EERIE PUBLICATIONS: The Crappy Horror Comics That Changed My Life!

Rarely does the junk you read when you're eight years old translate well over twenty-five years later. In the case of Eerie Publications, however, I gotta make an exception. I picked up a couple issues of this stuff when I was eight and my life has never been the same. I had a blast terrorizing my little sister with the gory pictures from stories like "Give Me Back My Brain!" That is, until my mom got fed up and threw the mags away... I never forgot them, or the effect they had on me (and my sister). It took me almost twenty years to find more copies, and by then, they'd magically jumped from $1 to $10 an issue "collector's items."

What makes Eerie Publications horror comics so great? They had few if any "name" artists or writers like James Warren had with CREEPY. Warren was the pioneer of the B&W horror comic magazine format. The only thing Eerie had going for them, besides ripping off their competitor's format, was an endless supply of over-the-top gore and cheesy plots. It seemed like on every page you could find pictures... glorious, gory-ous pictures of people being hit in the head with a meatcleavers, having their eyeballs shot out of their sockets, or barfing all over themselves while being bitten on the neck by dog-headed spiders... Eerie published lowest common denominator crap, plain and simple, but you just couldn't help but admire them for doing it so unashamedly.

The story behind Eerie Publications is convoluted behind false names and a failure to file for copyrights. For years, next to nothing was known about them. From what I can gather from my own research and that of others, owners Myron Fass and Stanley Harris published a bunch of crappy horror comics in the 1950s to compete with EC's infamous TALES FROM THE CRYPT line-up. When the Comics Code outlawed horror comics, Fass and Harris sat on their stockpile of crap until 1966, the year FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND publisher James Warren gave the Code the finger by publishing CREEPY. CREEPY broke all the rules: It got around the stupid, puritanical Code by switching to B&W and a magazine, rather than comic book, size. Thus it was no longer a "comic book" but an "illustrated magazine" and no longer subject to the Code's restrictions. It wasn't just the format change, but its combination with smarter, more mature horror comics created by top name talent that made CREEPY such a phenomenon. Myron Fass and Stanley Harris were quick to capitalize, forming Eerie Publications, Inc. They announced they were releasing a competing magazine called EERIE... Unfortunately, James Warren had the same idea and rushed out his version of EERIE before Fass and Harris could release theirs! In a now famous bit of "F-U" marketing, Warren kept his crew up 24 hours putting together a quickie "prototype" (or "ashcan") edition. Then, issue in hand, he raced to a NYC newsstand distributors meeting where Fass and Harris were present. Before barging in, he paid off the lobby newsstand owner to stock copies of it. Warren triumphantly entered the meeting and announced that his version of EERIE was already on sale at newsstands, using the schmo in the lobby as "proof." One can only imagine the looks on the faces of Fass and Harris!

NOTE: This is why it is nearly impossible to find a copy of Warren's EERIE #1; the "official" magazine began with issue #2.

Left with no choice, Fass and Harris retitled their magazine WEIRD and released it later in 1966. It contained reprints of their 1950s comics. It did well enough that more titles were added: HORROR TALES, TALES FROM THE TOMB, TALES OF VOODOO, TERROR TALES, and WITCHES' TALES. They also released sci-fi titles called STRANGE GALAXIES and WEIRD WORLDS. In the early 1970s, they had exhausted their 1950s material, and their friendship. An alleged fistfight in the office left Harris out and Fass in. Rather than pay for both new art and stories, Fass merely retitled the existing stories and hired new artists to redraw them. This is where the new wave of extreme gore and scantily-clad female victims really came to the forefront. However clever, the move wasn't enough to save the line-up and Eerie Publications folded in 1975 (the same time many of their competitors, like Skywald's Horror-Mood line [see below] were hurting or went out of business thanks to Marvel Comics trying to muscle them off the newsstands with their own craptacular line of "illustrated magazines" ---the only one of which that was worth a damn being THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN.

But not even mighty Marvel could keep an entrepreneur like Myron Fass down. He returned to publishing horror comics under the name Modern Day Periodicals, Inc., bringing back WEIRD, TERROR TALES and HORROR TALES. He quicky dropped the last two (perhaps to coincide with the release of the DRACULA remake with Frank Langella), retitling them TERRORS OF DRACULA and WEIRD VAMPIRE TALES. There would be no new material this time and the line continued until 1983 when Warren's CREEPY, EERIE, FAMOUS MONSTERS and VAMPIRELLA also folded. It was the end of an era, both in comics and my childhood. Since then, I've collected hundreds of issues of the B&W horror comic mags. While CREEPY remains my favorite, it's the brain-dead schlock horror of Eerie Publications that will always hold a special place in my heart.

The last anyone heard of Myron Fass was in the 1980s. He'd changed his name and moved to Florida to open up a gun shop. Ex-partner (and magazine mogul in his own right) Stanley Harris ended up buying out James Warren's famous titles and had success bringing VAMPIRELLA back to comic shops in the 1990s.

[Warning: The following section contains paraphrased conversations, letters and facts drawn from memory as best I can recall 10 years later. Nothing said in relation to the copyright status of the material in question is being offered as legal advice.]

MY BID TO SEIZE THE EERIE PUBLISHING EMPIRE
OR, "THE WEIRD THAT NEVER WAS"

In contemplation of republishing WEIRD and the rest (I was publishing my horror movie magazine GUILTY PLEASURES at the time), I searched the US Copyright Office in 1996 for any record of Eerie Publications or Modern Day Periodicals. I found none pertaining to the horror comics (and none at all for Eerie!). There was a UFO magazine listed for Modern Day and that was about it. IIRC, the rights had been assigned to Stanley Harris! I contacted Harris Comics and got some flunky who denied Harris had the rights to the infamous horror comics; he denied the company even knew anything about them...

So I said, "Fine! If Harris doesn't have the rights, I'll just republish this stuff then." After some checking, he said "No, wait! We do have them in our warehouse and how perceptive of you to track Mr. Harris down." I said, "Look: I'll give you $10,000 for all rights throughout the universe in perpetuity to everything, but it better include the original cover paintings, artwork, etc., with clear proof that Harris owns the rights." The flunky came back and said he'd checked and the paintings and the original art were gone but they still had the camera-ready masters I could send to the printer. He also told me "$10,000 means nothing to Mr. Harris; that won't even buy him a new jaguar! But he might be willing to sell you one title for $25,000." WTF? Considering that all the titles were interchangeable and used the same material over and over, that didn't seem like such a good deal. It would kill my exclusivity if some other bastard had the same idea as me and bought one of the other titles...

I said I'd give Stanley $10,000 for one title, WEIRD, lock, stock and barrel. This was the longest-running title between Eerie and Modern Day (running from 1966-1983) and arguably, the most famous; it stood to reason that it would have the widest possible range of material. Hell, probably every story they'd ever had was in there! My offer was conditional on whether Harris could cough up clear proof of ownership. As I recall, that was the last I heard from Harris Comics. I sent them a certified letter saying I was going to reprint the comics anyway since they couldn't materialize the proper paperwork; I never heard back. Unfortunately, I never did get around to doing the full scale reprint line I'd envisioned. Looking back on it a decade later, I can't believe I even considered buying the rights to that junk! The $25,000 I saved on the Harris deal went into funding my next movie, MISLED. Come to think of it, considering the way that film turned out, maybe I should have used the money to republish those damned comics instead...

Most recently, some video company has started marketing crappy foreign horror movie double features on DVD using Eerie Publications covers for their sleeve art. I wish I'd thought of that!

You can learn more about Eerie Publications, including extensive cover art galleries and story reprints, from the following websites:

BAD MAGS
DATAJUNKIE
EMPIRE OF THE CLAW
ROCKFIEND

To learn more about the history of Warren Publishing, I recommend reading The Warren Companion.

If Skywald Publishing's horror mags (NIGHTMARE, PSYCHO, SCREAM) are more your cup of tea, then check out Skywald: The Complete Illustrated History of the Horror-Mood.

Finally, there's Tales of Terror: The EC Companion for the history of EC Comics, without whom there would be no B&W "illustrated horror magazines."