Dark Horse Comics; $49.95

The second volume in this series collects Creepy #6-10 and again includes work from a proverbial Who’s Who of creators. Among the illustrators are EC alumni Reed Crandall, John Severin, George Evans, Jay Taycee (better known as Johnny Craig), Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, and Angelo Torres, along with Alex Toth, Roy Krenkel, Gene Golan, Gray Morrow, George Tuska, Steve Ditko, and many others. The Colan and Ditko pieces are practically worth the cover price and Williamson’s piece flashes straight back to his brilliance on EC’s Valor.

The writers included Archie Goodwin and, well, no slight intended to the others but one needn’t go much further before settling on Goodwin’s mastery of the form and format (Larry Ivie, Russ Jones, and many of the other writers did a bang-up job, too; it’s just that Goodwin was so consistently superb…).

The reproduction of the stories from 1964 and 1965 is gorgeous, and most of the work, both stories and art, stands up very well. Hats off to Mike Richardson and editor Shawna Gore at Dark Horse and Dan Braun and his colleagues at New Comic Company for releasing this fine volume that is simultaneously comics history and contemporary entertainment. This great hardcover has actually been out for a couple months, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t make sure it didn’t get lost in the shuffle.

Next up is the first volume collecting Creepy’s companion magazine Eerie, and we’re ready for that one, too.