Creepy #11 (February – 2013 – Dark Horse)

Creepy #11

I have made my unending love of the black and white horror anthology comic pretty well known on this site already, so I won’t on to much about how I love it. I love that it gives a camp 50’s movie feel to everything. I love that it allows my brain to play a little more on what things would look like if they were in color. I love that the techniques that can be used in black and white make for an infinite varities and styles that rivals color comics. I love them.

So with that said you would think to yourself, “Creepy should be right up Gabe’s alley.”

You would be right.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I love to read, and the first issue of the Creepy reboot that I have had a chance to pick up, didn’t let me down in the least.  Even though it is a very special Valentine’s Day issue.  That’s right, all of the stories in this issue are about the dark and forboding side of love and romance.

A man with to heads terrorizes a woman with large breasts, who in turn terrorizes one of her co-workers.  A man who lost his wife to the sea finds out the hard way that mermaids are nothing like Ariel.  Teen love can get messy when it is between to monstrous lovers.  A man uses black magic to bring his wife back from the dead, but he is the only one that doesn’t see the truth about her.  A man and a ghost have a relationship that just doesn’t work out well.

I mean if those tag lines alone don’t pique your interest, there is a part of you that is dead inside.  This is the glorious stuff that horror comics are made of.  Tales of morality punctuated by drownings and decapitations  all hosted by some funny man that you would cross the street to walk past.  I loved Eerie and Creepy when I was a kid, and if anyone is going to do justice to a reboot of the titles it is going to be Dark Horse, and from what I’ve seen in this single over sized issue they are doing it all sorts of justice.  We might have to wait until May to see the next issue, but I get the feeling that it will be worth it.

Next Time: B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1

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Eerie #2 (January – 2013 – Dark Horse)

Eerie #2

Eerie and Creepy were those kind of books that you find in a box full of random comics from the 60’s and 70’s at a garage sale.  They didn’t have the same kind of name recognition that Tales From the Crypt or Vault of Horror had.  They weren’t quite like those EC titles that ended up spawning a whole revival of horror comics in the 80’s and 90’s.  If you saw them though, you would snap them up.  Because there was something awesome about the red-headed stop child of EC that Eerie just seemed to be.

Originally release in the 60’s this black and white anthology was actually produced as a magazine to circumvent having to get the comics code seal.  Though it was in magazine form the guts of it were still anthology style black and white comics, hosted by the leering Cousin Eerie.  A quip wielding Crypt Keeper style host, in turn of the century garb and a leering visage that honestly always freaked me out a little bit, but as an adult I now realize he is just plain silly.

First story of the bunch is “Our Friend, The Ant,” like most tales in this book it is a cautionary tale of greed.  A scientist is working on how to communicate with ants, and while his relationship with the ants is more meditative and communal his assistant sees dollar signs behind the technology.  So naturally the assistant traps his boss in his chamber with fire ants who consume the good doctor.  Assistant gets rich quick, but no matter where he goes he is stalked by insects, until they enact their revenge upon him.

A tale called “Signaling the End,” is up next.  Again two scientists argue about the validity of an experiment.  One scientist is working on a SETI like project, scanning the universe for communication from other planets.  His contemporary wants him to turn that technology to some other use that might make him a living instead of a living crackpot.  But then all the work is justified when a communication comes through.  A little song plays through the universe and right into the minds of humanity.  Taking over their feeble minds.  Not the invasion that humanity was expecting but an invasion none the less.

Finally, “Experiment in Fear,” which is the most Twilight Zone-esque of the issue.  A Nazi scientist is trying to prove that the Aryan race is superior to those they are executing by putting them through an experiment where he terrorizes them.  The fact that they show fear proves that Jews are of inferior stock.  Naturally the scientist gets trapped in his own chamber of horror and displays the same kind of fear that he had been arousing in his Jewish subjects.  His superiors don’t see this as a failure in his experiment, but as an indicator that the now former Nazi scientist is Jewish.  Soon he is behind the barbwire fence of the concentration camp, trapped with those he once tortured.  My favorite little revenge through science story I have read in a while.

So the issue seems to have a science gone wrong theme, which is something that I love in my horror comics.  The glorious black and white pages, the letters with responses that mock the writer more than answer their questions, all of the tropes of the old school horror comics are just spot on.  With Dark Horse picking this old title up and giving it new life, I hope to see the same kind of treatment that they gave to Conan (I can’t tell you how much I would love to have a collection of all the old Eeries in TPB collections).  I’ve got to hunt down issue #1, and I’m really looking forward to July when issue #3 comes out.

Next Time: Rise of the Midnight Sons TPB