For American horror fans, the mid ‘60s probably weren't the best of times. E.C. horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear were no longer published (thanks to the madness of the 1954 Congressional subcommittee hearings on the effects of comic books on children), and England's Hammer Studios had already released most of its best films, and had begun churning out endless Dracula and Frankenstein sequels. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and D.C. Comics' House of Mystery and House of Secrets were still several years away; and the heyday of Stephen King and Dario Argento would have to wait for the 70s. That's why Warren Publications' Creepy must have appeared like manna from heaven to a generation of quality-horror-deprived teens.

In the tradition of E.C.'s late lamented comics, Creepy showcased the work of comic-art legends like Bernie Wrightson, Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, and Alex Toth, when all were operating at the height of their creative powers. In fact, Creepy most likely appeared as not so much a comic title, but a monthly greatest hits collection of brand-new work. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Creepy stories have remained out of print since their original publication. Until now. Under the editorship of Dark Horse Comics' Shawna Gore, Creepy is back, along with its sister publication Eerie, in two ongoing series of hardcover reprint archive editions. And Dark Horse isn't stopping there – with its upcoming all-new four-issue re-launch of Creepy, the company plans to continue Warren's legacy of turning both the field's finest up-and-coming and veteran creators loose on meaty little tales designed to elicit shivers and chuckles (courtesy of the book's "host" Uncle Creepy) in equal measure. Earlier this month, at Wondercon 2009 in San Francisco, we had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Gore about Creepy and Eerie's past, present and future. 

Note: When you've finished reading this interview, be sure to check out our conversation with new Creepy contributor/character designer Eric Powell, a.k.a the creator of The Goon!

What can you say about the new Creepy?

We haven't made a formal announcement about this stuff, but we have talked about it here and there with fans. The first issue of the new Creepy launches in July. We're starting with four issues that will be quarterly. Eric Powell is painting all four of the covers for us in a traditional Frank Frazetta-like style, so big creepy, scary, psychedelic atmospheric horror paintings. And in the first issue, we have Angelo Torres, who was one of the original illustrators. He was a steady contributor to the first three years of both Creepy and Eerie, and he is also in our new first issue. He's been drawing for MAD magazine for the last thirty-seven years. So he's an incredible artist. We're trying to mix classic creators who work in the classic tradition with new, younger creators who also work in a classic tradition, but bring a more modern sensibility to it. So one of our stories is basically about… I call it "The Fat Camp Run by Cannibals". Which is a story by Neil Kleid, a great young writer. He pitched me a story that is awesome. And that one's being drawn by Brian Churilla, who has done Fear Agent for us, and a couple of others. He's a young up-and-coming artist who is incredibly strong in black-and-white, does really beautiful inking. So we're trying to combine teams like this with a more classic style and aesthetic, and so far it's coming together really incredibly.

So how many stories will be in each issue?

Each issue will be forty-eight pages. So we've got four new stories, Neil Kleid's story, a story by Dan Braun and Angelo Torres, called "Hellhound Blues", and that's basically about a blues musician in the tradition of Robert Johnson, who made a deal with the devil, but the devil never got to collect the soul in the bargain. So some fun mystery stuff, some great satanic monster beasts rising out of the swamp. Also, in that issue is a story called "Chemical 13", which is a story by Michael Woods, which is set in a Nazi concentration camp, where some horrible things happen. And the artist on that is actually a twenty-four-year-old German cartoonist, Saskia Gutekunst, who has never been published in America as far as I know. Incredible stuff. She is an amazing artist, and her stuff reminds me of a more modern interpretation of Alex Toth. Her stuff is incredible.

And that's all in the first issue?

That's all in the first issue.

Are there any particular artists you have your eye on for other upcoming issues?

Neal Adams has agreed to contribute to a forthcoming issue. We don't know for sure if it's issue two or three at this point.

Would he be doing interior art?

Interior art. A brand-new original story.

Would he write and illustrate?

Yes. We've hinted at that, but we haven't formally announced it. So you guys can go ahead and say that. Gene Colan is also coming back for another story, in issue 2. He's incredible. And I've got Bernie Wrightson lined up for a later issue. But one of the things we're doing… Again, Creepy was always the showcase just for great art in general, and it included not just the stories, but there was "Loathsome Lore", one-page strips. In Eerie, they ran one-page "Monster Galleries", which were sort of like pin-ups, but with history about the monster and stuff. So all of these things will be returning to new Creepy and Eerie as well. So even though I don't have a story from Bernie Wrightson in the first issue, he's doing the inside front cover, a frontspiece in the classic Bernie Wrightson illustrated style. I've gotten confirmation from Gary Gianni that I'll get one of those from his as well. Gary's probably gonna do a Monster Gallery pin-up for me. The goal with all of this is to launch those first four issues as strongly as we can, so we can keep doing more. So, right now, guys like Mike Mignola can't do a story for me. But he agreed to do a pin-up for me. So for art lovers and for people who really love fine illustration, this is gonna be a fun comics anthology, but peppered with pin-ups by guys like Mignola and Bernie Wrightson, one-page features. Eric Powell is gonna be painting covers and providing interior art as he can, maybe a short one- or two-page funny feature. Hillary Barta is an artist who's worked with Eric on The Goon and a couple of other things. Hillary is doing our first Loathsome Lore. So it's basically just this mad mash of amazing talent, and some people are getting one page out of it, some people are getting a cover, some people are getting eight or ten pages.

Uncle Creepy's family is apparently growing with the new series. Can you talk about this expansion?

Yeah. Basically part of bringing Creepy to a new era was to add to it in a way that we felt didn't contradict anything [writer] Archie Goodwin and Jim Warren did originally. Everybody involved in this project greatly loves and respects the original material. I started reading Creepy when I was six years old, and it was the first horror comic I ever read, and it just completely made me a huge fan of horror, especially in a more classic, monster-and-supernatural tradition. So even getting to touch the original stuff is beyond incredible to me. It makes my heart flutter. [Laughs.] And then to be [told], "Your job for the next couple of years is to create new Creepy, and make it as good as the original," how do you do that? That's just such an incredible challenge. But I feel like it actually came together in a way. So part of what we did with this… One of the guys who bought the license from Jim Warren… Basically a group of guys got together who all loved the material and wanted to bring it back to publication, purchased it as a property and as a license from Jim Warren, and then partnered with Dark Horse to do it. Jim no longer owns it – he signed over ownership to a company called New Comic Company. I think at this stage of his life, Jim is basically wrapping up some of the stuff he wanted to make sure would continue. He sat on Creepy for years and years and years, refusing to let anyone just pay him a lot of money and walk off with it. He wanted to make sure that his legacy was secure. I was able to get his address, and when I sent him a copy of the very first hardcover, a week later I got a dozen roses from Jim Warren. Crazy! And practically a love note saying, "Thank you for doing such a good job on this work, and for being so true to what I tried to do." It was an incredibly flattering thing to get from an absolute legend in the comics industry. So yeah, we have his full approval.

Including his approval of your expanding the Creepy family.

We've expanded the family so that we can do a little bit more with Creepy and Eerie as characters. Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie always had a bit of a rivalry. The whole set-up was that Uncle Creepy had launched this magazine, and Cousin Eerie thought that he could do it better. So he launched his own title. They're very competitive and pretty catty and bitchy with each other, back and forth, in letter columns and stuff. So one of the things we wanted to do was give us a little more opportunity to explore their world. And thinking about it, well, if he's an uncle and he's a cousin, who else is there in this family? So Dan Braun, who is writing for us in a lot of our upcoming issues – he wrote "Hellhound Blues" – Dan worked to expand the family. I don't know all of their names off the top of my head right now, but basically there is a Creepy side of the family and an Eerie side of the family. There's Grandma and Grandpa Creepy, a character who is actually a shape-shifter – his name is Eepy (he's part Eerie and part Creepy, and he always has two heads, two personalities, and one body). You're also gonna see a lot of Sister Creepy and Uncle Creepy in the new Creepy. She's sort of…

The goth chick?

Yeah. She's gonna co-host the series. She's very confident and a big part of this family, [including] her parents, her little brother. We'll see the other characters here and there. We'll see short comic features, probably featuring the whole family at some point, introducing the characters. There's a story… We did a story with MySpace Dark Horse Presents in October that introduced the Creepy family, and it's by another artist, a painter named Jeff Preston. His stuff looks painted, but it's actually colored pencils. So in October we ran "Meet the Creepys", which is an introduction to all these characters, just in two short pages.

Then in November on MySpace, we did the first new Creepy story, which is really perfect. If you go and read that story, you'll get a good sense of what I mean by taking the classic aesthetic but telling a more modern horror story. It's called "Om Nom Nom Nom", and it basically focuses on this little old lady who has an obsession with cute things. She has very limited knowledge of the outside world, but she has online access, and she goes to CuteOverload and looks at all the cute little animals. She's obsessed with cute and she has a whole house full of cute things. And she has a hospice worker who comes in and helps her, sort of an assistant who helps her take care of herself and feed her and stuff. So basically the old woman who is obsessed with cute, talks constantly about all of her precious treasures, all of the things that are dear to her. And how she had to move some things into the basement because some people are gonna try and take these precious things from her. The woman who works for her, and is her caretaker, is not a noble person at all. She hears this and thinks, "I think I'm gonna go in the basement and see what you've got down there." It turns out that this woman who is obsessed with cute, and keeps her precious things in the basement… the things in the basement are not quite what you think they will be. So if you want to get your head wrapped around what new Creepy is gonna be like, go read that story. The look of it, the way it's told, and the content… The writer on that one was a guy named Andrew Mayer, who hopefully will be doing more writing for us in the future, he just nailed it the first time. Just absolutely knocked it out of the part.

You're also editing the Creepy and Eerie Archives, which reprint the original series. Creepy Volume 2 was the latest volume released, along with Eerie Volume 1. Can you talk about how long these Archives will run? Will they reprint the entire original runs of both books?

We had to try early on to bookmap how much material we could get out. We sort of made a guess. I think we can probably do most of the original material in each line in eleven volumes, for each line. It turns out I was a little mistaken about that, because eleven volumes only gets us through issue 120 or so, of both titles. So I'm pretty sure we will make it through eleven volumes, because looking at the creator list on all of those, volumes 6 and 7 and 8 are as strong as volumes 1 and 2. You got a couple of lesser artists in there at some point, but primarily that stuff remains incredible. So as we move from the 60s into the 70s, we lost Angelo Torres and Wallace Wood, but we gain Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson and those guys. So we've got at least ten or eleven volumes of titles, and by the time those are out, we're talking four or five years down the road, because it's three books per title per year. So we'll be due to reevaluate it by then and see. But one of the other things we will get going on relatively soon are creator-themed collections. I've already talked to Neal Adams about collecting all of his material. Most likely we won't do that as the same kind of Archive hardcover. It'd be a more affordable format, paperback, with a new cover by Neal and all of his stories collected. We want to do the same thing with Bernie, probably the same thing with Ditko, just as much as of these as we can. But we want to take our time. We don't want to overload our audience with a bunch of thirty and fifty dollar books to buy all the time. The Archives are an investment, but so far it's the bestselling Archives series Dark Horse has ever done, which is incredible. We just went back to press on a second printing of Volume 1. We already sold out. The book's been out for about seven months. And Eerie Volume 1 just came out. It literally just came out this week. But that also sold incredibly well. So the archives are really strong, and they're gonna keep coming out.

For those who aren't familiar with Creepy and Eerie, can you describe the difference between the two?

They really stick pretty close to each other, with the exception that Eerie did get a little weirder, and Eerie had a little bit more science fiction in it. And you'll notice it tonally. Creepy definitely started as a rebirth of the E.C. style of horror storytelling, the supernatural rooted in that kind of stuff. I honestly think that as Eerie sort of took form a little more strongly, as the 60s progressed, I think storytelling just a got a little bit weirder and more psychedelic. So there is some pretty weird stuff. Steve Ditko especially – Volume 3 and 4 of Creepy, there's some weird in there. I mean craaaaaazy drawings, incredibly psychedelic. Nobody does that stuff like these artists did, and Ditko especially was on a trip of some kind in the 60s. It's beautiful. But that aesthetic tended to appear more in Eerie, so you do get more weird science, weird sci-fi, utter insane psychadelia, trips to other planets. That stuff is a little more Eerie than Creepy, and you see more of that in Eerie, I think.