The High Price of Nostalgia: Creepy #7 Review

While on one level it’s admirable that Dark Horse Comics has resurrected Creepy Magazine as a comic book, it’s playing to a sense of nostalgia that simply can’t exist. With its mascot Uncle Creepy and short horror vignettes, it clearly calls back to the old EC Comics horror books, which went under thanks to a conservative panic about them in the 1950s. Considering the median age of comics readers is roughly Generation X, we have no frame of reference for comics like this. The people who do have that reference are my dad’s age, who won’t ever find this book, because they’re too busy having a conservative panic about comics.

So the audience for a book like Creepy is questionable at best, but that’s okay, because the book’s not all that good anyway. It’s something different, and some of the art is fairly impressive, which might be enough reasons to pick it up, but there’s only one story of the five contained in this book that feels like the old EC ironic twist stories… and that’s because it’s a reprint from the original Creepy in 1962. Which honestly is the best reason to consider paying five clams for this book, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The book opens with a story by Joe R. Lonsdale about a kid who hatefully creates a vengeful mud monster that Should Not Be… which easily describes every Saturday morning in my bathroom since 1990. The story is just light and simplistic, containing a child delivering dialogue like – honestly – “If I was bigger and stronger, they’d pay… if I was big, I’d show them.” Really? If an actual nine-year-old had written that dialogue he’d backspace it out while muttering, “No nine-year-old actually talks like that.” It was particularly disappointing because I generally like Joe Lansdale’s stuff; I’ve got his entire Hap and Leonard series of novels on my Nook Color, and his stuff on Jonah Hex back in the 90s still holds up for me. This story felt like Joe sneezed with the pen still on the page after writing “By Joe R. Lansdale” and sent it in. If you’re buying this book because of Lansdale’s name, skip it and look for The Dunwich Horror instead.

Then there’s a story about the Shroud of Satan, which makes complete and total sense when you remember the old tales about Satan – originally the immortal archangel Lucifer – being somehow killed and buried that one time. You know, that time Satan died? I think it was an Arkansas somewhere. Yeah. And then there’s a tale about a vampire hunter who kills a fly vampire with a trained mosquito. I am not making this up. At least nothing in the story sparkles… not the vampires, and God knows not the story itself.

By far and away, the best parts of this book are the final two stories. The first, The Ultimate High, written by Martin Salvador with art by Steve Skeates. The story itself is only okay – a dude leaves home to try and spend his entire life high, which sounds less like horror and more like collage. It’s the art that really sings here – realistic, with fine-line ink work, tailor-made to be printed in black and white, just like the original Creepy Magazine… and that’s because it was originally printed in the original Creepy #44 back in 1972. It’s not a great sign when one of the high points of a comic is a 40-year-old reprint of what amounts to a “drugs are bad, mmkay?” story.

The gem here is the final story: Deep Ruby, written by Archie Goodwin with art by (Dun dun dunnnn!) Steve Ditko. Before you get excited, this isn’t new Ditko art – this is a reprint from Creepy #25 back in 1964, and as I said before, is the closest in feeling to the old, twist-ending EC Comics stories. A cautionary tale about the nature of greed, it gives Ditko a chance to do what he does best: weird environments, strange shadowy demons, and non-Euclidean landscapes. This story was geniunely a delightful and unexpected find in what was an impulse purchase, and was a damn sight cheaper than the $46.50 that getting your hands on the original would cost you.

Look, on one hand I applaud Dark Horse being willing to put out a horror anthology comic in 2012. It’s something different on the racks, and it gives new comics creators a place where they might get published where they normally wouldn’t be – while the Shroud of Satan story is ridiculous on it’s face, the art by Patric Reynolds is detailed, finely-inked and atmospheric, with good uses of shadow, which is key in black and white horror art.

But on the other hand, the key to a good anthology is good fucking stories (I know, it’s a bold stance to take, but that’s just how I roll). And except for the reprints, these just aren’t. If you have a taste for old 1970s EC-style horror stories, or are a Steve Ditko junkie, it’s worth the five bucks. Otherwise, if you want that real old EC Comics feeling, you can save the fiver and put it toward the real thing.