The sad truth is that if you're a ten year old boy who loves horror comics, it's all downhill once you discover and omnivorously devour EC Comics' Horror Triumvirate: Tales From The Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear.
After that, the only place to turn is Warren's publications: Creepy, Eerie and (to a lesser extent) Vampirella). Warren published a series of black-and-white magazines on newspaper, largely culling some of the lesser EC talent. Because they were in magazine format, Warren managed to skip over being held accountable to the Comics Code... which is the same reason Mad went to magazine format.
I revisited Creepy and Eerie and although the quality is pretty high, it's clear they didn't have master storytellers like Bill Gaines or Al Feldstein directing it. The quality is poor compared to E.C. But the covers remain genius: Frank Frazetta, Basil Gogos, Jack Davis, Gray Morrow.
Another wrinkle here is that a lot of the covers of these magazines were heavily based on old horror films that many people had only read about, such as the brilliant rendition of King Kong done by Frazetta (right) or the long lost Cheney classic, London After Midnight. Warren actually released an entirely different magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, dedicated to writing about the horror movies that kids, in the days before VHS, usually couldn't see.
This gallery of old Warren-era horror magazine covers is just hours of browsing if you've ever huddled underneath a hillock of bed covers as a kid, holding a flashlight between your teeth to direct a tremulous beam of light down upon the page of a gruesome horror comic.
Horror Magazine Cover Gallery [G Darkness]
