page art from Creepy #s 26, 55 & 87 (1968, 1973, 1977)
Showing posts with label Creepy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creepy. Show all posts
07 August 2018
Gray In Grey
I need to make my monthly supply run and pick up the new hard drive, so minimal words this morning. While i'm off being too busy, y'all enjoy a trio of short black & white tales illustrated by Gray Morrow from the old days of Creepy magazine -
03 February 2018
Jim Jams (not to be confused with Jim Jam Jr.)
Before we get back to Joe Guy, let us pause to look at our author, Jim Stenstrum.
Jim is an artist as well as a writer, and that's where you'd find much of his work these days. While you might not know his writing from his old comics, odds are you've seen some of his artwork. His character designs have graced such shows as the animated Superman from the 90s to the Scooby-Doo videos of recent years. His artwork appears in many other toons, ranging from Johnny Quest to Fish Police to Freakazoid! to Tom & Jerry.
I know him best from his old stories he did for Warren, and sometimes they stuck with me in the oddest ways. Back in the days before the WWWeb, hunting and collecting music was a much more difficult and time consuming endeavor. I maintained a constant watch list of things for which i was hunting, and the printed copy had a header reading Hard John's Nuclear Hit Parade. That title came from Jim Stenstrum.
Back in the 70s when my first son was gestating, Jim had a short series of stories in Eerie running under that title, starring Hard John Apple, illustrated by Richard Corben. This was right about the time that Den started running in Heavy Metal magazine, bringing a bit more attention to the work he was doing at Warren.
A snippet-
...some time later...
Where Joe Guy played a light-hearted but dark parody of the comics genre, Hard John gave Stenstrum license to turn that twisted lens on modern society of the 60s & 70s. As usual when Jim is spotted driving, i was standing by the road with my thumb out, eager to go along for the ride. Even the short jaunts were usually interesting, like his work with Neal Adams to produce Thrillkill - a story about a public mass shooter written way back in 1975.
In addition to his work in animation, Jim also has a new series of novels featuring Rex Havoc (just two so far - Asskickers Of The Fantastic and Horror Island.)
I've yet to read either, but Rex Havoc & The Asskickers Of The Fantastic was the title of a story he did for Warren's 1984 back in 1978, just to be confusing. I only discovered the existence of these books while writing this piece, but i quite enjoyed the original 10 page comic.
If you go hunting through old issues of Eerie, Creepy and 1984 looking for his work, you should know that Jim also wrote for them under the name of Alabaster Redzone.
Anyway - Yes, we'll come back to Hard John after we wrap up on Joe Guy. In the meantime, here's another taste of Jim Stenstrum's slightly skewed sensibilities as he and John Severin bring us the Super-Abnormal Phenomena Survival Kit -
For younger readers left wondering about that last line, Irwin Allen (who brought us shows like Time Tunnel, Lost In Space and Land Of The Giants) had recently sparked the Disaster Movie genre and was making a new name for himself while altering the Hollywood landscape, influencing movies to this day. The Towering Inferno and Earthquake were huge box office back when this was written.
Jim is an artist as well as a writer, and that's where you'd find much of his work these days. While you might not know his writing from his old comics, odds are you've seen some of his artwork. His character designs have graced such shows as the animated Superman from the 90s to the Scooby-Doo videos of recent years. His artwork appears in many other toons, ranging from Johnny Quest to Fish Police to Freakazoid! to Tom & Jerry.
I know him best from his old stories he did for Warren, and sometimes they stuck with me in the oddest ways. Back in the days before the WWWeb, hunting and collecting music was a much more difficult and time consuming endeavor. I maintained a constant watch list of things for which i was hunting, and the printed copy had a header reading Hard John's Nuclear Hit Parade. That title came from Jim Stenstrum.
Back in the 70s when my first son was gestating, Jim had a short series of stories in Eerie running under that title, starring Hard John Apple, illustrated by Richard Corben. This was right about the time that Den started running in Heavy Metal magazine, bringing a bit more attention to the work he was doing at Warren.
A snippet-
...some time later...
Where Joe Guy played a light-hearted but dark parody of the comics genre, Hard John gave Stenstrum license to turn that twisted lens on modern society of the 60s & 70s. As usual when Jim is spotted driving, i was standing by the road with my thumb out, eager to go along for the ride. Even the short jaunts were usually interesting, like his work with Neal Adams to produce Thrillkill - a story about a public mass shooter written way back in 1975.
In addition to his work in animation, Jim also has a new series of novels featuring Rex Havoc (just two so far - Asskickers Of The Fantastic and Horror Island.)
I've yet to read either, but Rex Havoc & The Asskickers Of The Fantastic was the title of a story he did for Warren's 1984 back in 1978, just to be confusing. I only discovered the existence of these books while writing this piece, but i quite enjoyed the original 10 page comic.
If you go hunting through old issues of Eerie, Creepy and 1984 looking for his work, you should know that Jim also wrote for them under the name of Alabaster Redzone.
Anyway - Yes, we'll come back to Hard John after we wrap up on Joe Guy. In the meantime, here's another taste of Jim Stenstrum's slightly skewed sensibilities as he and John Severin bring us the Super-Abnormal Phenomena Survival Kit -
For younger readers left wondering about that last line, Irwin Allen (who brought us shows like Time Tunnel, Lost In Space and Land Of The Giants) had recently sparked the Disaster Movie genre and was making a new name for himself while altering the Hollywood landscape, influencing movies to this day. The Towering Inferno and Earthquake were huge box office back when this was written.
pages from Creepy #79 and Eerie #83 (1976, 1977)
14 November 2017
Famous Creepy Eerie FreakOut
We're running out of year pretty soon, did you notice that?
Any 50 years ago in 1967 sort of things must be tended to in the next several weeks. There was a lot happening in '67 - in fact, it was A Happening in '67. But i'm not in an overly wordy frame of mind, so let's take in something visual - I trust not too abysmal. And let's intersect with another subject i've had on the back burner for quite a while - Warren magazines.
We'll later be talking about what goes on inside the magazines, but today, let's just take a look at Warren's '67 covers. As they developed over the years, their magazines often sported some of the coolest and most interesting visuals on the magazine rack.
Their Big 3 comic magazines were Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, with a host of other titles supporting them over the years. But back in 1967, Vampirella was still a stirring in Forry's... imagination. So, instead of Vampirella, here's his other magazine - Famous Monsters Of Filmland. Not a comic magazine, but just around the genre corner:
There's a reminder - Christmas Is Coming! That sounds somehow very different in a post Game Of Thrones world...
Meanwhile, back at Warrens premiere comic magazines... Creepy is the Big Brother of the two titles, being a whole year older. So we'll honor the elderly and let them go first-
Frank Frazetta was a frequently featured cover artist on Warren's publications. Even when re-purposing a pre-existing illustration that many had likely seen before, it was still a good draw on the newsstand. A great number of other fantasy and horror artists' paintings were used on the cover, Warren seeming to splurge on the colour covers to offset the mostly black & white inner contents.
Worked for me, though these were before my time buying the titles. I was still living in Asia at this point, and Warren was having enough troubles with distribution in the USA.
On the cover's of Eerie's mere five issues for '67 we had Frazetta once again leading off-
I particularly like that Gray Morrow cover on #10 above. So simple & clean compared to the typical offerings of the time, and a striking design that makes good use of the white space to draw the eye to the image.
Though perhaps not up to later levels at the peak of their covers, not a bad collection for the year of 1967.
Of course, this is The Voice Of ODD!, so we'd be remiss were we not to peek at the covers of Warren's oddest publication for '67 - Freak Out U.S.A.
Yes, the second issue is actually cover dated for 1968, but it was published in '67 and it was just too damn odd to leave out. I mean - how many of you looked at that and Austin drawled "Yeah, Baby!"?
You can expect to at least see a bit of The Monkees from the first issue (16 pages they got!), as might be expected from some of my previous indications of Monkee mania.
But the question looms in my mind - which covers make you want to look inside the magazine?
Any 50 years ago in 1967 sort of things must be tended to in the next several weeks. There was a lot happening in '67 - in fact, it was A Happening in '67. But i'm not in an overly wordy frame of mind, so let's take in something visual - I trust not too abysmal. And let's intersect with another subject i've had on the back burner for quite a while - Warren magazines.
We'll later be talking about what goes on inside the magazines, but today, let's just take a look at Warren's '67 covers. As they developed over the years, their magazines often sported some of the coolest and most interesting visuals on the magazine rack.
Their Big 3 comic magazines were Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, with a host of other titles supporting them over the years. But back in 1967, Vampirella was still a stirring in Forry's... imagination. So, instead of Vampirella, here's his other magazine - Famous Monsters Of Filmland. Not a comic magazine, but just around the genre corner:
There's a reminder - Christmas Is Coming! That sounds somehow very different in a post Game Of Thrones world...
Meanwhile, back at Warrens premiere comic magazines... Creepy is the Big Brother of the two titles, being a whole year older. So we'll honor the elderly and let them go first-
Frank Frazetta was a frequently featured cover artist on Warren's publications. Even when re-purposing a pre-existing illustration that many had likely seen before, it was still a good draw on the newsstand. A great number of other fantasy and horror artists' paintings were used on the cover, Warren seeming to splurge on the colour covers to offset the mostly black & white inner contents.
Worked for me, though these were before my time buying the titles. I was still living in Asia at this point, and Warren was having enough troubles with distribution in the USA.
On the cover's of Eerie's mere five issues for '67 we had Frazetta once again leading off-
I particularly like that Gray Morrow cover on #10 above. So simple & clean compared to the typical offerings of the time, and a striking design that makes good use of the white space to draw the eye to the image.
Though perhaps not up to later levels at the peak of their covers, not a bad collection for the year of 1967.
Of course, this is The Voice Of ODD!, so we'd be remiss were we not to peek at the covers of Warren's oddest publication for '67 - Freak Out U.S.A.
Yes, the second issue is actually cover dated for 1968, but it was published in '67 and it was just too damn odd to leave out. I mean - how many of you looked at that and Austin drawled "Yeah, Baby!"?
You can expect to at least see a bit of The Monkees from the first issue (16 pages they got!), as might be expected from some of my previous indications of Monkee mania.
But the question looms in my mind - which covers make you want to look inside the magazine?
all covers from Warren publications (1967)
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