The Weird World of Eerie Publications

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Credit: Eerie Publications

In its pursuit of forgotten B-grade products of American popular culture, Feral House has released The Weird World of Eerie Publications. In a large and lavishly illustrated volume, Mike Howlett has assembled the history of Eerie Publications, manufacturers of cheap, black and white horror comics magazines that picked up business mostly by sitting alongside the better product on the comics racks of the early and mid-1960s. More well-known and widely admired such mags included those by publisher Jim Warren, who did a more upscale horror magazine with the title Eerie, not to be confused with the flagship title of this publisher, Myron Fass.

In fairness, the introduction by Stephen Bissette does warn the reader to stop reading The Weird World of Eerie collection from the get-go. He warns that the reader’s expectation should not be of the genuinely horrifying or the beautifully drawn but of the cheap and the tawdry. This understanding, the intro writer notes, came to him when he first bought Fass’ magazines at the age of ten.

Author Howlett comments that Eerie Publications were never anyone’s first choice. “It wasn’t until adulthood,” he argues with quotation marks around the word, “that I began to appreciate the Eerie Pubs books for what they were. Cheap knock off? You bet, but the audacity of the mags themselves, the astounding colors and garish action of the covers, the guerilla publishing style and the forever under-appreciated art started to speak to me. An obsession was born.” “Compulsion” might have been a better term, since these qualities characterize the comics business as a whole and most of the notoriously obsessed collectors focus on the industry’s true masterpieces. Eerie Publications were not “cheaper”, i.e., less expensive, than their better drawn counterparts, just more poorly done.

That Fass’ productions had any commercial life at all more likely had to do with how inexpensive comics and the horror comics magazines were at the time. Kids having bought every other 12 to 35 cent magazine on the stand often had change left over and a still unsated appetite for vicarious graphic thrills. As with fast food, TV and movies, the business model of the industry encouraged more, more, more—to a point now where comics are bought for much more money in specialized stores. Try floating a Fass-type production in today’s comics marketplace. Such things now find their niche only in gorgeously produced volumes such as this, for comics historian specialists and the cognoscenti of kitsch.

Tremendous contextualization goes on here, through chapters that deal with the history of 1950s EC and EC-type horror comics; very odd early Fass publishing successes, like the MAD rip Lunatickle and its sexier successor, Ogle; “picto”, “foto” and text magazines like True Problems, and brief histories of the Warren line and second tier BW publishers such as Skywald, Seaboard and even the contribution of corporate comics giant Marvel to larger, black and white horror magazines.

The man more responsible than Myron Fass for this line, however, was a superstar employee for Marvel in the late 1930s and early 40s when the company was called Timely, Carl Burgos. Burgos created the Human Torch, a signature character like Superman for the competing DC comics that provided a foundation for the entire Timely line. Jack Kirby ignited the renaissance of interest in comics in the 60s by reviving the character. But, as would happen with Kirby later, Burgos had no control over the Human Torch and others were given art chores on the character as its popularity grew again. Burgos unsuccessfully sued Marvel and left comics in bitterness, but Fass hired him back into the field. At Eerie, Burgos would repackage material, clip-and-paste cannibalize some his own old artwork (at times in stories involving cannibals), sometimes adding pencil and brush work, and of course often doing original work as well. Could the overall low production value at Eerie include some element of revenge Burgos was having against the comics business? (The conspiracy of business elements versus talent in that industry recently resulted in Disney paying six billion dollars for Marvel’s superhero characters, including the Human Torch, little of which went to the men who created them.)

The Weird World of eerie Publications offers an up close and magnified look at what might have been truly forgotten, and forgettable to many, without this treatment. It’s an essential component of any thorough pop culture library.