The Critical Guide to
the Warren Illustrated Magazines
1964-1983
by Uncle Jack
& Cousin Peter
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| Ken Kelly |
Eerie #38 (February 1972)
"Stake in the Game"★★
Story by Doug Moench
Art by Jose Gual
"The Carrier of the Serpent"★★
Story by T. Casey Brennan
Art by Jerry Grandenetti
"A Stranger in Hell"★★1/2
Story by T. Casey Brennan
Art by Esteban Maroto
"The Night the Snow Spilled Blood!"★★
Story by Don McGregor
Art by Tom Sutton
Photographer John Edwards has the rather odd assignment of doing a study in pictures of the blood bank manned by Drs. Sarno and Hauser. Rumors of missing blood turn out to be due to the fact that Hauser is a lazy vampire who likes to chug from a bottle of plasma when Sarno heads to the cafeteria for his nocturnal coffee break. After photographing his model/girlfriend Pam the next day, Edwards makes a startling discovery: Dr. Hauser does not show up in the photo he develops! The photographer puts two and two together and deduces that the doctor is a vampire; he then comes up with a nutty plan to pour some silver nitrate into a bottle of plasma and kill the bloodsucker by tricking him into drinking the fatal and precious metal.
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Jose Gual must not have read the script carefully,
because that hair is nowhere near that bosom. |
Back at the blood bank, Sarno observes Edwards pouring the silver nitrate into the bottle and realizes what's going on so, being a nasty vampire, he hotfoots it over to Pam's apartment and puts the bite on the beautiful blonde, who is surprised to realize that she enjoys the experience. Edwards is soon awakened by a telephone call telling him that Pam is at the hospital undergoing a blood transfusion. He races to her side but--wouldn't you know it?--they happened to infuse the bottle of plasma mixed with silver nitrate, killing the patient.
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| The final battle recalls a similar scene in Horror of Dracula. |
Edwards goes to Hauser's home, hoping to stake the vampire, but finds him gone, so the photographer decides to wait at home, armed with a stake, garlic, a cross, etc. Sarno eventually shows up and a battle is waged, with Edwards snatching victory from the jaws of defeat by means of a hastily-made stake through the heart. Later, when the authorities don't believe his story, Edwards visits Sarno at the blood bank to tell him about Hauser, only to learn that Sarno is a vampire, too!
"Stake in the Game" is one of the longest stories we've read so far in the Warren mags. At 21 pages, it rivals some of Vampirella's recent epic adventures. Unfortunately, Doug Moench's script, while reasonably entertaining and a fairly breezy read, drags every last vampire cliche out into the daylight and doesn't do very much new with any of them. Jose Gual's artwork matches Moench's storytelling: it's good enough to avoid mockery but not good enough to be remarkable. The story has the odd distinction of being split in two parts; the first ten pages lead off the issue and the last eleven pages finish it. I was wavering between two and two and a half stars until the epilogue, which caused a half star to be deducted due to the completely unnecessary revelation that the other doctor was also a vampire.
Clad only in a loincloth, a musclebound gent by the name of Thogar sets off along the road called Agarra-Zin to visit his beloved in the land of Ra-Noon. After Thogar is beaten and left for dead, he is nearly eaten by a huge serpent. When the snake sees that Thogar is alive, he proposes a deal: if Thogar becomes "The Carrier of the Serpent" all the way to Ra-Noon, the serpent will scare off any more bad guys. Thogar accepts and soon discovers the seeming wisdom of the snake's plan. However, Thogar begins to be troubled by some of the acts the snake encourages him to carry out: he kills a gentle beast for food and robs and kills a kindly old man.
Thogar sees his own reflection in a pool of water and notices a change in his appearance. As he and the serpent approach Ra-Noon, all whom they meet flee at the sight of them. Thogar parts company with the snake and enters the home of his beloved, but she is repelled by the sight of him and he attacks her. Rejoining the snake, Thogar learns that "he who carries a serpent becomes a serpent."
T. Casey Brennan's morality play did not look promising at first, what with the hyphenated names and the preachy tone. I was also not expecting to like Grandenetti's art, especially based on the murky early pages. But, against my better judgment, I somewhat enjoyed this story, which tells of the dangers of compromising one's principles for expediency. As with the Moench story that precedes it, there's nothing particularly spectacular or surprising, but it is a decent read and Grandenetti's unusual page designs can be eye-catching.
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| "A Stranger in Hell" |
A man throws himself in front of a speeding train but does not die. A mysterious, beautiful, scantily-clad woman appears and offers to give him death if he accompanies her. Claiming she is the messenger of death, she points him to the sewers but, though he descends among the hungry rats, he still fails to expire. On they proceed until he meets Death himself, whose son Thanatos attacks the man with a hatchet, yet he lives on. Death explains to the man that he is "A Stranger in Hell," doomed to live on endlessly for the amusement of Death.
I really have no idea what the heck T. Casey Brennan was getting at here, but Esteban Maroto sure can draw. In my little logbook, I rated this story one star for the writing and four for the art. Maroto's depictions of Death and his minions are stunning. Too bad the prose gets in the way.
It's Christmas Eve 1976 and the carolers are on the city streets, but Anthony Crane's mission to kill Wendell Bourque is not dimmed by the spirit of the season. Crane goes to Bourque's apartment and murders the man, who was his wife's lover, but the act gives him no peace; as soon as Crane walks outside, he begins to find himself covered in a familiar red liquid. On "The Night the Snow Spilled Blood!" it is Wendell Crane who suffers the torment of the damned.
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| "The Night the Snow Spilled Blood!" |
Blood everywhere! Like a modern-day "Tell-Tale Heart," Crane is tormented by the sight of blood wherever he goes. Meanwhile, his wife Claire discovers the corpse of her lover and calls the cops, who respond to the scene. They bring Claire home and, when Wendell arrives, he opens fire on the police and they return a hail of bullets. A chase ensues and Crane is captured, only to sit in the back of the police car and hear a report on the radio that the attempt to manufacture snow for the holiday went horribly wrong and resulted in a bloody snowfall.
Well, this was a preachy issue of
Eerie, wasn't it? Don McGregor follows Doug Moench and T. Casey Brennan with a tale that has bits and pieces of Eisner and Poe, all mixed up with a heaping helping of late-Vietnam War angst and cynicism. Tom Sutton has been absent too often in the pages of Warren lately, so it's great to see him back again and, at twelve-page length, there's plenty of fine, black-heavy art to enjoy. I wasn't that impressed by the tale until the ending, which took me by surprise. Bloody snow falling from the heavens explains why Crane saw everything covered in the red stuff, but it hardly explains why the carolers resemble ghouls!
-Jack
Peter-Doug Moench abandons politics and racism for vampires and... Doug probably should have stuck to the other stuff. My first thought after finishing "Stake in the Game" is who thought it was a good idea to hand over 21 pages to a bad vampire script? Comparisons to
The Night Stalker would seem obvious but, to be fair, the movie wasn't aired until just after this issue hit the stands, so it's just coincidence. "The Carrier of the Serpent" is another weak sword and sorcery tale; never mind it's written by my least favorite Warren scribe. Brennan tries to throw in a deep proverb at the end ("He who carries a serpent becomes a serpent"--
very deep), but this is just fantasy trash indistinguishable from the stuff Gardner Fox keeps pumping out. "Serpent" is not among Jerry Grandenetti's best work, but there are flashes of Good Jerry here and there (like when he uses the snake to border the action).
I didn't
hate "A Stranger in Hell"; in fact, I spotted glimpses of good writing buried under the usual pomposity of TCB's sermonizing. The moral, that Death is the greatest gift to man, actually makes some sense once you sit down, after rolling a few fat ones, and get lit. Easily, Brennan's most successful script yet but, yep, that's a sideways compliment. Then there's Maroto, who floors me every time he puts pencil to paper. Yes, a lot of Esteban's work has that posed look to it (the whole "gorgeous babe reclining with her ass in the air while looking over her shoulder" thing that Warren excelled at in the '70s), but it's so visually stunning. "How does he come up with this stuff?" I says to myself. It's a perfect warm-up for what Maroto is about to do next issue with a certain warrior named Dax.
Overlong and over-written, "The Night the Snow Spilled Blood!" still wins best of issue thanks entirely to the skills of Tom Sutton (who's actually only warming up to what I consider the apex next issue). The story is a meandering, bloated mess with McGregor's usual eco-friendly dialogue and convoluted events. The discussion between the two detectives in the car is equal parts pretentious and ludicrous, with the cops transforming the Charlie Brown Christmas Special into Freud ("
It's the atmosphere. The small, vulnerable voice in the huge amphitheatre.") in one frame and then stumbling over the word "symbolic" in the next. But Sutton's stark, at times almost noir, visual style elevates Crane's madness from silly to disturbing.
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| Vincente Segrelles |
Creepy #44 (March 1972)
"With Silver Bells, Cockle Shells And..." ★★★
Story by F. Paul Wilson
Art by Irv Docktor
"Something to Remember Me By!!" ★★★1/2
Story and Art by Tom Sutton
"A Certain Innocence" ★
Story by Steve Skeates
Art by Nebot
"The Last Days of Hans Bruder" ★
Story by T. Casey Brennan
Art by Frank Bolle
"Like a Phone Booth, Long and Narrow" ★★★★
Story by Jan Strnad
Art by Jose Bea
"The Ultimate High!" ★★★
Story by Steve Skeates
Art by Martin Salvador
"Dorian Gray: 2001" ★1/2
Story by Al Hewetson
Art by Bill Barry
"Sleep" ★★
Story by Kevin Pagan
Art by Mike Ploog
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| "With Silver Bells, Cockle Shells And..." |
Creepy #44 sees a raise in the rent by fifteen cents but we get eight more pages for that extra coin. Even better, we seem to have received better content.
Creepy's sister pubs will follow suit (in size, if not in quality) soon.
Ex-con Bill Carey is looking for the next big score, but the heat is on in the form of cop Kevin Mathis, who's itching to put Carey back in stir. Seems Carey got a very light sentence on a murder rap and that didn't sit well with the detective. Carey stumbles into a bar and meets Professor Storch, an old man who can't hold his liquor and who catches Carey's attention with his boasts of grandeur.
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| "With Silver Bells, Cockle Shells And" |
Carey invites the old man to his house, but when the Prof. won't show him the green, the bad guy belts him with a bottle, accidentally killing him. Carey turns out the old man's pockets but all he finds is a packet of seeds. He buries Storch in the back yard with his seeds and hits the sack. The next morning, Detective Mathis shows up at the door, explaining that Storch is missing and was last seen in the bar with Carey. Seems the Professor was a botanist working on "a new seed that copies the genetic code from the wastes of other plants." Plant the seed with an old corn husk and up pops corn. Carey insists that he never met Storch and the cop can look around as much as he likes. Meanwhile, in the garden, Storch-head plants are popping up everywhere.
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| "Something to Remember Me By!!" |
Definitely a case of style over substance, "With Silver Bells, Cockle Shells And..." doesn't have much of a story and too much of it is contrived (how quickly that cop shows up at Carey's door the next morning!), but Irv Doktor's art (delivered, according to the letters page, in "black and white oils") is stark and almost unsettling. That final panel, in different hands (let's say, Jack Sparling, for instance), would elicit guffaws rather than gooseflesh. This was F. Paul Wilson's second and final Warren contribution and, to me, it has the feel of a good episode of
Night Gallery.
Paul Hardwick, eldest of the cursed Hardwick clan, is absolutely certain his wife Helene means to dispatch him with black magic. Several of his ancestors died strange deaths (burned alive, chopped into tiny pieces, eaten away in minutes by plague, all in front of a live audience), and he's paranoid Helene has consulted some of his occult tomes for a recipe. Helene has taken a lover and she's well aware of Paul's fears, so she goads him, telling him she's taken a lock of hair and placed it in his mother's antique locket for safe keeping.
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| "Something to Remember Me By!!" |
One night, while traipsing through the family cemetery, Paul stumbles across a gravestone, etched with his name and that day's date. Two ghosts surround him, beckoning him to join them, and he keels over, dead of a heart attack. Helene and her beau, Clint, doff their costumes, bury Paul in his new home, and celebrate their new wealth. While drinking it up, Clint peruses the black magic book Helene took her instructions from and notes that the lock of hair must be buried with the dead or "the victim will return to recover it." A loud bang and shadow at the door turn out to be a tree branch in the wind but it successfully unnerves Helene and she talks Clint into going with her to bury the locket with Paul.
They open the coffin to find the rotting corpse reaching out to them and don't notice when lightning strikes Paul's tombstone. The marker crushes both of them and all three die happily ever after. There are inconsistencies and silliness to be sure (it's noted that Paul's doomed ancestors had "pieces" such as fingernails or a scrap of skin missing from their dead bodies even though they were burned, chopped, and rotten--tough to find evidence of that even with the high level of CSI they had in the 18th century!) but this is a Tom Sutton love fest for me. There were times when it seemed like Sutton was involved in the scripts he was given to illustrate and... times when he wasn't. "Something to Remember Me By!!" is clearly in the "involved" category. All the supporting props (the gnarled trees, the graveyard, the house which seems to have been built on the side of a crooked hill, etc.) are atmospheric and chilling; Paul's desiccated corpse (which somehow rotted down to the bone in a matter of hours!), with its upthrust hand, is a Sutton masterpiece. I'm not sure why Warren didn't just reproduce the panel rather than pay Segrelles to trace it.
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| "A Certain Innocence" |
A rock band, The Screaming Turkeys, "hides" a "secret message" on their album cover (visible only under a black light) that triggers a transformation in sexually active teenagers, turning them into giant, tusked beasts who seek out and kill other sexually active teenagers. The "secret message" becomes the new rage. Steve Skeates, doubtlessly searching for a good idea one day at the Warren offices, looks over at T. Casey Brennan's desk and sees his 1971 Warren Bowling Trophy for whatever gawdawful story he wrote that year and figures, "Hey, I can write a story just as muddled!," and then does so.
There's so much wrong with "A Certain Innocence." First, the script seems... a bit sketchy and meandering. Skeates wants to satirize the music industry with his phony band names (The Automatic Snails, The Dog-Eared Pigeons, etc.) and his vast knowledge of music trivia (such as the "Paul is Dead" fad, here credited by Skeates to the Beatles themselves), but comes off more like a seventy-year-old man who knows nothing about the music biz other than what Paul Harvey had to say that morning. The climax makes no sense whatsoever, but then neither do the preceding incidents. Nebot again proves he's at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the new wave of Spaniards arriving on the shores of Warren Publishing, mixing elements of innocuous GGA and Frallarico-inspired tusk-monsters and concocting a visual wasteland that perfectly meshes with the lame script.
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| "The Last Days of Hans Bruder" |
Dr. Hans Bruder refuses, on a moral basis, to test his anti-cancer vaccine on convicts. He doesn't believe humans should be used as guinea pigs. In a rage, he injects himself with the serum and crashes through a window, disappearing. The police are notified, the radio issues very detailed reports (laughably so, in fact), but only fellow research scientist (and busty babe) Karen locates Hans lying in a park nearby. Karen calls an ambulance, but Hans feels the need to unload his story on her.
It seems that, back in World War II, Hans Bruder was a German doctor stationed at Buchenwald concentration camp, and he witnessed atrocities committed by fellow medics. Trying hard to stay the course, Hans managed to help his patients rather than perform sadistic experiments. One night, Hans was ordered by guards to give a young girl a complete physical before she becomes the commandant's "play thing."
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| "The Last Days of Hans Bruder" |
Hans enters the room to discover the girl is none other than his sweetheart, Sonya, who joined the underground and was caught by the Ratzis. She only joined the freedom fighters "to build a better world, a world with peace and hope" for her and Hans. Knowing that his love will be used by the commandant and his men and then tortured, Hans stabs Sonya to death and is thrown in with the other prisoners to rot. When the Allies liberate Buchenwald, Hans is rescued with the others and reboots his life. Story done, Hans dies peacefully and Karen muses that Hans and Sonya "dreamed of a world of peace. Where they could find the love that was denied them. Perhaps he's found that world at last."
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| "The Last Days of Hans Bruder" |
Ethereal worlds and abstract gods behind him, T. Casey Brennan turns his golden Smith-Corona toward inner peace and self-forgiveness in a world so full of evil. Unlike "On the Wings of a Bird" and "Escape From Nowhere World," "The Last Days of Hans Bruder" (I want to type Hans
Gruber!) at least kept my eyes open for its entire soap-opera-filled, eight-page length. Make no mistake, this one is monumentally bad, but at least I didn't roll my eyes (well, at least not more than three or four times) or stick my swizzle stick down my throat. "Hans Bruder" is entertaining in the same way
Othello performed by fourth-graders would be; it's amazing just how
cheesy this thing is. From the start, I'm a bit confused. We open with Hans mid-tantrum, swearing that, by all that is holy, experimenting on cons goes against all he stands for, but the context here is that he's been doing it for a while. Why the sudden upswing in moral values? When he injects himself, he makes a very dramatic exit, but then he goes and hangs out at the park. Why the theatrics?
Then there's the generic Sunday-strip art of Frank Bolle, with very little dynamic or thought to choreography. The action just lies there dead in each panel. All of Bolle's faces look exactly the same; he's Warren's answer to Jack Kamen! That final page is the pits; I'd even take the Frallarico twins over this boring, milquetoast crap. Even in the WTF? world of Warren Publishing, I don't see T. Casey Brennan winning any awards for this.
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| "Like a Phone Booth, Long and Narrow" |
Harry's wife Delores was a worrier, but she had reason to be. Catalepsy runs in the family and she's not feeling well. Delores makes Harry promise he'll have the mortician install a landline into her coffin and, if she needs anything, she'll call Harry. Inevitably, Delores passes and Harry follows her wishes to a T. Problem is, Harry's an alcoholic. After tying one more on down at Morgan's, the newly widowed drunkard passes out on his bed and can't quite make it to the phone when it rings.
A stunner, "Like a Phone Booth, Long and Narrow" is, as I recall, the first time I became aware of the power of Jose Bea. It was his first appearance outside
Vampirella (a title I did not purchase at the time, since horror stories about girls were yeccchhhy) and, even at the age of ten, I thought this art was
scary. You could say there might have been more
elegant or
clean pencillers around the Warren building (Wood, Crandall, and Gonzalez come to mind), but scary? Nope. Tom Sutton and Pat Boyette had unnerving styles, but they showed you all the horrors; Bea hinted at what
might be terrifying in all those long, dark hallways and still creeped you out. For a designer to have that effect on a pre-teen, without showing the boogeyman, is quite an achievement.
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| "Like a Phone Booth, Long and Narrow" |
Then you've got the script which, admittedly, borrows elements from Poe, by Jan Strnad (in his Warren debut). Sentimental, not maudlin; I feel as though Harry really does miss his wife. There's no hidden agenda, no life insurance policy, no secret lover. Just a couple of losers shambling through life. Harry's dialogues with Morgan the bartender and Delores sound real rather than forced or pretentious and the finale, despite the spoiler from Uncle Creepy, is unnervingly foggy. Is it really Delores at the end of the line? Strnad won't be around here much (he drops a few more scripts in the next couple months and then pops back in for a brief stay with Richard Corben in the Dark Ages II era), but he definitely leaves his mark.
John, an entitled young American, hears through well-placed sources that a group of priests living in a Tibetan monastery have perfected a drug that grants the user "The Ultimate High!" When he confronts their leader, the priest tells him that the drug is free but comes with a high price--the user will "waste his whole life upon it." Undeterred by the warning, John swallows the liquid and, indeed, receives the best trip he's ever taken. Coming down, he finds himself transformed into an old man, having literally wasted his life away on the drug. Steve Skeates finally comes up with a winner, a cautionary drug tale that actually avoids the preachy messages and concentrates on delivering an effective twist ending. John's only crime is arrogance, believing it's his right to have a good time, no matter what the cost. We're all guilty of that at one time or another.
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| "The Ultimate High!" |
"The Ultimate High!" sees the debut of artist Martin Salvador, another of the Spaniards who sailed in and saved Jim Warren's ass in the early 1970s. Salvador's work can be flat and lack style and imagination at times but, for the most part, he gets his message across just fine; he sits comfortably between the ultimate high of a Bea and the dreaded low of a Nebot.
The final two stories this issue return us to mediocrity. "Dorian Gray: 2001" is a "futuristic" (funny just how
far the writers of 1972 thought we'd get in just thirty years!) bit of nonsense about a vampire who's discovered the perfect subterfuge, living the life of a playboy zillionaire while draining the city dry. The script, by Al Hewteson, resembles one of those patchwork everything-but-the-kitchen-sink stories Skywald is famous for. Of course, it's no coincidence that Al Hewetson was already, at this time, Skywald's number one scribe. "Dorian Gray: 2001" was Bill Barry's sole contribution to Warren; no loss there, as Barry's style is bland and his characters look cookie-cutter, with odd angles to their heads and bodies. If I didn't see a credit on this, I'd have been sure it was Ernie Colon. "Sleep" is equally dismal, save Mike Ploog's drippy and atmospheric art. Two thieves discover the perfect tool for robbing rich mansions. When lighting fire to a finger on a dismembered hand, a spell puts the occupants into a deep sleep. It works really well until they get to a house owned by... (
surprise!) vampires! The script, the first in a couple years by Kevin Pagan, is a mish-mash of "The Body Snatchers" and Lovecraft, with a climax everyone saw coming. With half the stories in
Creepy #44 receiving three stars or higher, this is the best Warren publication in at least half a decade!
-Peter
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| "Like a Phone Booth..." |
Jack-I'm glad you liked it, Peter, but I thought it was nothing special, not as good as the issue of
Eerie we read this time out and not even close to a typical issue of
Vampirella. I liked Sutton's work in "Something to Remember Me By!!" and I really enjoyed Ploog's art in "Sleep," but the rest of the stories seemed mediocre at best. I think Irv Docktor's art on "With Silver Bells" is barely competent and the story is a tired twist on
Little Shop of Horrors. I don't mind Frank Bolle's art, so I did not dislike "Hans Bruder" but, again, it was nothing special. "Like a Phone Booth" seemed derivative, pulling heavily from "The Premature Burial" and perhaps from "Long Distance Call" on
The Twilight Zone, and I was disappointed in Bea's work and think we've seen better from him elsewhere.
I don't get your enthusiasm for "The Ultimate High," which seems to me to be just another trippy, early '70s misfire. Tied for worst are "A Certain Innocence," which continues the string of weak stories by Skeates, and "Dorian Gray: 2001," which at least has a decent last page, however random it seems in the context of the rest of the tale. Sutton and Ploog plus a heck of a cover make the issue passable but no more. By the way, there's a story by David Michelinie on the Creepy Fan Page.
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Next Week!
The return of everyone's
favorite lunatic! |
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| From Creepy #44 |
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| From Eerie #38 |
