According to a story in USA Today, Dark Horse's Creepy revival will switch to a bi-monthly publishing schedule next year. I don't think I can over-emphasize how wonderful this news is to horror comics fans like myself. Perhaps I should go out and commit a dozen or so ax murders or become a vampire or werewolf or some kind of soggy, shambling zombie in order to celebrate.
While I was living in Japan, I had more yen than I knew what to do with. Saving it was obviously out of the question, so instead I began spending it on various hardcover archive series. Dark Horse's Creepy and Eerie reprints top my list of favorites. The stories in the early books are kind of spotty-- overly tame and reliant on the same-old monsters and Eastern European settings that must have seemed pretty hackneyed even in the 1960s. But there's no arguing with the artwork-- Al Williamson, Alex Toth, George Evans, Steve Ditko and more, plus atmospheric covers by none other than Frank Frazetta. While I haven't bought any of the later volumes, my memory of quick peaks in the afternoon at various convenience stores around town leads me to believe the stories grew more explicit and gruesome over the years.
The quarterly Creepy comic, however, has proven pretty elusive. Somewhere around here I think I have issue 2, but I wasn't able to find any of the other issues in Japan. I don't think I've even read any online reviews. Hopefully the more frequent scheduling will translate into greater availability.
For me. Weird. When I was a kid reading comics, I never in a million years would've thought Creepy would become one of my favorite titles. And as a grown-up dork reading them in the 1990s, I never guessed both Dark Horse, Fantagraphics and Viz would end up becoming my favorite publishers.
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