I
was fourteen, going on fifteen, at the time. It was 1978, the year of The
Boys from Brazil, Damian: Omen II, Jaws II, Ralph Bakshi’s The
Lord of the Rings, Magic, National Lampoon’s Animal House, Superman,
and The Swarm. It was also the time of such horrors as Grease, Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and The Wiz. It had been only a
little while since Star Wars (just Star Wars then; no ‘A New Hope’)
was out, and it was already working an alchemical change on all pop culture.
Them’s was the growing years, and all us boys were casting around and expanding
our interests. Some of those interests for
a while were a few Warren Magazines.
As
you can see that gigantic monster on the front bore more than a passing
resemblance to Bakshi’s Gollum; just put a fish in his hand and change the
perspective. That was enough to tip our interest and make us give it a try.
Horror? Fantasy? Science Fiction? Worth a shot.
Eerie and
Creepy were, of course, published every two months in black and white as
a magazine, not a comic book, to signal their more ‘adult’ themes, meaning sex
and graphic violence, including the chance of cartoon boobs now and then. Other
than that, their tales were not much more advanced than old classics like Tales
from the Crypt, but with slightly more modern attitudes.
For
about a year we followed Eerie (there was a serial story about a cursed
family that we were following), topped it off with one issue of Creepy,
and then I bestowed my consumer dollars elsewhere (‘Weirdworld’ had lured me to
the full-color graphic magazine Epic). Later we picked up the odd old copy
of Eerie here and there. But that original run sank in deep enough to
add a few quotes and phrases to the family store, like “Do you see it blight? Do you see it
wither?” or “You just met ‘im, mouthpiece!”
There are recent circumstances that sparked these recollections, which I should explain more fully in my next post.
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