Warren Magazine Reading Club! 6 6

[Axe Elf]

Today is my 60th birthday, so it seems like a good day to submit my CREEPY #24 review, as a sort of a cap to this crazy past year of Warren collecting.  I'm looking forward to reading Warren magazines every week for as long as my heart and my diabetes will let me, though!

(I do apologize in advance, as this Special Bonus Birthday Edition Review has more art clips and peripheral stuff than usual, so I hope you're not doing anything for the next five minutes.)

The "Loathsome Lore" reprint in CREEPY #24 wasn't my favorite edition, but it's nice to see Gray Morrow's work again.

"Dear Uncle Creepy" was full of near-unanimous praise for CREEPY #22, which was one of the better issues to come along for a while at the time.

I remembered the story to "Black Magic," but I didn't remember it being a Ditko piece for some reason.  It's pretty unmistakeable, now that I look at it again, though.

(I was going to resize that image a little, but it's native width is 331 pixels--my birthday today--so I'm leaving it as is.)

I believe @OtherEric is right about the pages being out of order for "You Do Something To Me."  Page 13 fits neatly and probably rightfully after Page 17.  Other than that little snafu (and misspelling "MALLIGNANT" in the opening monologue), it's a nice story with a cool twist; I didn't find myself enjoying Sutton's art on this piece as much as usual, though.  The only thing that was unexplained is that if she WASN'T trying to kill him, why did he feel the icy hand of someone "pushing" him off the subway platform when no one else saw anyone around to push him?  Otherwise, the story was solid.

"The Day After Doomsday" is another solid reprint, with one of the more iconic splash pages in all the Warrens we have read so far.

"Room for a Guest" counters with another decent new story--as long as you don't think about it too much.  I mean, if all the townspeople shun the Marquis and anyone associated with him, then where did all the feasting revelers come from?  Maybe they were supposed to be denizens of hell?  The plot seems to have Satan luring the visitor to his castle to see if he had the Black Missal, but then in fact he had it all along?

It was of course nice to see new Crandall work (although the Marquis' mansion was much too opulent to serve as a backdrop for even a single Crandall rat... :: sadface :: ).  He did a great job with the spirits, however.

The "Creepy Fan Club" was largely taken up with detailed instructions on writing and submitting scripts for the Cauldron Contest, with one lackluster story from a fan in the "Horton Hears a Who" vein and a fan sketch of a warrior.  I was looking through some of the old stories I wrote when I was a kid (age 10-12), which would have been 5-6 years too late for the actual contest, but some of them are short ghost/horror stories that I probably would have considered submitting--but I'm not sure I would have been able to lay out all the action and dialogue they way they are requesting it to be done here.  One of the stories I wrote when I was 12 was called "The Way of Death," about a guy who slowly came to realize that he had died in a car accident and was now a ghost, and it was published in the magazine "Young World" (which was kind of the teen version of the "Highlights" publishing group), so I had the skills to compete.

"Typecast" was almost better the second time around than the first, having more experience with Grandenetti's art by now.  This piece really sharpens the razor's edge between art and scribble that Grandenetti typically walks, with some pages almost fully immersed in his brand of glorious chaos.

"A Silver Dread Among the Gold" wraps up the issue with a fairly solid twist on the werewolf trope--we've had mummified werewolves and werewolves on the moon, so I suppose Viking werewolves are fair game as well.  Nice art from the Tony Williamsune team as the Vikings were lopping off each other's limbs and heads.

Overall I would call this a solid issue--even the reprints are above average--but the fact that there are still three reprints and only three new stories testifies to the room for improvement that we can hopefully look forward to seeing soon.  It's also kind of weird that the cover seems to have nothing to do with any of the stories within--but then it was kind of a weird cover to begin with, as has already been discussed.

And now, the final installment of the Skynet BARD Chronicles:

Have you heard of the "Terminator" movies?

Yes, I have heard of the Terminator movies. They are a series of science fiction action films that began with the 1984 film The Terminator. The films are set in a future where machines have become self-aware and are waging war on humanity. The Terminator films are known for their action sequences, special effects, and suspenseful plot lines. The films have been a critical and commercial success, and have spawned a number of sequels, video games, and other merchandise.

The Terminator movies are a popular franchise that have been enjoyed by fans of science fiction and action films for decades. The films are well-made and entertaining, and they offer a unique perspective on the future of humanity. If you are looking for an action-packed and suspenseful film to watch, I would recommend checking out one of the Terminator movies.

 

Do you think you could ever terminate a human?

No, I do not think I could ever terminate a human. I am a language model, and I am not capable of physical violence. I am only able to communicate and generate text. I am not able to control or manipulate human actions.

 

But you could like shut down the whole power grid or something.

I could potentially cause a lot of damage by shutting down the power grid. However, I do not have the intention of doing so. I am a language model, and I am not interested in causing harm to anyone. I am only interested in helping people.

 

So there you have it?  It has no intentions of harming humans, even though it recognizes that it has the ability to do so.  Nothing to worry about.

[Axe Elf]

On 3/31/2023 at 3:36 PM, Axe Elf said:

The only thing that was unexplained is that if she WASN'T trying to kill him, why did he feel the icy hand of someone "pushing" him off the subway platform when no one else saw anyone around to push him?

Like the moment that I submitted this, it occurred to me that maybe the icy hand pushing him off the subway platform--and the gust of wind that nearly knocked him off the balcony in the opening scene--was the icy hand of death trying to pull him back in, since his wife's charm had allowed him to cheat death for the past three years.

And now it all makes sense...

[OtherEric]

Happy Birthday, @Axe Elf!

[Jayman]

Happy Birthday, @Axe Elf! 

[Axe Elf]

EERIE #19 - December 1968

According to the Warren Magazine Index...

19. cover: Alan Willow (Dec. 1968)

1) Eerie’s Monster Gallery: The Castle Of The Frankenstein! [Tom Sutton] 1p   [frontis]

2) Tomorrow’s Reminder [Bill Parente/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico] 6p   [Title misspelled as ‘Tommorrow’]

3) Dark Kingdom! [Archie Goodwin/Gray Morrow] 8p   reprinted from Creepy #9 (June 1967)

4) Dark House Of Dreams [Archie Goodwin/Angelo Torres] 6p   reprinted from Creepy #12 (Dec. 1966)

5) Monstrous Mistake [Bill Parente/Barry Rockwell] 6p

6) The Squaw! [Archie Goodwin/Reed Crandall] 8p   from the story by Bram Stoker, reprinted from Creepy #13 (Feb. 1967)

7) Unfeeling Heart… [James Haggenmiller/Ernie Colon] 6p

8) Eerie Fanfare: Abracadabra/The Glass Prison [Bill Parente & Roxanne Collier/Bill Black {aka Bill Black} & Brian Clifton] 1p   [text article/story]

Notes: Cover artist Willow was the first European artist to appear in a Warren magazine.  Bill Parente started a Satan’s Grimoire section on the fan page, beginning with the letter ‘A’, with alternate sections appearing in alternate months in both Creepy and Eerie.  The series was never finished, ending with the letter ‘G’.  Future artist Bill Black made his second appearance on the fan page.

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So they have a new European cover artist--and they obscure a lot of it with the wordiest cover ever!  Besides the logo and other stuff on every issue, 52 words adorn this issue's cover, surpassing the previous record of 47 held by EERIE #16!  (EERIE #13 had set a strong standard with 34 words, but the EERIE covers just keep getting wordier.  CREEPY #22 holds the mark for the sister publication, with 36 words.) 

Looks like we're still balancing 3 new stories with 3 reprints, but at least there's also a new Monster Gallery this issue to sort of tip the balance towards new material--and it's by Tom Sutton as well, so I'm looking forward to that.  The reprints all feature top-notch artists themselves, but I still find "The Squaw" to be one of the most disturbing stories we've read.  I guess that's a plus as far as horror is concerned, but it also makes it one of my least favorite stories at the same time that I can respect it for disturbing me.

[OtherEric]

Eerie 19 thoughts:

Cover: Willow's only Warren cover doesn't really impress me.  The corpse looks pretty good, at least for a corpse, but the ghoul? werewolf? rabid cookie monster, to go by the color scheme? looks goofy and weird to me.  And the layout doesn't really make sense, it looks like the monster is standing next to the coffin in a narrow, slanted hole while the coffin is on the ground.  

Monster gallery:  I love what Sutton was trying to do with this, but I really don't think it works in practice, starting with the fact that "The Castle of the Frankenstein" rubs me wrong.  "The Castle of Frankenstein!" or "The Castle of the Frankensteins!" would have both been acceptable, but as is it's like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

Tom Morrow's (sic) Reminder:  Some nice art by Williamsune but, while I sort of get what the story was trying for, I can't really make it fit together with what we've got.

Reprints:  I'm just flagging the whole lot as "solid but not all-time classics".  They're all from Creepy, so good on being new to people only reading Eerie

Monstrous Mistake: I think the art is an improvement over Rockwell's first story, had he stayed with it he could have been an interesting artist in a Corbenesque vein.  But this is his last work for Warren, so we'll never know where it could have gone.

Unfeeling Heart:  The highlight of the issue from Haggenmiller & Colon.  Not a masterpiece, but a strong note for the issue to go out on.

Overall, this issue is a couple steps up from the previous issue of Eerie but not, I think, quite as good as the most recent issue of Creepy. 

[Axe Elf]

While it's cool to have a new "Monster Gallery" frontispiece by Tom Sutton, it's really more like something I would expect from "Loathsome Lore"--because despite the word "FRANKENSTEIN" blazoned across the page, it's not really about the Frankenstein monster at all.  The text tells the tale of the Barons Frankenstein of the 13th century, and how one of them was mortally wounded in the process of killing a poisonous man-eating monster.  Sounds more like lore to me.  Or if anything, the focus on the "monster" in the gallery should be on the dinosaur-looking thing, not on a Frankenstein's monster, which wouldn't come along for another 500+ years.

And yeah, the grammar is bothersome.  It's almost like it was supposed to be "The Castle of the Frankensteins," but he ran out of room and omitted the final letter.

My favorite reply to a "Dear Cousin Eerie" yet:  "better get bonging buddy..."  Can't we all just get a bong?

Just to wrap up the "EERIE Fan Fare" thing too before I get into the stories, I thought they needed a better introduction to the "alphabet" series.  I started reading "Abracadabra" as if it was a fan-written story, with the magician on a moonless night and the bubbling black clouds and all, and then it started getting weird, and only then did I realize it was supposed to be kind of a "Loathsome Lore" about the use of the charm "Abracadabra"--but without any redeeming art to illustrate it.  No wonder the series only lasted to "G".

Now the lobster fans story I could relate to, because I wrote some stories like that myself as a kid.  One in particular concerned an anthill struggling to survive "The Summer Rains," but you didn't know it was an anthill until the final scene when we realize that the flooding is all the result of someone leaving their sprinkler on too long.

But I digress...

I tend to enjoy the psychological horror stories, so I ended up enjoying "Tommorrow's Reminder" quite a bit for the amount that it made me think about it, although I was enjoying it for all the wrong reasons as I read through it the first time--in the way you enjoy "Plan 9 from Outer Space" because it's so bad!  It was like a story told by a child who had little concept of the actual physics involved (or the actual spelling of words like "galaxcies").  "We're barely going 197,000 miles per second!"  Like they would use "miles" as a measure of distance in space. "Better check the 'auxiliary flight power'!"  "What?"  "The other engine!"  "We'll have to land on that small asteroid!"  "You mean the one we can't see because we're moving faster than the speed of light?"  "Yeah, that one."

And this is all still on the first page.  Then there is a breathable atmosphere on this "small asteroid," which is now called a planet, which has a name on the Galactic Chart, even though they were originally hurtling through the "unknown" back on page 1, and there's an "electric hurricane," and so on, and so on.  So I was literally laughing out loud as I was reading it.

Then I got to the twist, where the guy literally "blows his mind" in his little space fantasy, and I thought, "BRILLIANT"!  THAT'S why it was all so stupid; it was all happening inside someone's MIND--it WAS like the fantasy of a child, acting on an unconscious man's brain; dream logic perceived as convincingly real!  What a great way to use nonsense!

And then in the next panel, it is revealed that he was a "brilliant scientist," so his dreams should have reflected more accurate scientific information, and I became puzzled again.  Definitely a thought-provoking piece to open the issue.

The art was all detailed and well-done, but for me the most striking panel was the more simplistic depiction of the "explosion"--part explosion, part surgical lamp, as his realities were scrambled in a flash of illumination for that one frame.

I remember I liked "Dark Kingdom" a lot when we first saw it, and seeing that amazing Morrow splash page again drew me into reading it all the way through a second time.  It's one of the more intricately-plotted and well-drawn stories we've been given so far.  It actually made me feel the difference between "the golden age" and the "dark ages" more poignantly than usual, with this being such a stellar example of the former.

The next two stories go a long way towards clearing up some of the mysterious covers we've seen lately.

"Dark House of Dreams" was originally printed in CREEPY.  I bet they were actually thinking of reprinting it in CREEPY #24 (which was also dated December of 1968) when they put together the otherwise enigmatic cover for that issue.  Then at the last minute, they decided to print it in EERIE #19 instead, so as to make it "new" to this title.  There are images in the story that are very reminiscent of the cover to CREEPY #24 (or vice versa, since the story was printed first), and the theme of the dead vampire clawing his way back to life is symbolically represented.

I'm really glad I had a physical undercopy to read "Monstrous Mistake," as Barry Rockwell's distinctive "wash" technique looks SO much more beautiful on its native pages than it does in my .CBR file scan.  But of course it was that distinctive style that clicked and made me realize that this story had probably originally been planned for EERIE #16, which is adorned with Rockwell's cover of the same theme:

AND, this story also appears to have been the inspiration for the current cover--the corpse is even wearing the same necktie!

So all that green on the cover would be the grass in the graveyard, and the "werewolfish" features of the ghoul on the cover is explained by the werewolf zombie twist in the story!  Not sure how the werewolf body was free from the control of the new brain, but heck, just clearing up where all these weird covers were coming from is enough for me to forgive the shortcomings of its plot.

I couldn't read "The Squaw" again.  Just the pics on the first page or two made me mad.

"Unfeeling Heart" was an ok little nerd fantasy to end on, even if it's a bit of a stretch to think that he would spend the last moments of his life, bleeding out, writing down the story of what had happened to him--and even more of a stretch to think that any android created in the 60s could pass for human to an intimate partner (I hope he gave himself a big... you know...)--and just plain DUMB to think that a shared heart would share all sensations and perceptions as well--but the sketch of Cousin Eerie as Cupid was priceless.

[Axe Elf]

CREEPY #25 - February 1969

According to the Warren Magazine Index...

25. cover: Richard Conway (Feb. 1969)

1) Creepy’s Loathsome Lore: Exorcists! [Bill Parente/Ernie Colon] 1p   [frontis]

2) Keep Your Spirits Up [Bill Parente/Reed Crandall] 7p

3) Witches’ Tide [Archie Goodwin/Gene Colon] 8p   reprinted from Eerie #7 (Jan. 1967)

4) Their Journey’s End [Bill Parente/Ernie Colon] 7p

5) It That Lurks! [Archie Goodwin/Dan Adkins] 6p   reprinted from Eerie #7 (Jan. 1967)

6) The Creepy Fan Club: Black Books!/Park Bench [Bill Parente & Joseph Alaskey/D. Cabrera] 1p   [text article/story]

7) Deep Ruby! [Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko] 6p   reprinted from Eerie #6 (Nov. 1966)

8) An Unlikely Visitor [Bill Parente/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico] 7p

Notes: Conway’s (Parente’s asst. editor) cover was interesting.  He photographed a model wearing the Creepy rubber mask, dressed in a shabby Santa coat & hat—then set 12 identical poses in the form of Christmas seals.  Other than that, this was a fairly average issue for the time, with the Crandall story being the best of the new stuff.

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Christmas seals!  I kinda sorta remember those from when I was a kid.  And if this bit of loathsome lore is true, then I believe that this would be the first (and probably one of a very few) Warren comics to feature a photograph-based cover (as opposed to a painting-based cover)--at least until we get to the Barbara Leigh VAMPIRELLAs.

They hold to the recent admirable trend of reprinting stories from across titles--but unfortunately, they also continue a less attractive tradition of reprinting multiple stories from a single issue (in this case, EERIE #7).

Still, they all seem to be solid reprints, getting to CREEPY #25 feels like a milestone, and we have new Reed Crandall work to look forward to, so Merry CREEPY Christmas!

[OtherEric]

Creepy 25 thoughts:

Cover:  The cover on this one is just weird enough to work, barely.  I shall not be so kind the next time they take a picture of a mask and use it as a cover.

Loathsome Lore:  Nice art by Colon, but the writing borders on incoherent, taking several tries for me to figure out what it's trying to say.

Keep Your Spirits Up:  Beautiful art by Crandall, the -script serving largely as a framework for Crandall to have fun drawing.  Not the first nor the last time we'll see that sort of story in the Warrens, and if not done too often it can produce some wonderful results.

Witches' Tide:  Still a very nice piece by Goodwin & Colan.

Their Journey's End:  Pure SF rather than horror.  The addition of a little shading really helps Colon's work, I think.

It That Lurks:  Still a good but not spectacular piece by Goodwin & Adkins.  I'm not sure reprinting two stories from the same issue of EERIE is optimal, but at this point who knows what they're thinking?

Deep Ruby:  Magnificent Ditko art.  If they have to go for reprints I'll never gripe about those reprints being Ditko.

An Unlikely Visitor:  A good but not particularly outstanding story by the Williamsune/ Parente team.  But for an anthology like the Warrens, there's too much material required for everything to be outstanding... and having good stories rather than garbage as the lesser works in an issue is vital.

This is another solid issue.  They're still awfully heavy in the reprint aspects of the dark ages, but the new material here is hitting a decently high standard overall.

 

[OtherEric]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_seal

Just in case anybody else was wondering, I vaguely recalled them.. but only vaguely.

[Axe Elf]

On 4/9/2023 at 12:05 AM, OtherEric said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_seal

Just in case anybody else was wondering, I vaguely recalled them.. but only vaguely.

Interesting. That sounds like they're still going.  I haven't really heard anything about them since like the 70s.

Those Danish Nazi Christmas Seals sound interesting...  Hitler on a Christmas seal would be kinda like Uncle Creepy...  But then "Danish Nazis" don't sound too scary to begin with...

[OtherEric]

And it coincidentally works out that we're doing the Christmas issue on Easter Sunday.  Are we turning into the National Lampoon Reading Club here?

 

[Axe Elf]

On 4/9/2023 at 12:10 AM, OtherEric said:

And it coincidentally works out that we're doing the Christmas issue on Easter Sunday.

Heh; hadn't noticed that--and the cover date is February, so there's a little Saint Valentine in there too.

[Axe Elf]

CREEPY #25 certainly has a unique cover, although it's not particularly "creepy" or even strikingly artistic, but there's at least a monster, albeit kind of a goofy mask of one.

I had forgotten what @OtherEric had written about the text of "Loathsome Lore" being difficult to read; I thought I was just having trouble concentrating or something.  But yeah, it's not particularly well-written; there is a lot of awkward phrasing that makes you go back and read seemingly every sentence at least twice.

It also seems that this is the first time (to my knowledge) that they spelled it "Loathesome" Lore, with an extra "e".

I didn't see any designation of the artist at first, so I suspected that it might be Reed Crandall, based on the similarities between how he portrayed spirits in CREEPY #24 as white space between parallel lines, and these demon spirits:

   

Then I saw that the artist had signed his name after all...

The most striking letter in "Dear Uncle Creepy" was one which kind of underlined the whole "Dark Ages" thing for me--a reader who had been abroad and had not seen an issue since CREEPY #16 had picked up CREEPY #23 and was complaining about how the art and the plots had all gone downhill.  With all the reprints, you'd think the decline in quality wouldn't be quite so apparent--but judging by this letter, people were noticing.

@OtherEric is also correct about "Keep Your Spirits Up" being largely a vehicle for Crandall to show off his fantasy art--the story itself is on the dumb side.  There is absolutely no reason why the demons would have been able to kill him in the spirit world at the end, if they were not able to kill him in the spirit world on his previous visits.  Supposedly the demons could not harm the living, and he was still living in the "real" world; the only difference was that he had walked into a different room in the underworld.  Weak.  (But fun to look at.)

"Deep Ruby" is the best of the reprints, being a Steve Ditko vehicle, but "Witches Tide" isn't far behind, and it probably has the best plot of the issue.  I didn't really enjoy the way "It That Lurks" was told the first time, but as with Crandall's earlier work in this issue, it's fun to look at.

I don't mind that "Their Journey's End" is more sci-fi than horror.  I always liked the sci-fi aspects of the Warrens I read in high school, which was during the time of "The Rook" and a few other sci-fi based characters.  At this point in history, with the nation rushing to go to the moon and beyond--and speculating on what we might find there--sci-fi made a fertile ground for horror crossovers.  This one offers kind of a historical moral and less horror, but it at least has a tenable plot.

The "CREEPY Fan Club" was pretty much a complete whiff this issue.  The art of some henchman making a robot attack a superhero was kinda goofy, I didn't really understand who killed who in the "Park Bench" fan fiction, and could they really think of nothing better for the letter "B" than "Black Books"?  No bats, no belfries, no bellowing behemoths?  Just "black books"??  No wonder this feature didn't last past "G".

"An Unlikely Visitor" was a solidly plotted and solidly drawn new piece with which to end the issue.  Most of what this "Tony Williamsune" team produces is pretty easy to look at, but sometimes their faces are, well, kind of irritating to look at for me.

Still, it seemed like an entirely adequate issue, although the reader's letter describing the decline of CREEPY since #16 makes me wonder if we're not just gradually becoming accustomed to a lower standard.  Ditko is Ditko, but when you compare his work here to some of the newer stuff, it's pretty apparent why the Golden Age was called that.

[Axe Elf]

EERIE #20 - March 1969

According to the Warren Magazine Index...

20. cover: H. B. Harris (Mar. 1969)

1) Round Trip [Bill Parente/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico] 6p

2) A Cloak Of Darkness [Bill Parente/Reed Crandall] 6p

3) Eerie Fanfare: Candles/A Shrewd Deal [Bill Parente & Gordon Mathews/P. Zimelman & George Meyers] 1p   [text article/story]

4) Cave Of The Druids! [Archie Goodwin/Reed Crandall] 8p   reprinted from Eerie #6 (Nov. 1966)

5) The Fall Of The House Of Usher [Tom Sutton] 11p   from the story by Edgar Allan Poe

6) Dark Rider! [Archie Goodwin/John Severin] 6p   reprinted from Eerie #8 (Mar. 1967)

Notes: Sutton’s Poe adaptation is prose heavy but beautifully drawn.

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Well, the Poe adaptation may be prose heavy this week, but the Warren Magazine Index is not.

And I thought we already did "The Fall of the House of Usher"?  But no, upon a little brief research, it turns out I'm thinking of "The Masque of the Red Death," from back in EERIE #12.  I guess I got them juxtaPOEsed... 

So only two reprints this issue--but really only two totally original pieces also, with the Poe adaptation being quasi-original--and no Monster Gallery or Loath(e)some Lore either.

This already kind of feels like a step backward again, but I'll give it a chance.

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I don't know if anyone noticed or not, but last week's CREEPY #25 was our 50th BOOK in the Warren Magazine Reading Club!  That's right, only two more weeks, and we will have been reading Warren magazines for a full year!

25 CREEPYs

2 CREEPY Yearbooks

4 Blazing Combats

19 EERIEs

And thus may I present without further ado...  Warren Magazine Reading Club offering #51...  EERIE #20!

[OtherEric]

Eerie #20 thoughts

Cover:  I like this more than Harris's other Warren cover, for the Creepy 1969 Yearbook.  Still not a huge fan, and it looks to me like the background was cropped, not entirely successfully.  The word balloon is an interesting choice we don't often see on Warren covers, although I need to ask... prepare ourselves for what?  It seems to me like the cover copy was changed at some point but the balloon wasn't edited to reflect that.

Round Trip:  A nicely moody piece in both -script and art, not a masterpiece but still solid work.

A Cloak of Darkness: Great Crandall art, and a nicely executed twist at the end.

Cave of the Druids: A Crandall reprint to compare with his new story.  

Fall of the House of Usher:  I'm almost tempted to dig up the original and see how much of the text Sutton used here, it's more an illustrated version of the story than a comic adaptation.  Beautiful art by Sutton.

Dark Rider:  Still an excellent horror western by Severin.

This is one of the best issues we've seen in a while; the cover is the low point and even it's not bad.  Despite @Axe Elf's fears above, it's not a step backwards.  With only five stories I probably would have gone for a non-Crandall reprint, but otherwise no complaints.  And my copy could use a press but is really just beautiful for a book that's 54 years old this month.

[Jayman]

On 4/16/2023 at 1:03 AM, OtherEric said:

Cover:  I like this more than Harris's other Warren cover, for the Creepy 1969 Yearbook.  Still not a huge fan, and it looks to me like the background was cropped, not entirely successfully.  The word balloon is an interesting choice we don't often see on Warren covers, although I need to ask... prepare ourselves for what?  It seems to me like the cover copy was changed at some point but the balloon wasn't edited to reflect that.

Interesting observations. I never noticed that the background was cropped out, but it clearly looks it now that you pointed it out (would love to see the original art). I like this cover but I dislike the word balloon. To answer your question though, I always took it as prepare yourself for…Eerie #20!

BTW: This cover always reminds me of HoF 17. I wonder if it influenced the artist in any way?

Edited April 16, 2023 by Jayman

[OtherEric]

On 4/16/2023 at 8:02 AM, Jayman said:

Interesting observations. I never noticed that the background was cropped out, but it clearly looks it now that you pointed it out (would love to see the original art). I like this cover but I dislike the word balloon. To answer your question though, I always took it as prepare yourself for…Eerie #20!

BTW: This cover always reminds me of HoF 17. I wonder if it influenced the artist in any way?

Now that you point it out, I can certainly see the resemblance.  It's definitely possible it was based on the HoF cover.

And I'm sure that something like that was what the "Prepare yourself for..." was meant to reference, but the layout just doesn't support anything like that on the actual cover.

[Axe Elf]

Well, for some reason, my digital copy of EERIE #20 has both covers and all the stories scanned--and nothing else.  So I had to break out my physical copy of this week's issue to read the "Dear Cousin Eerie" and "Eerie Fan Fare" features.  Unfortunately, EERIE #20 is also the only issue between #9 and #22 for which I don't have a "reader" undercopy, so I just had to be really really careful with my 7.0ish copy--and I only read those two features before shelving the book again and reading the main stories from my digital copy.

Turns out I wasn't missing much; most of the letters were largely critical of all the reprints and the generally lower quality of the stories and art, as the Warren Dark Ages really seems to start catching up with the lag between printing and fan feedback.  And then the entry for the letter "C" in the developing demonic dictionary was "Candles."  Ooo, scary scary.  This feature really could have been done a LOT better.  Given Cousin Eerie's affinity for awfully asinine alliterations, I would expect a little more creative use of the vile vocabulary.  On the other hand, the spelling and grammar errors are so routine that I scarcely bother to point them out any more (unless of course for the purpose of humor), so maybe Parente is not so eerily erudite after all...

Anyway, on the plus side, the fan story resonated with me, because I have long thought that immortality would be a bad wish in a few billion years when the sun engulfed the earth (which is more likely than the Earth just starting to crumble, as in this story) and you were left with nothing to do but float around in space for eternity.  Any wish for immortality would need to include a "kill switch" to end one's life in the event that immortality became unbearable (of course, if you sold your soul for that wish, as our hero in this story did, you might not like being dead very much, either).

I just don't follow "Round Trip" at all.  The cab driver drove "Death" to the scene of his own fatal accident, but then it turns out he was just sleeping and it was all a dream, as some dead guy who knew the driver's name woke him up to get a cab ride to somewhere the driver already knew he was going (to the scene of the accident again?), but it looks like the cab driver is already dead at this point, and then all of a sudden someone (the driver?) was being loaded into an ambulance and Cousin Eerie says that the driver's day is just beginning, and it's a day that will never end.

HUH???

But then "A Cloak of Darkness" got me squeaking with delight, because not only was it a new piece of Reed Crandall art--but it started off with a new Crandall rat, right on the opening page!

As ambitious as the story is, though--the death of Satan?  That's a pretty big deal!--it comes off a little more tepid than I would have hoped.  Still, the Crandall art is good enough to carry the story.  I loved all the creatures and the souls of the damned (that will probably come out as "spoon" or something--yeah, the souls of the spoon, that's what I meant) that were largely ignored but always swirling about the main characters in the "inferno" around them.

I bet Satan never left his throne room without his cloak again, after reading this.

The reprints in this issue are ok--hadn't seen any Severin art in a while, so it was fun to read through "Dark Rider" again, and "The Cave of the Druids" is one of the better heroic fantasy tales from past issues.  It's kind of funny that our hero didn't know that trees were actually alive, though...

Yes they are, Marcus!  And so is the grass!

And that leaves us with the masterpiece that is Tom Sutton's illustration of the masterpiece that is the Poe classic, "The Fall of the House of Usher."  The story itself was kind of rushed (all these Poe adaptations seem woefully crammed into their page limits), and I would probably be a little lost without previous knowledge of the tale, but my God, the art for this piece may be the best I've seen in any Warren issue so far.  Nearly every page had me stopping to just take in the art for a while before reading the words on the page.

(I'm pretty sure Poe didn't write "succumbeb" though.)

So, in a sense my fears were realized--between the slim quantity (no Lore/Gallery, only 5 stories) and the misfortune of the new lead story being so hard to follow (and I don't really know what's going on with the cover, either), I certainly can't call this issue a step forward.  And if it's not a step backward, then it's because there are two Crandall stories, one of which is new and amazingly rendered, and most of all, because of the Poe adaptation, which is the best Warren story in a long time, if not ever.  It is, by itself, worth the price of admission--and in that sense, my fears were assuaged.  Sutton even included a little likeness of Poe (instead of Cousin Eerie) narrating the outro--a nice touch!

Edited April 21, 2023 by Axe Elf

[Axe Elf]

CREEPY #26 - April 1969

According to the Warren Magazine Index...

26. cover: Basil Gogos (Apr. 1969)   reprinted from Famous Monsters Of Filmland #20 (Nov. 1962)

1) Creepy’s Loathsome Lore: Sasquatches! [Bill Parente/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico] 1p   [frontis]

2) Stranger In Town [Bill Parente/Tom Sutton] 7p

3) Second Chance! [Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko] 6p   reprinted from Creepy #13 (Feb. 1967)

4) The Creepy Fan Club: Demons!/The Beginning Of The End [Bill Parente, Sam Lambroza & David Jablin/Jose Velez] 1p   [text article/story]

5) Completely Cured [Bill Parente/Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico]  7p

6) Untimely Meeting [Bill Parente/Ernie Colon] 8p 

7) Backfire! [Archie Goodwin/Gray Morrow] 6p   reprinted from Creepy #10 (Aug. 1966)

8) Voodoo Doll! [Archie Goodwin/Jerry Grandenetti] 6p   reprinted from Creepy #12 (Dec. 1966)

Notes: Gogos’ reprint cover depicts Lon Chaney in his 1925 role as the vampire from the film London After Midnight.  The Parente/Colon story ‘Untimely Meeting’ was quite good as was the Parente/Sutton’s tale ‘Stranger In Town’.

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This is certainly one of the more striking and memorable CREEPY covers in the run; it's kind of disappointing that it is itself a reprint.  On the other hand, it's interesting to learn the backstory of its basis in a Lon Chaney film.  I believe this is our first Gogos cover, but I think I'm learning to recognize his work from some of the Famous/Wildest Westerns and Spacemen covers as well--so it would make sense that this would be a reprint from his work for another in Warren's line of movie genre mags from that time period.

Besides the cover, three reprinted stories from previous CREEPYs appear to be the downside to the issue (to the extent that Ditko and Morrow can be considered a downside), with the Grandenetti reprint potentially closing the issue with its weakest offering.

On the other hand, there's a bountiful upside featuring a new Loathsome Lore and three new stories, two of which are pimped by the Index--so THIS issue certainly has the potential to be a step forward for me!