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My choices for the best stories ever to appear in Creepy ran way back in the final issue of The Scream Factory (to make a long story short, the best story to ever appear in Creepy was the Bruce Jones/Ramon Torrents shocker, “Second Childhood,” from #88 and the best issue of Creepy ever published was #18), and I admit I've a bias towards Creepy as the flagship of Warren’s triple threat, but the best story ever to grace a Warren mag was “The Disenfranchised,” from Eerie #39 (April 1972).
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Oh, sorry, I was writing about the Marvel Monster zines of the early 1970s, not my mid-life crisis while buying a cup of coffee last week. A lot of very competent material appeared in these zines. Two titles in particular became favorites over the two years Marvel published their oversized comics: Monsters Unleashed and Tales of the Zombie. MU featured some of Marvel’s Monster/heroes, Man-Thing, Wendigo, Tigra, Gullivar Jones, Werewolf by Night, and a continuing storyline featuring the Frankenstein Monster by writer Doug Moench and artist Val Mayerik. The Frankenstein Monster is found frozen in a block of ice, put on display in a freakshow, escapes, and then wanders from one ghoulish incident to another, ala Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing. A low-rent Swamp Thing to be sure, but still packing a thrill or three in each adventure.
TOTZ was a weird experiment, to be sure. Based on a 1953 short horror story by Bill Everett (whose Sub-Mariner belongs in the Comic Book Hall of Fame, but that’s another article), the series told the story of Simon Garth, a nasty businessman cursed by his voodoo-practicing gardener to walk the earth undead. And walk he does. And walk, And walk. Like MU’s Frankenstein Monster serial, Steve Gerber’s “Simon Garth, Zombie” became a monsterific FUGITIVE, blundering into strange and not always interesting happenings. Though overall TOTZ was a high-quality strip, I do have to mention that one of the worst lapses of good taste and reason occurred in the pages of TOTZ and that would be “A Death Made of Ticky-Tacky,” a gruesome and just plain lame expose on group sex as envisioned by a Marvel superhero writer. Tacky, indeed. The aforementioned Alfredo Alcala (who will be mentioned again) put in a few appearances in TOTZ. You can find a lot of these Marvel monsterzines in the dreaded miscellaneous box at your local comic store and, chances are, they won’t set you back much more than a few dollars apiece.
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