Eerie folded in 1983. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eerie So did Creepy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepy. And nothing seems to have emerged (or to have risen shambling from the soggy earth of the graveyard) to replace them. Why not? Why isn’t anybody doing magazine-format black-and-white horror comics any more?
From memory, without cite, there was some sort of tax advantage to writing them as such. Possibly not being under the Comics Code, as well, but I think the black and white and magazine format had some sort of odd financial advantage, accounting-wise.
Yes, there was a financial advantage: they were cheaper to produce than color.
As to why they’ve died, the answer is obvious: they weren’t making money, even with cheap production costs. Most likely, that type of horror has become passe, and you can’t show the blood and gore so necessary today in black and white.
Why do I remember Creepy and Eerie et al in color? They weren’t in color? Were any of the horror comics in color? My imagination colored them?
Are there any new horror comics? Grave Tales is the only one I’ve seen.
Some independent ones are: Trailer park of terror, Western tales of Terror, Sword of Dracula (although I haven’t read sword)
The market changed. Horror books didn’t sell at grocery stores, so they died. Now the comics market is so small that it has become profitable to make them again. You just have to look really hard.
One other note is that a lot of the elements of horror got picked up by the big publishers. Swamp Thing, Ghost Rider, a lot of DCs Vertigo line and Marvels Epic all had some horror stuff. More big 2 involvement means less shelf space for the little guys.
There was another advantage that I remember : they weren’t subjected to the Code by being B & W, so they could show all the gore and all the nudity they wanted.
Sorry for the post. You are partially right. As an experiment in the early 70s, they had in the middle section a story or two in colour in each issue. Usually they were in psychedelic colours (especially those by Esteban Maroto).
I was a regular reader of Creepy and Eerie, as well as House of Mystery and House of Secrets. The color inserts in the first two continued from the mid-70s to their demise. Rich Corben’s work appeared in a lot of those inserts.
Nothing in the Comics Code refers to whether a publication is in black and white or in color. Adherence to the Code was voluntary by publishers, but many distributors would not distribute non-Code comics. Creepy and Eerie were distributed as magazines, not comic books, by the same distributor(s) who handled the other Warren Publishing magazines.
Does Heavy Metal now run exclusively in colour? I can recall black-and-white pages as recently as a few years ago when I thumbed through an issue at a used bookstore and was reminded yet again how “tits ‘n’ entrails” can be eye-grabbing but repetitive.
Might well be. It’s been 40 years or more since I’ve read horror comics, and I’ve forgotten what the titles were. The stories continue to give me nightmares though.
I’ll never forget one that had a couple of guys looking for treasure in a cursed tomb. Of course one of them kills the other as soon as they find the treasure. He starts to carry the treasure out, hears some weird noises behind him, and the last panel is nothing but big teeth and a CRUNCH! Awesome.
Well, isn’t that why we read these things? (insert smiley face)
I read the two DC House titles, and later picked up on Creepy and Eerie, but I don’t remember much of them at all. On the other hand, there were some B&W horror mags I bought during a summer trip to that upstate New York bastion of liberal whitebread Protestant philosophy, Chatauqua, that freaked the bejabbers out of me.
I was about nine or ten, and they were for sale at the local newsstand/bookshop…I think they may have been produced in Canada (?). Lots of dripping, severed heads were involved.
There was one story I can STILL visualize 30 years later, even though it upset me so much I couldn’t finish reading it…a fat, repulsive gourmet with a Mommy complex marries a waitress at his favorite restaurant, proves to be an abusive husband, and the wife slaughters his mother and serves her to him for dinner…
I loved those books as well, and thought Rich Corbin’s work was kick-ass, especially the color.
But in this whole thread not one former teenage boy from the '70’s remembers Vampirilla?
Heavy Metal has always been in color, but they also run some stories that were only drawn in black and white. So I’m not sure if that counts as “exclusively”. (To their credit, they do run b & w stories - no “color only” policy).
I’ve been with HM from the start, and it has definitely had it’s ups and downs over the years. And lately it seems to be all down. I was SO thrilled when they started their “only complete stories” policy - no 300 2 page episodes of Tex Arcana. But now they run “complete chapters” of long stories - many pages dedicated to a story that picks up where some previous chapter left off, and doesn’t really end itself. So though they dedicate more pages to “chapters”, they’ve kind of slid back to their old ways. (sorry for the rant, but I couldn’t help myself).