Picking up the pieces
Picking up the pieces |
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Page 34 of 38  Cover. Howard the Duck (Marvel Comics, 1976). Art: probably John Costanza. Ostensibly a funny animal comic about 'Marvel's wildest waterfowl', but also a political satire: Howard stood for President against Jimmy Carter in 1976. Horror went through a more robust revival. As we have seen, the fashion for the genre had restarted after the Code in the 1960s with the key Warren titles (Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella) and had been continued into the early 1970s by companies like Skywald (Psycho, Nightmare, etc). Now Marvel took its cue, and launched a range of magazines aimed at different age groups. The first wave, in 1973, were pretty juvenile, and included Tales of the Zombie, Dracula Lives!, Monsters Unleashed and Vampire Tales, which featured the enjoyably derivative 'Morbius the Vampire' and 'Satana - Queen of Evil'. Later, titles experimented with more adult references, such as the story in Haunt of Horror (1974) about a unit in Vietnam that is cannibalized by one of its own members ('Nam breeds a different kind of man than what you'd find back home. A person has to make adjustments ... he has to learn to accept, and then like the horrors he has to live with ...'). Warren itself returned to the horror fray with two titles: Comix International (1974), which, as the title suggested, was closer in sensibility to the underground horror titles, like Skull, than any of the Marvel line, and which featured some tongue-in-cheek, but still disturbing, stories by Richard Corben and Reed Crandall (an ex-EC contributor); and Dracula (1979), a 120-page solo outing by top Spanish creator Esteban Maroto. Smaller publishers also tried to compete. They included Seaboard with Weird Tales of the Macabre and Devilina (both 1975), and Modern Day Periodicals with Weird Vampire Tales (1981). None, however, were successful.  Cover, Comix International (Warren, 1976), a magazine anthology with a horror feel. Art: Richard Corben. |