Craig Yoe’s Yoe Books imprint at IDW has been a repository of some delightful cartooning, like Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein and Christmas Comics and the like. But he’s gone gory on us with The Worst of Eerie Publications. It’s a follow up to 2010’s The Weird World of Eerie Publications, also written by Mike HOwlett and published by Feral House. These are pre-code horror stories by Dick Ayers, Chic Stone, Domingo Mandrafina, the Iger Shop, and many other unsung masters. The PR suggests “Absolutely not to be missed for those who enjoy the grisly and the lurid.” and that sounds about right.
Eerie Publications was a 70s alternative to the better known Warren and presented reprints of pre-Code horror as well as new terror tales. Not for the squeamish or those blessed with a surfeit of good taste.
Eerie Publications (like “Tales of Voodoo’ and “Weird Vampire Tales”) were eagerly passed around when I was in sixth grade. In the late ’60s/early ’70s, they were the only comics where you could see graphic gore: beheadings, hands chopped off by meat cleavers, etc. Warren was downright tame by comparison.
http://www.comics.org/publisher/1813/
I remember seeing those titles on the second hand racks back in the day, and passing them by. I couldn’t bring myself to buy them then, so there’s no nostalgia here for me on these ones :)
I have a few of these. They were quite an experience.
So impressed with all those IDW-Craig Yoe comics and books. Great fun!
They were definitely forbidden fruit, the kind of comics you had to hide from parents and teachers. They were so extreme (by the standards of the time), we weren’t even sure they were legal!
They’d probably draw yawns from kids who have grown up on Friday the 13th, Saw, Hostel and their sequels.
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