use it occasionally.

This is the Eerie Pub issue I was reminded of…

[FoggyNelson]

On 2/12/2023 at 12:28 PM, OtherEric said:

Eerie #16 thoughts:

Cover:  Barry Rockwell only does two stories and this one cover for Warren.  The cover is moderately effective, but makes me feel like a lot of work was done in production to get it to be effective.  Very text-heavy, and it looks like parts have been blacked out on my copy under the text.  Hard to really assess the artist here.

Monster Gallery:  Clearly this was the bit intended for issue #13, it would have worked well there but it's hard to see a number as a monster, at least for me.

Dracula's Guest:  As I've indicated before, the reprints from the Christopher Lee book are all new to me, and this is a decent adaptation of the story.

Big-Time Operator:  Bridwell and Estrada both end their very short Warren tenures here.  The story is actually pretty good, and very much in the EC tradition.  The art, however, doesn't fit the story well.  Estrada is normally better than this in what I've seen of his work elsewhere, but it's very underwhelming here.

Sara's Forest:  Very good story and art here, but not a lot to say beyond that.

Evil Spirits:  Johnny Craig's last story for Warren, left over from a year before.  A very effective, moody piece that provides an appropriate farewell.

Fan Fare:  I don't normally comment on the Fan pages, but this one deserves comment.  We get an obituary for Rocco Mastroserio, who died shockingly young at the age of 40.  As I've said, he's an artist who has grown enormously in my esteem over the course of the reading club, I really should track down some of his other work.  This is followed by the debuts of two Warren mainstays, Richard Corben and Bruce Jones.  Corben, in particular, is possibly the single artist most associated with Warren, and Bruce Jones is a major writer for the company, frequently working with Corben, although he appears here as an artist.

The book finishes with a couple of reprints that didn't overwhelm me the first time but also aren't in the "why did they ever publish them" category.

A quite good issue, with a sense of passing the book on to the next group of creators, given that we have multiple farewells followed with the debut of two names that will loom hugely over the rest of the reading club, even if it's a little while before they start becoming regulars.  There's still a sense that we're in the dark ages, but it's just as clear that they're figuring out the road forward.

 

Like this cover✔️‼️