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Published by: Dark Horse Comics
Released on: Dec. 11, 2013
Writer: various
Artist: various
Cover: Jim Pavelec
Dark Horse delivers another installment of the horror anthology that is Eerie. Per usual, and keeping in the tradition of the wonderful black-and-white magazines from the 1960s and 70s, the cover makes you pick up the book and want to inhale its contents. Jim Pavelec sets the issue's “Bad Medicine†theme with his version of a Frankenstein-like monster waiting for life.
The main story, well the one that takes up the most pages, is “Shadowplay†written by Al Ewing and drawn by Kelley Jones. A man racked with remorse over a hit-and-run accident seeks the council of a psychiatrist who methods are…questionable. Alex Kot and Sloane Leong try to launch some “Ickstarter†projects (a couple of one-pagers). A filthy-rich man looks for eternal life with the help of a sorceress and of course gets more than he bargained for in “Invulnerableâ€. Artist Norm Breyfogle provides the pictures Dan Jolley's story. And lastly, legendary comic artist Billy Graham drops an “Alien Plague!†on the world, reprinted from Eerie #31, originally published in 1971.
All stories are told in glorious black-and-white, as they should be, with some looking better than others. Graham's artwork stands out simply because it is a) stunning, and b) it looks like it came from an old Eerie because it did. Kelley Jones' art looks great in this format, making use of shadows very effectively and putting out a nice looking piece of work that looks like it could have crawled out from an old issue of the Warren series. Breyfogle's style, however, doesn't fit with the styles of the other illustrators in the book, and as a result the story he illustrated was the least enjoyable. That's certainly not to knock his art, it just seems out of place in this particular issue of Eerie.
What a fun book. Those old Warren publications were a major staple in the diet of this reader's impressionable youth and reading Dark Horse's re-launch of the series makes for a happy time. It also makes me want more; a lot more.
