Some Scary Tales of Slit-Erary Alle-Gory
Written By:
Peter Bagge, Dan Braun, Rhiannon
Rasmussen-Silverstein, Richard Corben
Art By: Ricardo Cabral, Peter Bagge, Tony
Guaraldi-Brown, Glenn Fabry
Cover Price: $3.99
On Sale Date: June 22, 2016
Here’s another Reggie fact you can add to my
collector’s card: horror comics are my favorite kind of comics. More than
superheroes, more than wacky comedy books, even more than the psychedelic
underground comix that were instrumental to my youthful drug experimentation—I
love horror comic books and have ever since I was given, of all things, a stack
of Bronze Age Tales of the Unexpected and
the House of Mystery (among others)
by a family friend when I was about eight or nine years old. Many comic books
have come and gone in my life, but I still have that original stack,
languishing in the bottom of an old wine bottle carton, tattered and creased
from repeated readings. Not much later, I’d snap up whatever horror comics I
could—there were lots of black and white offerings when I was old enough to hit
the comic store myself, but I preferred oversized reprints of EC Comics 1950s
classics and Warren Publishing’s old Eerie
and Creepy comics. Well, besides
reprinting these comics in handsome hardbound collections, Dark Horse has also
been making new issues of Creepy, and I decided to check out the latest one!
Here’s my review!
One of the unfortunate legacies of horror comics is
really shoddy worksmanship. For every Crypt
of Terror, there were dozens of also-ran books like Witches’ Tales and This
Magazine is Haunted. The success of high-quality magazine Eerie begat the spiteful Eerie
Publications, which churned out black & white adaptations of the
aforementioned also-rans, mockeries of a genre practically created by Warren
Publications. Even throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, there were lots of
horror comics that were just dreadful, poorly executed independent works of
some creator’s personal fetishes and sadistic fantasies. With this in mind, I
approached Dark Horse’s Creepy
revival with trepidation. In hindsight, I don’t know why; Dark Horse Publishing
has one of, if not the best reprints program in comics today, diligently
compiling works like Crime Does Not Pay and
Alex Toth’s work for Warren Publications with equal care and diligence.
Clearly, folks there aren’t asleep at the switch, turning out comics reprints
for a quick buck, so there is nothing to suggest they would short change
readers of their new material. Still, on an instinctual level, I was leery.
Well, I am glad to say my concerns were completely
unfounded and spurious. Creepy #24 is
a horror comic in the classic pre-Code tradition, full of chills, thrills, and
lots of gore rendered in glorious black and white. There are a lot of stories
and pin-up pages rendered by lots of creators, and I think I could only do them
a disservice by naming a couple of stories specifically or spoiling the entire
book as is my usual fashion, so I will give my impressions: Modern Creepy seems to hold more similarity to
the Heavy Metal magazines I read in
junior high than the original, ink-washed Creepy
magazine from the 1970s and 80s. There are two full stories in the book, one
contemplative and the other…just plain fucking creepy, man. Like, sort of unsettlingly
so. Then there’s a lot of filler, some good and some not so great, but all
fairly entertaining and interesting in its own right.
If you love horror anthology comics like the Haunt of
Fear or You WILL Believe in Ghosts, then there’s a good chance you’re going to
dig this too. It’s sort of tough to define because there’s so much talent on
this issue, and perhaps that’s one of its problems—it sort of slips through
genres and styles, providing an uneven mood overall. But it still works, as a
kind of old school MAD magazine,
except for decapitations and evisceration. And creepiness. At four bucks, this is a really good value and still in
that realm of dollars that can be spent on a whim without too much impact to
your budget. So give it a chance. If you’re not at least a little grossed out
by the end of the issue, then please turn yourself in at the closest mental
health facility. You pose a danger to society and have no ability to feel
empanthy.
Bits and
Pieces:
8.5/10
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