The Warren Report Issue 21: November 1969-January 1970

The Critical Guide to 

the Warren Illustrated Magazines

1964-1983

by Uncle Jack

& Cousin Peter

Bill Hughes

Vampirella 2 (November 1969)

"Evily"★★
Story by Bill Parente
Art by Jerry Grandenetti

"Montezuma's Monster"★
Story by R. Michael Rosen
Art by Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico

"Down to Earth!"★1/2
Story by Forrest J. Ackerman
Art by Mike Royer

"Queen of Horror!"★★
Story by Don Glut
Art by Dick Piscopo

"The Octopus"★★★
Story by Nicola Cuti
Art by William Barry

"One, Two, Three"★★1/2
Story by Nicola Cuti
Art by Ernie Colon

"Rhapsody in Red!"★★★
Story by Don Glut
Art by Billy Graham

Grand-enetti

A witch named "Evily" lives in Vaalgania's Black Forest, where she talks to her magic mirror, abuses her hunchbacked servant, and holds a grand ball on Halloween. At midnight, the guests remove their disguises and Evily's mirror tells her that she is doomed but it cannot reveal the source of her troubles. After raising the dead from her dungeon, Evily discovers that her cousin Vampirella covets her throne, but the vampire escapes and Evily's spell rebounds on herself, turning her into a cat.

I'll admit that I prefer the Evily of Bill Hughes's cover to the one Jerry Grandenetti conjures up with what appear to be watercolors in the inside story, but Jerry's art is not half bad, in a shadowy kind of way. The story is not much and I hope Evily and Vampirella get more interesting soon.

"Montezuma's Monster"

Vince Harman leads an expedition into the jungle seeking Montezuma's treasure but instead finds "Montezuma's Monster" in the form of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent that can take the form of any flying thing. Vince and his comrades find the treasure and head back to civilization, but one man is killed by a buzzard and another by a mosquito. Vince boards a plane to fly back to the U.S. only to discover that the feathered serpent god can even take the form of an airplane!

Didn't we just read another story with a similar "surprise" ending? Oh yes, "Death Boat!" in Vampirella #1, where the boat turns out to be a vampire bat. Add to that the awful art by our pals Fraccio and Tallarico and you have the perfect recipe for a one-star Warren story. On top of that, we have the hideous depiction of Vampirella as story host, clad in a bikini with nipple-like eyes drawn on it. Jerry Grandenetti is looking better and better.

"Down to Earth!"

After arriving on Earth, Vampirella buys a copy of Monsterella magazine and heads to the publisher's office to enter a contest to win a trip to Hollywood. She wins easily but, on the way to Hollywood, her plane crashes "Down to Earth!" and the other passengers are found drained of blood.

Good Lord, how bad can this stuff get? I never knew Forry Ackerman lent his particular brand of humor to comic stories as well as Famous Monsters of Filmland! Royer's mediocre cheesecake art is at least better than the art in this issue's first two stories, but having Vampi audition for Jim Warren and Ackerman is the height of corn, especially when they suggest an Aurora model! Oh yes, another member of Vampi's family narrates the story: her blond twin sister, Draculina. Just shoot me.

Horror film director Nat Katzman's pictures are losing money, so he tells his hapless assistant, Penworthy, to find a new angle. Monster magazine editor Gorry Hackerman suggests building up a new "Queen of Horror!" and, at a disco, Penworthy discovers gorgeous Mildred Strudd, who also happens to be a good actress. After a quick name change to Adriana, the Queen of Horror makes a series of box office hits and Katzman invites her back to his apartment, hoping for some hanky panky. What he discovers is that his Queen of Horror turns into a werewolf when the moon is full, and he's her next meal!

"Queen of Horror!"
(Sure looks like Don Perlin)

Okay, I'll admit that good humor is hard to do, but this is not even close to good humor. The art by newcomer Dick Piscopo is mediocre at best, and do we really need to see caricatures of Ackerman in more than one story per issue? The whole thing is just forced and corny.

Greycollar House sits on a cliff at the edge of the sea, and the well next to the house holds not just water but "The Octopus," which came through an underground cavern. Carl asks his brother Gary for money to trace the source of the caverns but Gary replies that the money is his children's inheritance. Gary promises his son that he will always protect him and his sister. When Gary and Carl go scuba diving, Carl stabs Gary in the chest, killing him. That evening, Carl lunges at the children but falls into the well, where he is dragged down by the octopus. That night, the octopus emerges with the evil soul (and face!) of Carl and enters the house, looking to destroy the children. They are saved by a well-placed harpoon from the gun of their father, whose skeletal form arrives to protect them.

"The Octopus"

I'm obviously grading on a curve here to give this story three stars, but it looks good in comparison to the rest of what's in this issue. I've always been a Nick Cuti fan, due to his work on E-Man, so I'm happy to see a coherent story flow from his pen--well, at least somewhat coherent. I'm not sure why Uncle Carl's "evil soul" inhabits the octopus, but let's roll with it and also not question why Dad's flesh melted off his skeleton in less than a day. The art's not great, but everything is relative at this point. The story as a whole really reminds me of something from a Charlton comic.

An android named Lia begins to experience human emotions after reading a storybook to a little girl. She falls for a man named Mark and is thrown out by the woman who owns her. She then falls for an android named Kleet, and they destroy robots sent to apprehend them. Lia and Kleet are found guilty and sentenced to live in  the desert; they enter their new home only to be vaporized by an atomic blast that fuses them together forever.

"One, Two, Three"

Another pretty good Nick Cuti story with pleasing illustrations by Ernie Colon, who is (so far) the most accomplished artist in this issue. Once again, this story has a Charlton feel to it, and I enjoyed it, even if it was fairly predictable. At least there were no more relatives of Vampirella in sight and Forry Ackerman failed to make an appearance!

Newlyweds Richard and Jane Andersen are driving their VW Bug through Transylvania on their honeymoon when they suffer a blowout in a storm. Seeking shelter in a castle, they are welcomed by the Countess Sinovitz, who looks quite a bit like a vampire. Late that night, Richard is drawn to her and she bites them, turning him into a vampire as well. He runs back to his wife, bites her and transforms her, and kills the countess, determined to remain with his beloved bride.

"Rhapsody in Red!"

Billy Graham turns in some pretty neat art in "Rhapsody in Red!," a story where nothing unexpected happens but where it's told in an interesting and shadowy way, enough to make it the most enjoyable bit of horror in an issue that saved its best stories for the back of the book. I recall Graham from 1970s' Marvel and he does nice work here.--Jack

Peter--"Evily" is silly juvenilia which, in itself, is no big deal, but the story really has no flow to it; Parente seems to (stop me if you've heard this before) jump from incident to incident rather than tell one cohesive narrative. Minus the boobs, this would be something that would feel comfortable in an Archie title. I like Grandenetti's art--it's got that drippy look to it that I've enjoyed in some of his work--but Bill Hughes's cover is so much more effective. Fraccarico boil up some more awful art for "Montezuma's Monster." Hilarious that Q looks just like every other Fracc ogre. The only entertaining aspect of the script is when one of the dopes says "That's the 28th bird I've shot today!" As bad as Parente's meandering script for "Evily" is, I found Forrest J.'s "peek-a-boo I love boobies" fantasy to be much worse. At this point, I suspect no one knew what to do with the Vampirella character but was the idea to keep traveling down the parody route? Actually, it's not so much parodic as pathetic when you consider these were grown men whipping up this garbage.

"Rhapsody in Red!"

"Queen of Horror!" is just what you've come to expect from a Don Glut script: lots of cool old movie references and bad dialogue ("She couldn't act her way out of a wet issue of Variety!"). "The Octopus" is bad beyond belief, an amateurish joke in both script and art departments. If I didn't know better, I'd think William Barry was Ernie Colon, as their art seems similar. That climax is a goofball mish-mash seemingly sewn together because it sounded "cool." Nick Cuti's "One, Two, Three" is more proof that Warren should steer clear of the science fiction genre (a fact that, I'm afraid to say, will come back to haunt Jack and me when we get around to 1984/1994). "Rhapsody in Red!" is the best story this issue by default. It has a decent twist in its climax and Billy Graham's art is fabulous to gaze at. Aside from that single story and its gorgeous cover, Vampirella #2 is a disaster I'll be happy to forget about.

Steranko

Eerie 25 (January 1970)

"Isle of the Vrykolakas"★★
Story by Don Glut
Art by Ernie Colon

"Mistake!"★★
Story by Buddy Saunders
Art by Bill Black

"Hijack to Horror"★
Story by R. Michael Rosen
Art by Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico

"To Pay the Piper!"
(Reprinted from Eerie #2)

"Southern Exposure"★★
(Part One)
Story by Bill Parente
Art by Tom Sutton

"The Thing in the Cave"★★
Story by R. Michael Rosen
Art by Mike Royer

"House of Evil!"
(Reprinted from Eerie #4)

"Hex Marks the Spot"★★1/2
Story by R. Michael Rosen
Art by William Barry

"Isle of the Vrykolakas"

On the Greek "Isle of the Vrykolakas," Zorko the shepherd claims a vampire is on the loose and he thinks it's the recently-dead Basil. If his corpse shows no sign of decay, it's proof he's a vampire and he must be destroyed. When the crypt is opened, the corpse is rotten, so it can't be Basil, but--surprise!--it is Basil, who admits that he had leprosy and was a rotting mess before he passed away.

Ernie Colon's art is a mix of competent and goofy, almost like one of those Chilling Adventures in Sorcery comics the Archie line put out in the '70s. These vampire stories with twist endings get old fast, since they're all the same--some creature bends the rules a bit and tricks someone who thought he knew the score.

One of Bill Black's lesser
panels ("Mistake!")

In the Roaring Twenties, Chicago mob boss Joe Venanti heads back to Italy one step ahead of the law and fakes his own death to avoid extradition. The folks supposed to rescue him from his coffin fail to show up, so Joe manages to get himself free, but when he's wandering through the graveyard the villagers "Mistake!" him for a vampire and drive a stake through his heart.

Bill Black's art is really hit or miss in this story, some panels looking amateurish and others like competent fan art. The storytelling is not a model of clarity, making me wonder just how hard it can be to keep a cogent narrative going for all of six pages.

"Hijack to Horror"

After a plane takes off, the captain notices that it feels weighed down, so the co-pilot checks the cargo hold and finds several coffins. A man with a gun hijacks the plane and it flies to New Transylvania in South America, where the hungry population plans to feed on the human passengers and their descendants.

Peter's favorite art duo, credited here as "Tony Williamson" (the spelling in the Warren mags is so bad they even misspell their pseudonyms!), turn in another crummy piece of work with "Hijack to Horror," illustrating a story that is stupid from start to finish. The twists and turns make little sense and aren't worth trying to figure out, and the whole thing is just plain ugly to behold.

"Southern
Exposure"

As a child, Melinda witnessed her parents being burned alive. As she grew, she began to experience seizures (or "siezures"), one of which occurs at her 21st birthday party. Her elderly grandmother, who was thought to have been struck dumb in the same conflagration that killed Melinda's parents, tells the girl's beau, Elliott, that Melinda's mother was a vampire and her father was...

To be continued!! Why? We get five whole pages of Tom Sutton illustrating a woefully overwritten Bill Parente story and there's no room for the conclusion? Why not dump one of this issue's reprints? "Southern Exposure" may hold the record for most misspelled words in a single Warren story (don't get me started) and, as usual with Parente, the "plot" is a muddled mess, but at least Sutton can draw. That has to be worth something, right?

Timmy goes exploring in an oceanside cave where he finds strange mushrooms and emerges as a monster that kills his friend Jack. Timmy recalls nothing of the incident and grows up to be a fungologist, studying mushrooms and returning to visit his parents near the site of Jack's death. Timmy's gorgeous wife Beverly is attacked by a moth that transforms into a monster; Timmy blows a hole in the creature and takes Beverly to the cave where Jack died. He suddenly remembers everything, changes into a monster, and kills her.

"The Thing in the Cave"

This issue of Eerie is so dreadful that "The Thing in the Cave," which intermittently makes sense, seems almost competent. The most interesting thing about this story, for me at least, is seeing another example of Mike Royer's art without Jack Kirby's pencils underneath. It makes me realize just how much Royer there is in those DC Kirby/Royer stories.

Hendrick and Anna Stuyvesant move to a farm and Hendrick puts up hex signs for protection. Good thing, since a warlock named Peter Van Loon lives nearby and covets Hendrick's land. Anna insists that Hendrick remove those silly, superstitious signs and he does so, but when Peter sends a demon to attack the fiend must turn back and attack Peter, because Hendrick cleverly cut a giant crop circle hex sign to protect his farm!

"Hex Marks the Spot"

Bingo! A decent story with a decent twist. "Hex Marks the Spot" is the one and only tale in this godforsaken issue that gave me a tiny bit of satisfaction, since I did not guess the ending in advance. Barry's art here is on par with his work in "The Octopus" (see above), which I liked better than Peter did. In any case, thank goodness we survived another issue of Eerie in the Dark Age.--Jack

Peter-Vampires seem to be the flavor of the month but someone forgot to tell the bullpen writers to come up with something original re: the bloodsuckers. "Hijack to Horror" might possibly be the stupidest of the bunch but it's definitely got some stiff competition. "Southern Exposure" manages to be a bloated and boring Gothic in only five pages (despite some atmospheric graphics from Sutton); I can't wait to see how it ends next issue. "Isle of the Vrykolakas" manages to have more typos than thrills (some of these typos stray from just misspellings to missing words that actually change the meaning of a sentence). "Mistake" has some nice Bill Black art and a decent twist in its tail but the plot device of Joe in the coffin is ripped off from an old EC story or two. Turning my head away from the boring and safe art of Royer, Barry, Fraccarico, and Colon makes me wish I could jump into a time machine and fast forward to 1972 when the Spanish artists arrive. Just as an example, look at the panel reprinted above, from Mike Royer's work on "The Thing in the Cave." Tim should be terrified that Beverley is about to be consumed by his flying mushroom mutation but he looks more like he's asking her to dry while he washes.

Todd/Bodé

Vampirella 3 (January 1970)

"Wicked Is Who Wicked Does!" ★★
Story by Bill Parente
Art by Tom Sutton

"4 -- 3 -- 2 -- 1 -- Blast Off! To a Nightmare!"  ★1/2
Story by Al Hewetson
Art by Jack Sparling

"Eleven Footsteps to Lucy Fuhr"  ★
Story by Terri Abrahms & Nick Beal
Art by Ed Robbins

"I Wake Up... Screaming!" ★★
Story and Art by Billy Graham

"The Caliegia!" ★
Story by Nicola Cuti
Art by Dick Piscopo

"Didn't I See You on Television? ★
Story and Art by Billy Graham

"A Slimy Situation!" ★
Story by R. Michael Rosen
Art by Jack Sparling

"Wicked Is Who Wicked Does!"

Having regained her feminine form (after being transformed into a Chia Pet by Vampirella last issue), Evily sets out to find the "Tree of Her Ancestors" in order to gain her witch powers back... I think. Once in the forest, she and her constant companion, Conjure, are set upon by gypsies and taken to their leader, Shavga, who wants Evily to take him to the Tree and transform him into the Sovereign of Valgania... I think. Evily goes along with the plan until she comes across the Tree and shows Shavga who the real boss is... I think.

I really have no idea what this chapter is all about; it's meandering, confusing, and silly. I'd compare it to a L. Sprague DeCamp sword and sorcery tale, with lots of tongue-twisting names and quests for Golden Spatulas. My pal, Bill Parente, reaches deep down into his Purple Prose satchel and offers up such odiferous paragraphs as: Upon that tick of time, and an unexplainable silence that had returned without reason, a crackling of furious conflict fell between the slashed moment! Rage upon rage smashed against the hard hour... and Evily startled with the first touch of the gypsy's vision. My blind eye to the talents of Bill Parente notwithstanding, "Wicked Is Who Wicked Does!" is worth your perusal due to the unlimited talents of Tom Sutton, who takes the shortcomings of a Parente script and runs wild anyway. Sutton's strongest work (as I've said before) occurs when the artist is left to wander through nightmare landscapes populated by sorcerers and human toads. This guy was just getting warmed up!

"4--3--2--1..."

After years of toiling under the "Overmasters," a small group of hippies and spacemen are rocketed into outer space to find a new planet to colonize. Once they get there, however, they discover the world is populated by vicious creatures and savage barbarians. All their friends and companions slaughtered, two astronauts survive to discuss why this happened and they come to the conclusion that the monsters they've stumbled upon are the "Overmasters." So, was this happy band of (scantily-clad) beatniks sent to the planet known as Galact 6 for sport or for...? I have no idea, and if Al Hewetson knew, he wasn't telling. Sparling's work on "4 -- 3 -- 2 -- 1 -- Blast Off! to a Nightmare!" isn't bad (there's a rare full page panel that's effective) and he knows his way around a bikini but a few more details would have been nice. In 1972, Hewetson would become editor of Skywald magazines (Nightmare, Scream, Psycho) which was, at the time, Warren's chief competitor in black-and-white horror.

"Eleven Footsteps to Lucy Fuhr"

Seven men answer a cryptic ad in an underground sex magazine and head for a creepy old mansion on the top of a hill. Therein, they discover they're to play a part in a macabre game of life or death. A gorgeous dame, named Lucy Fuhr, in a sheer teddy stands at the top of a staircase and gives the men the chance to win her body or lose their lives. The first six are electrocuted when they fail Lucy's weird challenge but number seven, Ed Merritt, a dapper dude in a three-piece, manages to make it to the top of the hill. How did he do it? Well, the horns on his head are the first clue. I'm beginning to think there was no one resembling an editor in the Warren offices and "Eleven Footsteps to Lucy Fuhr" certainly adds to my suspicion. Like a Bill Parente script, "Eleven Footsteps" uses a pogo stick to jump from scene to scene. Who is Lucy Fuhr? Just a dominatrix with a kink for fried human flesh? Why would Satan waste his time participating in a silly game show (though it does give us a hint at what kind of literature he prefers)? This title, which presented more than a glimmer of hope, finds itself mired in a swamp of fetid typing paper.

"I Wake Up...Screaming!"

Budding actress Elena Carr is hit by a car and wakes up to discover she's been carted away by two spacemen who tell her she's actually been vacationing on Earth for several years and that she's destined to be queen of the planet they've traveled from. During the trip back to their planet, the truth unfolds: the two men are actually planning to use Elena and her untapped power to conquer the planet. More sci-fi gobbledygook that looks a lot better than it reads. The hook in "I Wake Up... Screaming!" is that the two "rescuers" can change their physical appearance at will and so transform into various movie stars throughout the story. We get Cosby and Culp, McCallum and Vaughn, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, all delineated nicely. We also get the gorgeous Elena in several "glamour shot" poses that look just that: posed. But with Billy Graham's talented pencils we also get his incoherent script which pinballs from one head-scratcher to the next.

"The Caliegia!"

Vjor, the Hunter, is in the forest hunting KreeGee, the Stag, one day when he bumps into Djii, "The Caliegia," a centaur with that annoying hair that always manages to cover up just enough of her exposed breasts.  Explaining to Vjor that he is trespassing on the sacred land she protects, Djii admits she has a problem which Vjor might be able to solve. There's a giant demon-bird flying into the forest and snatching away the deer. That behavior is frowned upon but the demon-bird's masters are the trolls and everyone knows they can be a bit anti-social. Vjor agrees to take on the dangerous mission of killing the demon-bird and (hopefully) winning the heart of the really cute half-horse, half-babe. So, what's more annoying? Bad science fiction or bad fantasy? In this case, the fantasy, since "I Wake Up..." was partially saved by its effective art. Here, we get some very fanboy-esque sword and sorcery doodles with trolls and flying horses and muscular barbarians and blondes with big boobs. When this genre is illustrated by Wally Wood or Ralph Reese, it's bearable, but when the art looks like something ported over from Creepy's Fan Page, it's all too much nonsense for my brain to handle.

"Didn't I See You on Television?"

Casting for the daily horror-opera "Cloudy Shadows" goes well until the applicants for the role of a pretty witch start dying off nightly. Turns out one of the casting agents is a... vampire! But the last laugh belongs to the last girl standing since she's a... witch! Oh boy. Obviously Warren handed Billy Graham a stack of old Creepys as a writing tool and told him to start "creating!" "Didn't I See You on Television?" is inane and the reveal is a groaner; the whole package is amateurish. Incredibly enough, "Didn't I See You..." isn't even the dopiest story this issue; that Medal of Dishonor has to go to the finale, "A Slimy Situation!," wherein the greedy Amy steals her handsome scientist Ted's de-evolution serum in order to make a fortune (she's going to inject little critters with the stuff, turn them into prehistoric monsters, and sell them to the circus) but runs into "A Slimy Situation!" and a whole lot of typos instead. Jack Sparling's art isn't bad but this script smells as bad as some of Ted's test subjects. No Vampirella (other than the intros and outros) this issue and, judging by the overall poor quality of the scripts, no obvious helmsman in sight. At least the covers continue to be eye-catching. This one's crafted by Todd and Bode, two more uniquely talented artists that Warren was lucky to latch onto, just in time to make up for the disappearing Frazetta.-Peter

Jack-When Warren started padding out their mags with reprints, I was annoyed. After reading every last story in Vampirella #3, I say bring back the reprints! This is terrible! Bill Parente seems utterly unable to tell a coherent story but at least Sutton's art is decent. The two stories illustrated by Jack Sparling are awful and he's never been my favorite horror comic artist, either here or at DC, where he was also working at the time. I thought "Lucy Fuhr" had at least a hint of story to it, though the art is atrocious. I kind of enjoyed Billy Graham's two stories, mainly due to the '60s TV references and his passably good art. I don't care for sword and sorcery but I have a soft spot for Nick Cuti, so "The Caliegia!" didn't bother me. All in all, an issue I would prefer not to have spent the last hour reading and writing about. The only good thing was the cover, which is pretty darn nice. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in an elevator with Vaughn Bode?

Next Week...
Will Blitzkrieg become a
welcome addition or more of the
same old stuff?