Creepy and Eerie and Vampirella, Oh My!

Knowing that I have over five decades of trivia stuffed in my brain, and that a lot of it has to do with comics, science fiction, and writing in general, Paul asked me if I was interested in writing a column for Stumblebum.
“Hmm,” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t have time for the things I have to do now. Besides, I don’t know much about the current trends in comics and such.” After assuring me that I didn’t have to expound on recent things, he then said that there was no deadline, and I could do it when I had the time. So here I sit at my lunch hour at work, adding to a case of terminal carpal tunnel syndrome. (Just kidding. Why, I have the wrists of a 50-year old. Wait. I’m only 51. Oh, well...)
Years ago, I thoroughly dismayed my son by telling him that I had once owned copies of every issue of the great Warren black-and-white comics, Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, up through about 1975. The fact that I had owned them wasn’t the cause for dismay, but rather that I had given them all away shortly before I married his mother. (I also once possessed first issues of The Amazing Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk, Deadman, Swamp Thing and others, but that’s a topic for another time.)
Thinking about this, I started reflecting on what I consider a great period in comic book history. When Warren put out Creepy in the mid-sixties, followed by Eerie and then Vampirella, it opened up an entirely new world of illustrated literature to me. A mixture of horror and science fiction stories, with articles on mythology and the supernatural, I could hardly wait for each issue to come out so that I could get my next treat. The artwork was stark and raw, the stories no less so, and they inspired me to read more traditional literature to fill in the time between issues. It didn’t hurt that some of the best stories were drawn from Edgar Allen Poe and other great authors, spurring me to read the original stories and others by the same writers. Of course, adults looked down on comics in general as juvenile and trashy, and a complete waste of time. I knew better than to argue with elders who had already made up their minds about the subject. I merely continued to mow lawns, rake leaves and shovel sidewalks to earn the money I needed to feed my habit, the insidious drug of comic books.
Many of the stories were straight-forward horror, similar to the content of Tales from the Crypt and other ‘50s EC horror comics, but the exceptions were gems, stories and series that could send a shiver down your spine, or make you see the possibilities of the as-yet unwritten future or the maybe-not so unchangeable past. Some of them stand out in my memory even today, mostly series that carried on over several years:

Adam Link was an intelligent robot with human emotions, hated and feared for being different. It was several years after I first read the Adam Link stories that I consciously recognized the metaphors of prejudice and discrimination, but even before that I could see the message in the tales.

The Demons of Jedidiah Pan featured an old man who possessed a pair of supernatural bracelets, each of which could summon three different demons from Hell to do his bidding. Jeremiah’s estranged son wanted to destroy his father, thinking that he was evil, but found that his father’s motivations were much different than he could have imagined, and ended up joining forces with him to fight even greater evils.

Night of the Jackass took its title from a drug called Jackass, a derivative of the formula that turned Doctor Jekyll into Mister Hyde. Set in Victorian England, the main characters of the series were a trio of unlikely companions trying to find an antidote to the effects of the drug, and to force it on those who had taken the drug. Groups of people in despair, such as coal miners dying from black lung, and orphans with no hope for the future, took the drug and became incredibly strong, insanely violent and nearly invulnerable, wreaking havoc on society until the effects of the drug wore off and they died from the withdrawal.

Hunter the Demon Killer was set in a post-Apocalyptical future, where mutants known as demons roved the Earth preying on the tattered remnants of the human race. Hunter was half-human, half-demon, the offspring of a mutant leader who had raped his mother and killed her husband. His life’s work was to track down and kill every demon he could find, always searching for the monster that sired him, all the while wearing an ancient US Air Force jet pilot’s helmet.

These and many others tales motivated me to read more, to write, to develop my imagination. They stimulated my mind, made me wonder why about nearly everything, and forced me in some cases to do some honest self-examination. A waste of my time? Hardly. I think rather that these “juvenile comic books” achieved the purpose of any true literature; to engage, to inform, expand the horizons of the reader, and to make that reader think. Yes, they were entertaining, and a lot of fun as well – things that I think any good literature should be.
If you should ever get the chance, read some of these comics. While they were written and drawn thirty and forty years ago, I think that the artwork and the tales themselves will prove timeless. They are certainly unique in the annals of comic books, and I don’t think we’ll see anything exactly like them again.