Most of you are probably familiar with legendary E.C. Comics like Tales from the Crypt or Vault of Fear, which introduced the youth of the 1950s to bloody ax maniacs, rotting corpses returning from the grave, and voluptuous wives plotting the deaths of their rich husbands. E.C. Comics were part of a wave of comic books published after World War II that catered to a teenaged or adult audience and therefore contained more violent and/or sexual content than the kiddy-oriented superhero comics that had dominated the field before. This was part of a publishing explosion after the war that included cheap paperbacks, true crime pulps, and “girly” magazines; all contained unprecedented levels of sleaze that were enormously popular.
By 1954, a backlash had developed, against comic books at least. The Comics Code Authority was created by the comics industry, banning the depiction of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and gory violence in general. The reform was so sweeping that it even targeted romance comics, which had been filled with busty girls in tight sweaters struggling with horny boyfriends over their virginity.
These regulations destroyed horror comics and the form vanished for a decade. In 1964, Warren Publications revived horror comics with Creepy, followed soon by Eerie. Warren got around the restrictions of the Comics Code by publishing in a black and white magazine format, which turned out to be a better form for the genre, at least artistically. Warren hired some of the best artists from the E.C. days and produced some of the most aesthetically satisfying horror comics ever. (Check out Dark Horses’ beautifully produced hardcover reproductions to get a real appreciation of these early masterpieces.)
Just like E.C. Comics before them, Warren had their imitators. Some of them were almost as good, most weren’t. Then there was the output of Eerie Publications: Terror Tales, Horror Tales, Weird, Tales of Voodoo, Witches Tales. These ultra-cheap rags represented not only the bottom of the barrel of the horror comics field, but the comics industry as a whole. Of course, that is why I love them so much.
Eerie Publications horror comics mixed reprints of cheap imitators of E.C. Comics from the 1950s with new stories designed to deliver as much gore and sleaze as possible. The reprints were often touched up to either accentuate cleavage or amp up the violence. Very few of the stories made much sense or were anything more than an excuse to depict beheadings, dismemberments, disembowelments, eye gouging, throat slashing, flesh melting, or torture.
Many of the new stories were illustrated by Hall of Fame comic artist Dick Ayers, who also inked many classic Jack Kirby Marvel comics in the Silver Age. While his work was not of the caliber of the art appearing in Creepy or Eerie, it did have a certain drive and vitality that helped readers overlook the inane scripts.
But the covers…OmiGod, these have to be the worst comic book covers in history. Most depicted a monster or maniac assaulting a woman whose clothing was barely containing her tits, and each included pools of blood, severed heads, or severed limbs. Crudely drawn does not even begin to describe them.
The publisher of Eerie Publications, Myron Fass, was the epitome of the term exploitation. He made his living by churning out ultra-cheap, shitty magazines that capitalized on anything that might have been newsworthy or popular. Along with skin mags, horror comics, and scandal sheets, Fass specialized in one-shot magazines with titles like: Son of Sam, JFK’s Love Affairs, or Paul McCartney Dead.
I actually owned a few of these horror comics back in the day, and I am sure that they laid the foundation of my life-long love of gore and sleaze. I read these when I was 11 or 12, in the days before VHS or cable TV, before I was old enough to catch R-rated movies at the local drive-in. This was literally my only outlet for adult-level sleaze at the time. I think I can directly connect my later passion for movies like the Blood Island Trilogy, Jess Franco’s messterpieces, or modern torture porn to the cheaply rendered, morally bankrupt output of Eerie Publications.
Looking back at the pages of these sleazy rags evokes a strange nostalgia. There’s something endearing about the cheap, tossed-off artwork and the direct appeal to the lowest common denominator that is hard to replicate today. At the time, I knew these were bad imitations of better magazines, but somehow I couldn’t just put them down. Maybe it was a mental aberration or character flaw that was never corrected, but it was probably more a case of the lure of the forbidden. If pot is a gateway drug then sleazy horror comics were a gateway to I Spit on Your Grave and Greta the Wicked Warden.
Thank God they didn’t have Harry Potter or Twilight when I was a kid or I might be writing columns about Kurt Russell’s Disney movies or what a great actor Robbie Benson was. Thanks, Myron!
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patrick