By: Various Publisher: Dark Horse Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Dark Horse Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 240 Publication Date: September 03, 2008
Product Description: Gather up your wooden stakes, your blood-covered hatchets, and all the skeletons in the darkest depths of your closet, and prepare for a horrifying adventure into the darkest corners of comics history. Dark Horse Comics further corners the market on high-quality horror storytelling with one of the most anticipated releases of the decade - a hardcover archive collection of the legendary Creepy Magazine! This groundbreaking material turned the world of graphic storytelling on its head in the early 1960s, as phenomenal young artists like Bernie Wrightson and Neal Adams reached new artistic heights with their fascinating explorations of classic and modern horror stories.
In glorious black and white!!!! Wow, the price is right for this compilation. There is some beautiful work here by Al Williamson, Gray Morrow, Joe Orlando, Frank Frazetta, Reed Crandall, Alex Toth. Frazetta does the bulk of the covers which are reproduced in color but everything else is in varying shades of black and white. There are a few clunkers with the stories but the art is really the main reason to buy these anyway. beautiful artwork with twist endings and bad puns. The first five issues of Creepy reproduced at the original magazine size. Don't sit on the fence, BUY IT!!
Some classic work, by some classic creators Just an absolute feast for the eyes, Frazetta, Toth, Williamson, Crandall...etc. combined with the stellar writing talents of Goodwin, Orlando, Engelhart how can you go wrong? Artistically the varied styles are a treasure... no "house style" here. The packaging is excellent as well, the reproduction quality matches the talent. This really makes you look forward to the future volumes (as well as the EERIE collections) Darkhorse has a real winner here. If you enjoy the classic art here check out the Tony Robertson's Jim Steranko site (I designed it)
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Nebula/8650/
At long last, the Creepy archives Wow! I've been waiting for years for the Warren magazine archives, Creepy and Eerie. I wonder, though if Dark Horse is going all the way and reprint the whole series. After issue 17, Creepy became really bad for a couple of years until about issue 30, when "new talent" like Richard Corben, Bill DuBay and Bruce Jones came around and the magazine went on to become the best horror mag of all times (sorry EC buffs, but the Warren magazines from the 70's were tops). Let's not forget the Spanish invasion later on, with the top spanish artists contributing to the magazine.
I wonder also if other Warren magazines will ever get their archives (Blazing Combat is being done by Fantagraphics), but what about my fave sci-fi mag, 1984 (later on, due to copyright issues, 1994) and stuff like The Rook and so on.
The main problem I see with these archives (which are beautifully reproduced, they are even better than the original issues printed on pulp paper), is that, as I said before, some time down the line (when most of the good artists and Archie Goodwin quit) they were really terrible (lots of amateur art and even spelling mistakes in the sophomore texts). Should they also be reprinted to continue the whole run of the magazines, even if the artistic quality was below average? Uhmm, dunno... Let's wait and see what Dark Horse has in mind.
Anyway, now I can finally put away all my old copies of the magazine and read the stories once again in pristine condition.
Kudos to everyone involved in this project!
Creepy Archives # 1 Excellent reproduction of this magazine. I will continue to buy these if the quality remains high.
Wow! I vividly remember the first Creepy magazine I bought at the the ripe age of 12. Having graduated from adolecent comics like Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny, Creepy was the first "adult" comic I had ever seen. I collected them for several years, but always regretted having missed the #1 issue - my collection started at #2.
As time passed, and Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella went extinct, I left my childhood behind and my mother eventually threw my collection away. But I've never forgotten the thrill of curling up in a blanket on a rainy, thunderstorming afternoon, or on a spooky October evening, or even on a lazy summer day, with the latest Creepy magazine to scare the jeepers out of me.
And now, I'm reliving my youth all over again. The days of The Munsters, The Addams Family, and Creepy comics are all back. The book is absolutely perfect in reproduction. And surprisingly, the stories are just as hauntingly "creepy" as I remember them.
Kudos to you Dark Horse! I can hardly wait for the next edition! And the next, and the next... As Tonto would say, "You print-em, Me buy-em"
p.s. The companion book "The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics" is a excellent deal as well. I'd never read any of the original publications, but the stories and artwork are brilliant.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
