In 1964, publisher Jim Warren debuted Creepy, a new horror magazine. It combined its host character, Uncle Creepy, and top notch storytellers such as artists Frank Frazetta, Joe Orlando, Alex Toth, and Al Williamson.

Creepy ran for 145 issues and a number of specials until 1983, and included work from creators such as Archie Goodwin, Richard Corben, Mike Ploog, Bernie Wrightson, Jeff Jones, Harlan Ellison, Neal Adams, Alex Nino, Wally Wood, Reed Crandall, Johnny Craig, John Severin, Angelo Torres, Gray Morrow, and Steve Ditko. Harris Publications brought the magazine back for a single issue in 1985, Creepy #146, and a four-issue comic book mini-series co-published with Dark Horse Comics in 1992.

After that, there were rumblings and legal wrangling, but almost nothing really happened for years. For the most part, Creepy was consigned to a fondly remembered comic book history.

In early 2007, though, Dark Horse was approached by a group called New Comic Company, which had just acquired the legal rights to publish everything Warren had originally published in Creepy and its sister publication, Eerie.

The principles of New Comic Company, coming from a film background, had originally intended to pursue Creepy as film or multi-media property.

“I have always had a deep and long standing respect and fascination for Creepy and Eerie and when the idea of trying to option Creepy came up, I got very excited and pursued the idea with a vigor that was out of proportion to all sane reason. At a certain point in this long process, my partners and I realized that an option on the properties would not be the way to go so we then laid plans to buy out all rights to Creepy and Eerie. That took a total of seven years to engineer,” said New Comic Company’s Dan Braun. “Dealing directly with Jim Warren was an honor and an education. He was a gentleman 99 44/100% of the time and the other 56/100%, I deserved what I got.”

“Once they acquired the license, the guys from New Comic Company called our president, Mike Richardson, and before long a deal was struck for Dark Horse to publish the material,” said Shawna Gore, Dark Horse’s editor for the project.

That is how Creepy started its comeback, re-entering the market just a few short weeks ago with the first volume of The Creepy Archives from Dark Horse. The hardcover, 8-3/8" X 10-7/8" book contains 232 black and white pages which reprint the first five issues of Creepy.

In addition to recognizing the historical importance of the material, Gore said she has personally been a fan for many years. “Creepy is probably my all-time favorite comic title. I saw my first copy of it when I was six years old and was instantly hooked. I grew up reading comics and the exposure I had to Creepy and Eerie, and some of the other Warren and EC titles really cultivated my love for cool supernatural horror stories. It definitely influenced what my career became, and it’s just a great personal honor for me to get to work on the very material that initially forged my deep love for comics,” she said.

Even before she knew anything about New Comic Company, Gore said she was beginning to look into the Warren material on her own to see if Dark Horse might be able to acquire the license. She knew that Dark Horse Comics President Mike Richardson had talked with Warren about it previously, but no deals had been struck.

“I had been discussing this with my immediate boss, and one day he told me he had some news on the Warren front, and that the license had been acquired but not by Dark Horse. I was crushed! But then he told me the people who had it had approached Dark Horse to publish it, and I probably started pleading with him on the spot to edit it. I think everyone in the editorial department knows how much this stuff means to me and how much I enjoy it, and when you’re editing a long series of archives, you really have to love the material. You have to really immerse yourself in the material to understand how to collect it, what kind of changes or corrections to make if any…so it really helps if you truly enjoy what you work on,” she said. “I know some of our other editors are big fans of Creepy and Eerie, but I think I have them all beat. I also enjoy working on archive collections, and there are some editors who don’t care for the kind of work that entails.”

She said that it was Richardson’s idea from the start to add Creepy to their successful Dark Horse Archives line. “We batted around about a dozen other ideas for collecting the material as well, but everyone agreed that the first mandate should be to do a very beautiful and straight forward chronological collection of all the original material. It’s pretty crazy that some of the very best stories from Creepy have never been collected in an easy-to-get format since their original publication,” she said. “So we wanted to do a thorough collection as well as making it a showcase for the art, but the one thing that the Archive series couldn’t give us is a suitable size. All of the other books in that series have been 7” X 10”, and Creepy’s original size is not even proportionate to that. So Creepy is the first book in the Archive series that we sort of broke the mold for, and I think it was the right choice to make.”

Braun and his colleagues at New Comic Company agree.

“Having been a long time comic book fan, I referred back to the various reprint formats that had been done of the EC Comics line and found it very easy to imagine a strong market for a Creepy compilation in the full sized hardcover format. There were a few moments when the large format was in question, but the talent that Warren and Archie Goodwin brought together for Creepy and Eerie deserved no less and that is the format we are launching with at Dark Horse and continuing on with for the entire Archive series,” Braun said.

One of the factors that made The Creepy Archives a possibility was the acceptance in the marketplace of similarly priced archival collections. Clearly the Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives paved the way for similar volumes, but what has made the market so receptive to the wide variety of titles available now?

“I think the single biggest factor is simply how difficult it has always been for comics fans to get their hands on old material once a title becomes collectible and hard to find,” Gore said. “I’ve been a Creepy fan practically my entire life, but it’s only because I am actually working on these collections that I finally am getting to read every single issue of the series. I’ve never been able to afford paying collector’s prices to simply read awesome old comics, and publishers doing big archive collections is finally making that possible. I love it.”

The process of putting together The Creepy Archives, while less intense than a similar project in color might be, is still very time consuming and highly detail oriented.

“We are scanning from the best original copies we can find and cleaning the pages digitally. For old black and white material like this, there’s only so much you can do when you’re scanning from black ink instead of the original files. So instead of having the option to do a lot of digital restoration, which we don’t want to do for a variety of reasons anyway, we get better results really fussing over the scanning so we get the best original image we can. I think people will be very pleasantly surprised at the kind of results we’ve been able to get. We’re lucky to have a really talented production crew,” she said.

At present, Gore estimates that Dark Horse will produce 10 or 11 volumes of the Creepy series, and they’ll be releasing three volumes a year for each of the two titles (Eerie will launch next March).

“It’s hard to know for sure at this point because we made the decision to not run the stories that are repeated from previous issues, and that happens pretty frequently starting around issue 16. We don’t want to ask fans to pay for reprinted material once it’s already part of the archive series, so I just need to find a good week of free time to figure it all out!” she said. 

Among the high points included in the first volumes of The Creepy Archives is Frank Frazetta’s iconic “Werewolf,” the opening story in the first volume, an auspicious start to the collection. “It’s not often someone could make a claim that other artists’ efforts measure up to something Frazetta did, but in the case of the first two volumes of Creepy, everything here is just as good as that werewolf story,” Gore said. “My favorite of the writers is undoubtedly Archie Goodwin. He was the classic writer-editor, and his great creativity really drove the first few years of the magazine. I also really like Larry Ivie’s stories, and it’s actually one of Larry’s stories, “The Thing in the Pit,” that is my very favorite of the eary stuff. It’s a shame not to name every single artist in the collection, but my personal favorites are Angelo Torres, Gray Morrow, Alex Toth, Neal Adams, Gene Colan, Steve Ditko…it’s such an incredible list of artists. Frank Frazetta only drew one story for Creepy, but he did countless covers and each of them is amazing.”

Even though the book has just been released, Gore said she’s already had a good bit of positive feedback on it. “I’m happy to say I’ve heard nothing but great things so far. I was able to get my hands on an advance copy before I went to Comic-Con in San Diego, so I was able to show it off to a bunch of people whose opinions I really respect. So far I’ve been able to show it to Bernie Wrightson, Roy Thomas, Jose Villarrubia, Eric Powell, Tom Yeates, and a handful of other great artists, and they all were thrilled with the presentation. And now that a few fans have received their copies, I’ve heard via email and a few message board postings that people are really enjoying it. That makes me happy,” she said.

Braun echoes that enthusiasm. “As a consulting editor, I had a hand in the entire project and I can truly say that nothing was sacrificed. We made sure to include the Adam Link storyline and even reprinted letters pages and ads and got the elusive Jon B. Cooke to contribute an introduction. But that’s what happens when you work with a dedicated and passionate editor like Shawna Gore at Dark Horse,” he said.

“I am extremely happy with the first volume; creatively it’s a great success. It is just as we imagined it would be, only better. The reproduction of the tone work by greats like Colan presented a challenge without having access to original negatives or artwork. The production people at Dark Horse exceeded our expectations and brought it all back to life. The quality is amazing. I did want to see a few more of the original ads, but there were some copyright issues, natch. But we have a good sampling in there. It might be time to put those mad doctor hypodermic needles, monster hands, and gruesome skull cups back up for sale,” he said.

Dark Horse will also be releasing a new version of the storied horror magazine as well. “We’re just getting started putting the new Creepy together. We’re reviewing pitches for scripts right now and going through artist samples. The new Creepy will launch in comic-book format next May, and we’re planning on it being a quarterly release for the first year. I can’t tell you any details right now other than I think fans of the original will be pleased, as will fans of more contemporary supernatural horror. We’re doing our best to maintain the original Creepy aesthetic for the new series, so the horror we depict is going to focus on supernatural tales, the occult, monsters, witches, etc. And while we’re endeavoring to update the material enough to make it a good fit for readers of contemporary horror, nobody wants to see Creepy devolve into hack-and-slash horror, or torture porn, which is such a big part of what people consider to be horror stories today,” she said.

“We intend to bring back the magic, the mystery, and the vibe of the original Creepy with stories that capture more of the modern horrors of life but with a slant towards the supernatural. And, of course always summoning up those big scary monsters we all love. Also, be on the look out for an Eric Powell interpretation of the new Creepy Family. Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie have an extended family and as you can imagine, they ain’t pretty. Other creators that will be contributing will be a mix of new blood and classic talent with names to be announced at the 2009 N.Y. Comic Con,” Braun added.

The old Warren horror magazines aren’t the only scary stuff in Gore’s editorial life, though.“Creepy and Eerie are easily the biggest part of my schedule right now, but I’m still working on a couple of other titles I really love—Emily the Strange and Criminal Macabre,” she said. She is also working with Bernie Wrightson on the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his illustrated version of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. “November is bringing the debut of a new bi-monthly miniseries I’m really excited about The Cleaners, which is essentially a very noir supernatural horror story set in L.A. that focuses on a group of trauma scene cleaners who get called in for the jobs that the cops either can’t or don’t want to explain.”

She’s also working with writer-artist Jim Silke on another of his well received art survey books, this one taking a look at the career of the painter Robert Maguire, was one of the biggest names in paperback cover paintings during the 1950s and ‘60s.

For more information on Creepy, visit Creepy Universe and Dark Horse Comics.