 There's a weird little pleasure that hits whenever someone mashes up sci-fi, horror, and fantasy elements. Vampires? Cool. But Planet of the Vampires? Sign me up. I like both Red Sonja and Vampirella, but Red Sonja and Vampirella Meet Betty and Veronica? Yes, please. Eerie magazine was a fun genre playground like that for nearly 20 years in the second half of the twentieth century. From 1996 to 1983, it pumped out extremely brief stories in body horror, the macabre, dystopian futures, Gothic romance, sword & sorcery, and planetary adventure. In contrast to its sister magazine Creepy, which told one-and-done stories throughout, Eerie told serialized sagas in which characters returned from time to time for more installments.  Some of these characters have become cult classics among fans of Silver and Bronze Age comic fans: Hunter, Darklon the Mystic, the Rook. Thankfully, the Warren Publishing comics- Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella- have been collected into accessible "Archive" editions in recent decades, so they're not that hard to read. But there is not a fiendish fandom for Eerie the way that there is for many Big Two comic characters. As such, every little, unexpected horror nugget you discover in Eerie feels like you've stumbled onto something great, like finding your new favorite album in a dusty crate at the back of the record shop. I was in Loveland, Colorado a few weekends ago visiting Grand Slam Sports Cards and Comics (despite their name privileging the cards, they've actually got a pretty good comic selection), and I was digging through the mags to find any back issues of Savage Sword of Conan. They had a few, but what really caught my eye was a damaged copy of Eerie #80 from 1977. That Ken Kelly cover was unmistakable. A greenish-yellow vampire with bat wings, a Voltar helmet, a Conan loincloth, a Frank-Frazetta-nearly-nude victim, and a dramatic background of vivid red? You know I bought it. WORLD WAR III HAS COME AND GONE! DEADLY SURVIVORS... TOMBSPAWNED VAMPIRES... REMAIN! There are few taglines that absurd, and I mean that as the highest compliment. What I discovered in the issue's cover story was "Tombspawn: Pieces of Hate," which was actually part of an ongoing story. I hopped on Comic Vine to see if I could figure out in which issue the first part appeared, and it was a few issues prior, in #73 (Side note: I feel like it would be kind of frustrating to read Eerie at the time. If you dug the first "Tombspawn" story in issue #73, it would have been like ten months before you saw the next mere eight-page entry. These things are short!). I couldn't believe it for a second- I've had Eerie #73 hanging in a frame on my wall for a decade now. Back in 2015, I was playing in a punk band called the Ghoulies, and as a send-up to my all-time favorite band The Mummies and their Runnin' on Empty Vol. 2 comp, I bought a horror comic for us to mug at, and it became the back cover to an album we were putting out. I'm sure I read the comic like ten years ago, but hadn't opened it since. It's been displayed along with an issue of Creepy and Vampirella in my office ever since.   But let's get back to "Tombspawn." Gerry Boudreau wrote the series, while artist Gonzalo Mayo did the pencils and inks. The world of "Tombspawn" is an interesting mash-up, like its genres. Set in 1992, it is the distant future of our recent past, taking place around fifteen years on from when it released. The world has bombed itself into oblivion, returning its technology and lifestyle back to something comparable to the stone age. A post-apocalyptic wasteland of irradiated monsters is left where the United States used to be. Craggy rock faces and rotting stone ruins dot the landscape. High above, unbeknownst to any characters, a space war cartel watches the remnants of humanity, responsible for keeping the world dependent on war. Maybe it's just me, but Gonzalo Mayo's landscape design conjured sickly greens and unnatural purples in my mind to fill in his grayscale landscape. In this world, humanity is limping by.  Our main characters with classic sword & sorcery names, uh... Stevie and Biff, make references to Sunday football games, Miller High Life, household appliances, and other touches of midcentury American life while looking like Frazetta paintings in each panel. Their physique is chiseled out of marble, their loincloth and helmet garb is classic S&S, and their speech is straight out of sitcom. "No cheap horror flicks for kids to seen on Saturday afternoons," Stevie remarks, "Today, the Earth is one massive horror show. We've got it all, except for the stale popcorn." They are hunters for their primitive tribe, but they're not great at what they do. The first installment, titled "Day of the Vampire 1992" shows Stevie and Biff trying to take down an irradiated land-based hammerhead shark (oh fuck yeah they are) but they both fail to shoot it. Seeing them curse their wide shots at a shark flopping around on dry land evokes the cliché of somehow actually failing to shoot fish in a barrel. Stevie and Biff soon stumble on a ruin full of horrifying stone carvings. Lying in seeming suspended animation is a beautiful, nearly-naked woman. A hologram of an old-world scientist, rendered in spectacular special effect detail, tells the fellas that this woman is a vampire, captured and placed in this monster-laden crypt so that future generations will know not to disturb her even if they can't understand the spoken English of the scientist's hologram.  Stevie, of course, decides to chance it with the vampire girl of his dreams and chooses to press the button labeled "REVIVE," placed right next to the better option of "DESTRUCT." I'm not kidding. The vampire woman is immediately revived, and as vampire stories often go, Stevie is thrown into a spiritual and physical ecstasy while his body is drained of blood by the vamp in question. She, in turn, flies all the way up into space where she is spotted by the alien space cartel. The space cartel nukes her out of existence in an instant. This short ten-pager ends with Stevie, now a vampire, completely overtaken by the idea of vampire superiority, deciding to turn Biff as well. We conclude on a freeze-frame as he leaps forward with one more reference to horror movies and stale popcorn. The Howardesque sword & sorcery themes are apparent from the first few pages. Society is destined to destroy itself while staying focused on superficial comforts like beer and circuses. We have destroyed all our progress and don't even seem to be capable of processing it- we just grab bows and arrows and feel nostalgic for easier times. Americans have been reduced to a state of barbarism, which they're adjusting to with varying degrees of success. Readers liked the story, with the letters column "Dear Cousin Eerie" in the following issue featuring several positive reactions of "Vampire 1992." One mixed review was mostly whinging at the Eerie editorial staff because he felt like they didn't know whether they wanted to be a horror mag or an adventure mag. He felt "Tombspawn" and another story leaned too hard into adventure.  The second chapter, contained in issue #80, was the "Pieces of Hate" story with the Ken Kelly cover I was initially drawn to. After six panels of recap, we pick up with Stevie and Biff on a campaign of vampire supremacy, convinced that they need to turn as many remaining humans into blood-suckers as they can. These vampires grow not only fangs and an uncontrollable vampire-chauvinist mindset, but a set of heavy metal bat wings bursting out of their shoulder blades. I find it spine-chilling on an existential level when genre fiction has characters retain their fundamental personality while horrifyingly changing one key aspect (in this case, they're pretty much the same characters, just ravenous for their vampire cause now) without comment. Issue #80 is very much a middle chapter, and two pages shorter than its predecessor for a slim 8-page run, but ends by setting up a conflict between the space cartel and the vampires. Initially mistaking the cartel UFO occupants for a mystical enemy called "Russians," the two groups decide on a "Most Dangerous Game" type of contest to see who gets the US. It's the classic mashup like Yankees v. Red Sox, Taylor Swift v. Katy Perry, and vampires v. space aliens. What the second issue lacks in plot it makes up for in philosophical discussion. Author Gerry Boudreau goes in deeper on the themes of the first issue, mostly unchanged since the 30s but somewhat updated for 1977. Stevie narrates, likening the wave of vampire infections to a rekindling of the pioneer spirit, but realizing immediately the self-destructive path its set them on.
Letter-writers in "Dear Cousin Eerie" were now raving about "Tombspawn." They loved its lack of clearly moral characters, the Gonzalo Mayo art, and painted Ken Kelly cover. "This is going to be an excellent series!" wrote Jack Marriot of Toledo, Ohio.  For those following "Tombspawn," the wait was significantly shorter for the third issue than it was for the second. Chapter three, titled "The Game is Afoot," appeared in issue #82 just two months later and Gonzalo Mayo is joined this time by legendary artist Carmine Infantino. The recap is contained to one page, spiraling in on itself while you turn the magazine to view it from all sides. At the page's center, our vampires Stevie and Biff shake hands with the Space CIA agents against whom they've decided to compete. The vampire everymen then fight an atomic pterodactyl, and I need to pause for a moment because I'm afraid I may never get to write a sentence like that ever again. The aliens try to contend with the barbarian vampires' physical superiority by using holographic tricks and mind-control guns. Between bouts, Stevie once again waxes philosophical while turning a sort of Cro-Magnon man into a monstrous neanderthal bloodsucker ("cavampireman?" "australopithenosferatu?"). "Vampires, at least according to legend, are sterile. I suppose it has to do with the balance of nature. In granting eternal life, nature takes away the power to propogate [sic] new life. If we win this contest, our 'super-race' will be immortal, but it will also be stagnant. There would be no new blood."  Humanity is still quite literally sifting through the fallout of its own bad choices, and it can't help but plot its next downfall. Stevie and Biff, our two himbo Joe Schmo vampires, are able to ask the question of what their wanton consumption might bring, but are never focused long enough to think it through. They can't investigate, can't plan. Instead, they're once again consumed by bloodlust and you turn the page. In the final pages of the third issue, Biff is bitten in half, seemingly in one devastating chomp, while the friends navigate what they think is another illusion from the space aliens. Stevie vows to avenge his fallen friend and that space cartel will not win. But that was the last we saw of the barbarian vampires in space. In "Dear Cousin Eerie," one reader proposed an "all-Tombspawn" issue for the future of the mag. After one letter-writer expressed a desire to see "Tombspawn" continue in the very next issue, Eerie editorial responded that the series would return, but it would be a while since Gonzalo Mayo was working on a "book-length VAMPIRELLA epic" in the meantime. Since the Eerie team frequently responded to concerns about the return of well-liked series (around this time they spend a column inch or two assuring readers that their time-travel trilogy will indeed conclude, it just got delayed a bit) that they could have communicated a cancellation of "Tombspawn," but it was quietly dropped. I searched through the next two-dozen issues' worth of letters pages and couldn't find another mention of it. We never got a fourth chapter of "Tombspawn," so we'll never know who won the game or what happened to Stevie. Gerry Boudreau teamed with Gonzalo Mayo for more horror adventures in Eerie #90, but this time told an 8-page story called "Carrion" rather than returning to their previous creation (reader reaction to "Carrion" was not pleasant). I'm sad to see that it never concluded; I could've gone for ten more chapters of "Tombspawn" just to see what other misadventures a couple of former couch potato vampires could've gotten into. To see the logical conclusion of the vampire epidemic would've been fun, too. I can't help but speculate whether it would've ended all life on Earth, like Marvel Zombies, or if the aliens would have launched even more nukes. I guess I'll never know.  I really enjoyed Gerry Boudreau's world-building and characterization in this series. It's not often you get to see a barbarian with gigantic bat wings and a death's head emblem on his loincloth make Elton John references. The themes evoke Howard, Lovecraft, and Burroughs while also transplanting the darkness of Depression-era fantasy into the consumerist 70s. But I think my favorite thing here is Gonzalo Mayo's art. He conjures Frank Frazetta using just black and white. But he also mixes it with what feels like a recreation of Marlon Brando's Jor-El in Superman, and old (even then!) science fiction TV like The Twilight Zone. He uses stark contrast between black and white to create a dark, salacious, damned planet that I want to spend more time on. Character designs just don't look like that anymore. For the rest of the late 70s, Eerie was dominated by The Rook, its time-travelling Bill Dubay character who pretty much became the magazine's flagship series for a while. The popular "Hunter" series returned for "Hunter III." Eventually, creative teams found the grind too hard to keep up with and Eerie began publishing issues with fewer stories in each issue. There was always a lot of talent behind the mag, and always a wild variation in quality between the stories. I'm really glad I happened to crate-dig my way to Eerie #80. Who knows what other incredible nuggets are in the archives of Warren Publishing? I know there are a few send-ups to 70s anthology horror out there like Vampiress Carmilla, but Eerie will always feel special. Is there more sword & sorcery goodness out there to find? Let me know if you've got a good one you want to share. 
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AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
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