Creepy Archives Volume 1

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.

Creepy was a 1960s effort to recapture the spirit of the beloved EC horror comics of the 1950s that, by publishing in larger magazine format, ducked the Comics Code imposed to quiet public outcry over precisely such lurid fare as the EC horrors. Creepy hewed as closely as possible to the EC model, rounding up many of the line’s most talented artists, including Al Williamson, Jack Davis, Reed Crandall, and Joe Orlando, and using a comically grisly host to introduce the tales à la EC’s Crypt-Keeper. The magazine sported lush, eye-grabbing covers by painter Frank Frazetta, who became one of the most acclaimed sf-fantasy artists. Creepy arguably outdid its inspirers. The scripts, mostly by editor Archie Goodwin, were less text-heavy than EC’s, and the black-and-white printing and larger page size showed off the detailed artwork to fuller advantage. Creepy and its stablemate Eerie would soon augment the EC-veteran contributors with other artists as good. The brilliant Alex Toth appears in the last of the issues reprinted here, and forthcoming volumes will spotlight more top talent. --Gordon Flagg