The Warren Report Issue 104: June 1979

 

 

The Critical Guide to

the Warren Illustrated Magazines

1964-1979

by Uncle Jack

& Cousin Peter

Terrance Lindall

Creepy #108

"Hole in the Head" ★1/2

Story by Frank Salvatini

Art by Alex Nino

"Camelot Crosstime" ★1/2

Story by Jean Michele Martin

Art by Val Mayerik

"Sultana" ★★

Story by Budd Lewis

Art by Pepe Moreno Casares

"Going by the Book" ★★★

Story by Kevin Duane

Art by Alfredo Alcala

"House of Magic" ★★

Story by Gerry Boudreau

Art by Pablo Marcos

"Hell's Playground" ★★1/2

Story by Pierce Askegren

Art by Leo Duranona

A crazed man, who believes Lovecraftian demons exist all around him, relates how he went from doctor to inmate at the Ellison State Hospital. "Hole in the Head" suffers from an incomprehensible, almost unreadable, script delivered in a cliched fashion. It doesn't help that Nino's art, once so fabulously unique and thrilling, has become almost equally incomprehensible. Panels melt into each other and muck up the reader's attempts at extracting some kind of plot. I'm not saying I can't handle non-linear storytelling, but Nino's visions of tentacled, winged, wormy things with two million eyes have become almost passé since he first came onto the scene. We've seen it all before. It doesn't help that Frank Salvatini (in his one and only Warren appearance) caps it all with the most overused "shock ending" in funny book history. 

Hank Clemens uses a time machine to travel back to Camelot and the time of King Arthur. Once there, Clemens uses "sorcery" to become a very powerful man, but two "Temporal Transtator" agents also travel back in order to stop Clemens from messing up history. What a mess "Camelot Crosstime" is, almost as though pages are missing. The splash shows us Clemens tied to a stake and about to be burned, but then a couple pages later he's on the loose, jousting with knights. The organization that sends the agents back in time is given no back story whatsoever. We jump from Camelot to a futuristic headquarters as if we're supposed to know what's going on. The climactic panel, where Clemens heads off to fight a mythic dragon he snickers at only to find a T. Rex waiting for him, is a keeper, as is Mayerik's art, but the script is muddled. And where's the vision of Hell?

Decent art is all that props up "Sultana," Budd Lewis's perplexing story of the sultan's daughter who watches her father's army destroyed in front of her eyes and later finds out the slayer was her own mother. There's a lot of confusing dialogue and scene switches in between those two events but, take my word for it, it's all better left ignored. The fact that these scripts become more and more muddled makes me wonder if Louise Jones was having lunch with other publishers about this time.

A sorcerer's apprentice accidentally unleashes a horde of demons on a small English countryside and it's up to the wizard and his right-hand man (a kinder demon) to put the rats back in their cage. Luckily, the demon has been studying the book of spells, since the riff-raff get the drop on the boss. But all's well when the proper incantation is read and the marauding demons are sent back to Hell.

A genuinely delightful fantasy, a description I don't use regarding too many Warren strips, "Going by the Book" is both witty and funny; even the pop references work (One minute the Green Bay Packers were tap-dancing on my face, the next moment I'm under 40 empty sausage skins), a skill not utilized by many of the typewriter-users in the Warren cafeteria. It's also got some of the best Alcala work for Warren in years. 

Bernardo is the greatest escape artist in the world but his final trick, being buried alive in a casket for 36 hours, goes horribly wrong and the magician suffocates. Rumor has it that Bernardo kept detailed notes about all his tricks, so Edward Montressor spends his entire life savings on Bernardo's abandoned mansion, in hopes of finding those notes. One night, while asleep, Montressor's bed is catapulted through the upstairs window, Edward and all. He survives the fall but comes across the corpse of a man in the snow outside his house. Thinking nothing of it, Montressor does what any right-thinking person would do: he drags the corpse to his basement and heaves it into a coal bin.

Just then, nails from a nearby workbench fly at Montressor, burying themselves in his leg. While he lies in agony on the floor, he sees the corpse rise from the coal bin. The robed dead man (think DC's Spectre) explains that he is a magician named DeVore and that Bernardo stole his magic tome, the Book of Ishmael. Now DeVore has come for the book. But Bernardo is not lying still either; his apparition appears before the men and the two magicians do battle. Montressor escapes just as his great investment comes tumbling down behind him. 

"House of Magic" is warmed-over Poe, a slow Gothic burn that never really delivers any kind of excitement. The story would have felt very welcome within the pages of late 1970s' House of Mystery. The novelty here, of course, is the fact that Pablo Marcos was forced to draw characters with their pants on, surely a first for the artist. 

Property manager Henry Wilson gets a dismayed call from one of his clients; seems a crevasse has opened on her property and a bunch of demons are playing poker in her backyard. Henry heads over on the double and tries to reason with the demons, but they're too happy to be out of that hot place and basking in the Cali sun to give him much notice. Even an exorcist can't get rid of these evil imps. Henry finds the perfect solution and peace returns to Serenity Acres. I can't deny that "Hell's Playground" made me smile a few times; the dialogue is witty and doesn't overstay its welcome. I also can't deny I'd like it a HELL of a lot better if it weren't drawn by 1978's Best Artist winner.-Peter

Jack-From the hideous cover to the final page, this issue was a chore to read. Nino's crazy, full pages without panels are terrible--he's not telling a story, he's just drawing weird stuff. Jean Michele Martin's "Camelot Crossfire" is worthless, as you note, but Mayerik's art is passable. Maybe the writer and artist understood what was happening in "Sultana," but I sure didn't. "Going By the Book" features still more weak attempts at humor, but Alcala's art is okay, I guess. I thought "House of Magic" would be a relief from all of the sword and sorcery nonsense, since it's ostensibly a horror tale, but the story is dumb and the Marcos art is meh. And finally, what better (worse?) way to end a dreadful issue than with a Duranona story? Allegedly the second story by Martin in this issue, "Hell's Playground" is really by Pierce Askegren, and he follows the rest of this issue's writers in his use of incongruous dialogue--here, demons play cards in a suburban back yard. This issue should be tossed in the recycling bin of history.

Jim Laurier

Eerie #101

"The Martians are Coming! The Martians are Coming!"★★1/2

Story by Bill DuBay

Art by Jim Starlin & Alfredo Alcala

"Gotterdammerung!" (II)★★

Story by Budd Lewis

Art by Isidro Mones

"The Horizon Seekers"★1/2

Story by Leo Duranona & Cary Bates

Art by Leo Duranona

"Three Flames of the Phoenix"★1/2

Story by Budd Lewis

Art by Pepe Moreno Casares

When Restin Dane hears a news report about the unearthing of a 19th century mechanical man, he hops into the time castle and heads into the past to investigate. In an 1894 Austrian village, he's attacked by robots and meets Heinrich Stutgardt, a former watchmaker who has spent 15 years building a still-unfinished robot. His former clerk, Alois Schicklgruber, has shanghaied a quartet of watchmakers to build cut-rate robots in a factory to aid in his quest for world domination. Restin completes Heinrich's robot and ends the menace.

Meanwhile, in 1979, Bishop Dane sees on the TV news that "The Martians Are Coming, The Martians Are Coming," and giant alien ships are destroying Washington, DC. He and Manners fly there in a jiffy and put up a big fight. It turns out that the Martians are actually homegrown "patriots," led by a general who just wanted to show Americans how wasteful the government can be.

Restin arrives home to find Bishop sitting in front of the TV, the Martian problem solved.

It certainly helps to have Starlin and Alcala drawing the Rook, though this story looks much more like Alfredo's work than Jim's. I was happy for the brief, final page appearance of Katie and Jan, two characters virtually forgotten of late, but the parallel structure DuBay always uses in these stories is too predictable. The speech by the General could have been lifted whole and transposed into the mouth of our former president on January 6th, but at the end of the story DuBay has the rebel general lauded as a truth-teller. What I thought was satire was simplistic politicking.

"Gotterdammerung!" continues as Juda's ship flees through space, chased by enemy ships. After plenty of flying and blasting, things aren't looking good for the home team until the ship finds itself being pulled to safety by a tractor beam. Jericho the robionic and Chaddo are beamed off of Juda's ship and onto the ship of General Nightshadow, old friend of Jericho and father to Juda. Nightshadow had been sending the "Soon" signals to Earth. Chaddo beams back to the ship where Juda remains and the two ships succeed in blowing up all of the bad guys before father and son reunite.

This Star Wars rip-off is fairly entertaining, even though it jumps around a bit and isn't always crystal clear as to what's going on. For example, in one panel Chaddo is on Nightshadow's ship, with him telling her she has to get back to Juda's ship, and in the next panel she's standing next to Juda on his ship; the reader has to assume she beamed back over between panels. The art by Mones is serviceable.

Jesse and Allison, "The Horizon Seekers," climb down the mountain into a valley, where they find precious water. They also find a band of African savages riding zebras and attacking with spears. A combination of fighting back and running away works pretty well, but the duo find their backs to a stockade wall when suddenly arrows fly from above and kill the savages.

Jack and Peter debate whether to end this blog in 1979 or 1983.

On the other side of the stockade, Jesse and Allison find a fort and castle straight out of the middle ages, manned by knights in armor and overseen by Merlin--not that Merlin. The old man explains that he's as befuddled as everyone else and set this place up when he stumbled on a museum of the Middle Ages. After a good night's sleep, Jesse and Allison awaken to find that the castle is under attack by a giant.

Bates and Duranona seem to be making this up as they go along, since it veers from one locale to the next without any real logic. The Black savages seem like they came over from a DuBay story and Duranona's art is as ugly as ever. This series is the definition of page filler.

A decade after Hunter's last adventure, he's back in "Three Flames of the Phoenix." Ragan, his gal pal, has been kidnapped and taken to the underworld, so Hunter must once again don his goofy helmet, join forces with the Exterminator Robot, and go after her. Find her he does, after much verbosity and dangerous travel; he discovers that her abductor is none other than Mandragora, the wizard who raised him and whom he thought had been killed. Mandy gets the upper hand and is about to finish Hunter off when Browne Loe appears and falls into a lava pit with Mandragora.

I was reminded of Monty Python and the Holy Grail as I read this ("What is your name? What is your quest?") but, alas, the Hunter story isn't funny or interesting at all. Moreno's art is oddly wooden and not as smooth as the work of Paul Neary, who wasn't that great of an artist to begin with. The story in this unwelcome return of our hero is a jumble of Lord of the Rings elements (I think), which is fitting, since the LOTR ads start on the page right after "the end." Eerie 101 is better than Creepy 108, but not by much.-Jack

Peter-I thought the Rook story had some interesting pieces to it (as Jack notes, Dube might actually have had a time machine of his own and teleported to 2016 for inspiration for General Wells), but it's just too darned long and drags way too much. It doesn't help that I can't stand the grandpa character--ironic, since I thought he was the best part of the early adventures--his hillbilly dialogue gets under my skin and pulls my nails out slowly. The art is kinda funky--I love Starlin's work and Alcala is (suhprize suhprize suhprize) my all-time favorite horror artist, but when the two talents combine there's a bit of a blandness to it. It ain't horrible, it just ain't memorable.

"Gotterdammerung!" continues to be a low-rent rip-off of a high-rent rip-off, so the less said the better. I find I have less and less to say about these Eerie serials; there's a scarcity of fresh ideas or at least a new angle on old themes. The space battles in "Gotter" look as though they've been pulled right from the silver screen. I have no problem admitting that I have no idea what the hell is going on in "The Horizon Seekers." One may say that points to a series that is compelling and not predictable but, no, it just means that Duranona is as clueless a scripter as he is a doodler.

Speaking of complicated and indecipherable, one only has to point to the first page of "Hunter II" to strengthen one's argument about the emptiness and needless complications of the Eerie serials (Eerials?). It's best to just wade into the installment without the prologue. Why? Because you save two or three minutes of precious time. Never mind that this is a new chapter of "Hunter II" after we've already been put through a "Hunter III!" I find Moreno's work to be confounding, alternately exciting and amateurish, and the script to be mind-numbing. In fact, the entire issue could be summed up as confounding and mind-numbing.

Next Week...
Starlin unveils his latest epic!