The Warren Thread

OK, here's a thread might be of interest to a number of us:
let's talk Warren Magazines.

I know a number of you have picked up the Creepy Archives that are being reprinted by Dark Horse?I think they look pretty good. I got the two volumes out now -any thoughts? Should they continue, and for how long?

I've got most of the Creepys and Eerie magazines that I want and still have pretty much all the Vampi's, plus most of the misc mags. I'd be interested in a Famous Monsters archive but doubt if they could ever get the rights for that.

I think you're right about FM. And I think you'd be disappointed on how often features were reprinted in that magazine over the years.
But, you're not going to bother picking up the Creepy archives? There's something to be said for having them bound in the bookcase.
I confess I did not have all the early issues. I have 1, 2, and 3, and then I don't pick up again till the teens. And those early issues have become muy expensive, so this is the cheapest way for me to get the stuff.

I think I have most if not all of the early issues of both Creepy and Eerie - back when they dismantled the Warren warehouse stock I picked up most of those super cheap and already had many. I got fairly selective as the numbers went up and would only buy what looked interesting on the stands (at the time I was fairly young so I had to be selective due to limited funds). I couldn't tell you what I have exactly - I made an effort to buy any issues that had my favorite artists in them at some point and haven't really focused on any of the in-between issues. During a move I lost one whole magazine box that had the first 100 or so issues of FM - I still think my brother ended up with them (my mags and comics were stored at his house for 3 years when I lived abroad). I just haven't had the will to rebuild that run - it was so much work the first time (before online resources they were really expensive and the condition was always so questionable - not that that aspect has improved much).

I've bought and sold my collections so many times over the years I frankly am not sure what I have as far as comics and magazines go - I keep finding stuff in boxes I thought were gone. For the most part the mags were the only consistent thing I owned - I've still got my original run of Savage Tales and Savage Sword of Conan (multiple early issues of both as over the years I've upgraded issues that were beat up from reading them over-and-over as a kid).

Your post touches on the essential reason why I bought the volumes. I have a lot of the Warren stuff, but to lug the boxes out of the closet to look at one story is a chore now. Better to just take a book off the shelf. Or if they had put them on a DVD-Rom, that would have been acceptable too.
Maybe that could be a way to go with FM. Maybe the rights issues would be different.

Here's an interesting blog where the guy gives a play by play, of issues of Warren mags he's currently looking at:

http://averycreepyblog.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html

There's also this very good Warren cover site that has images from Creepy, Eerie and Vampi:

http://www.pixeltube.com/wmc/

Originally in Japanese you can still look through it without loading the language into your browser.

I've only picked up the first Creepy reprint so far, but I like what I've seen. And it's enough to make me want to buy the subsequent volumes as well.

I don't have any of the individual magazine issues, so it's nice to come across work I haven't seen before, especially by Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel.

One of the interesting things I've found looking over the archives, is how much of the heavy lifting in these early issues is done by Angelo Torres and Gray Morrow. They seem to do more than half of any issue themselves.
And the photos of any of these guys in the spotlight features are surprising -they all look so young!! Alex Toth looks young!!

Now you've gone and done it - guess I'll start picking these up. I've noticed in the past the same thing - even when you look at the cover art of the main three (Creepy, Eerie and Vampi) and you'll see Sutton and Morrow on a lot of the covers (then there's plenty of Kenneth Smith and Ken Kelly with an occasional Bode/Todd cover as the numbers climb). I remember thinking that Kelly really sucked back in the day and I didn't even know who he was at the time. Those early Marvel mags and Warren covers were pretty bad - luckily he got into the groove. Speaking of which - look at the early covers that Jusko did for Savage Sword if you went to see bad - those really stunk - but like others he finally found his sweet spot and has made up for it in recent years.

I'm probably a bit behind the curve, but that was my first real expsoure to Gray Morrow's work, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of it.

I wish Dark Horse had done the SSOC reprints in the same fashion (oversized, good paper).

This is kind of interesting. I have a stash of SSoCs, I thought they were fine, I think Buscema is great, but I don't remember them being so central a frame of reference when the magazine was published. I don't remember anybody at the time thinking it was more noteworthy, than the Barry Smith run on the comic. Now, people talk about it all the time. The Onion even had an Obama satire piece featuring bits about SSoC. When did this mag become atomic?
Mind you, I'm not saying anything bad about it at all, it's just that within the past year or so, it seems everyone is talking about it all the time.

The book was such a staple - my first 10 issues or so were so worn and spine rolled that they were some of the first mags I ever upgraded. I've only got 60 or so issues in the 200's - I stopped collecting around issue 70 or so then ran across a whole magazine box of latter issues at a show - $25 and they came home with me. That's when I started noticing the covers more. I think the Buscema issues are great, the Smith issues phenomenal and the occasional Dezuniga, Nino et al also created some iconic imagery, even if things got rather repetitive. These days I like to peruse the covers and see how many share the same structure (the analytical part of me I guess) - I think I still prefer the "rawness" of Savage Tales - the Vallejo and Adams covers especially (one of the later Kazar covers by Adams has long been one of my favs).

Well I did the obvious thing and headed over to the Dark Horse site, and in fact, they already have Creepy Archives 3&4, and Eerie 1 slated for pre-order. I don't see a Vampirella Archive though.

The rights to Vampirella now belong to Harris Publications, so there will probably never be a Dark Horse Vampirella archive. Harris did a trade paperback series called "Vampirella: Crimson Chronicles" starting in 2004, which reprinted material from the early issues of Warren's Vampirella. The 2004 series is now hard to find, and I've seen only a few for sale online at eye-popping prices. More recently, Harris came out with a book called "Crimson Chronicles Maximum" (or something like that). The "Maximum" volume only reprints Warren's Vampirella saga, not the stand-alone stories that appeared in the original magazine.