Creepy Archive Vol. One

Creepy was one of the Warren horror magazines published in the 1960s that was intended to bring back the EC Comics fun yet disturbing stories (such as found in Tales From The Crypt) that had been made impossible to publish by the comics code.  By publishing this content in black and white magazine format Creepy was not required to comply with the comics code (which comics were not required to comply with since it was an in-house agreement among the comics companies with some concerns from distributors).  Creepy took on the role of short horror stories with a twist ending that were in much the same format, some would even say derivative, of the EC titles.

I had never really heard about this magazine until Vince B. of 11 O’Clock Comics praised it to the Nth degree.  I tend to agree with him.  This is some great material, with excellent art from Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando and others that would become pretty spectacular contributors in their field.  Archie Goodwin was also the editor, which helped alot.  It did diverge from the EC comics it was based on by being less text heavy and more visual.  The black and white art is very effective in that setting, and all of the artists are rather expressive in this media.  The stories follow the EC short morality tale format.  There is a moral level, despite all complaints about the horror content, that you would see in the EC stories.  Really, if I had to chose between my ten year old reading this in comparison to what was going on in Superman at the same time of publication I would prefer this.  It has a higher moral content despite somewhat shocking images (for the time, it is pretty tame by modern standards).

The first volume is published by Dark Horse and containst the first 5 issues in a nice hardcover.  It is pricy at 50 dollars, but I got a copy for 15 dollars from ebay.  They have published 2 more volumes as of this writing, plus 2 volumes of the companion magazine Eerie.  At 50 dollars a pop they can be rather expensive.  They reprint the letter pages and some of the ads, which may annoy some readers who are parsing page count to cost (they are around 240 pages each volume).  The oversized format is great, but a cheap guy like me would love to see them published in those thick newsprint volumes ala Dark Horse’s Savage Sword of Conan collections.  All in all a great reprint project that, though pricey, is an excellent choice if you are into horror comics.