by Robert Greenberger

Creepy Presents Bernie Wrightson

When Joe Orlando arrived at DC Comics in 1968, he brought his experiences from EC Comics along with him and was given House of Mystery to revive after years of seeing it house super-heroics. Joe introduced a horror host, which was expected back then, and filled the book with stories by new and old talent. When Dick Giordano followed soon after, he revived House of Secrets and also sought out new talent. As a reader, I was transfixed at seeing art styles that seemed perfectly suited to subject matter. Among those new names was Berni Wrightson, who drew atmospheric stories that immediately made goose bumps rise and got you ready for a fright.

It was only later that I found him gracing the pages of Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie and I was impressed at how perfectly Berni fit in with black and white stories plus seeing his work at magazine size let me luxuriate over the details. I learned after the fact that he cut his teeth on Warren knockoff Web of Horror, which he wound up co-editing with Bruce Jones before its unceremonious end.

Since then, Bernie (who reverted to the traditional spelling) has become a respected artist in the superhero and horror worlds, a true legend of the field. I was therefore quite excited to see that Dark Horse is taking all of Bernie’s Warren work and compiling them into an affordable hardcover collection. Aptly titled, Creepy Presents Bernie Wrightson, the 144-page collection includes his title pages, pin-up art and scads of stories which he either wrote himself or drew from scripts written by Warren mainstays Bruce Jones, Nicola Cuti, Bill DuBay and Bud Lewis.

Bernie may be the first artist to crack the field after taking the correspondence course from the Famous Artists School. A chance meeting with the equally legendary Frank Frazetta inspired Wrightson, then an illustrator for the Baltimore Sun, to produce graphic stories. Although it was Giordano who gave him his first professional comics story, Wrightson is more closely associated with Orlando’s editorial reign. Still, by 1974, Wrightson was lured over to Warren where he had the freedom to experiment and grow as an artist. As a kid, he grew up a voracious reader of the Warren material so this was a dream come true. He told Jon Cooke at Comic Book Artist, “In 1966, I had my first published work on a Creepy fan page. When I saw it printed, you could have knocked me over with a feather! I couldn’t afford to buy more than one issue—those things were expensive at 35¢!—but I showed it around to everybody.”

After his landmark work with Swamp Thing, Wrightson was looking for challenges. “I was having a lot of fun. I was playing and experimenting. I had gotten really tired of using a brush working on Swamp Thing, and the last issue of Swamp Thing was all done in pen.” His adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat, Bernie’s first Warren work, saw him do finely detailed line work while Jennifer, perhaps his best known tale, was done with gray markers. He even played with the duotone process, usually reserved for comic strips, when he drew H.P. Lovecraft’s Cool Air. “For one thing, I was putting a lot more work into the Warren stuff because it was going to be reproduced in b-&-w so it was only going to look as good as I do it, y’know? I can’t count on the color to save it, or for the color to make it so murky that it doesn’t matter,” Bernie said.

Wrightson did full-color work, too, notably Muck Monster, which is described as a precursor to the style he used when he illustrated Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (also in print from Dark Horse).

Bernie told Cooke, “[Warren] called a couple of times—he might have sent a telegram. Apparently, after these years of reprints and the Spanish work, Creepy and Eerie started using American comic book artists again. He was attracting people like Richard Corben, Alex Toth, John Severin, and a young guy named Billy Graham. I think Billy was art director when I first went up there and then Bill DuBay took over.” It was DuBay and Louise Jones (now Simonson) who let Bernie sift through scripts to pick from or drew his attention to stories right up his shadowy alley.

Wrightson even lent his talents to inking a few others, notably Carmine Infantino and his peer Howard Chaykin, also included in this collection. “Carmine was chief editorial poobah at DC when I first started working up there and he took me under his wing,” Wrightson explained to Cooke. “He left DC and he showed up at Warren and was drawing again. I got a look at his pencils and they were just beautiful. It was just great stuff and you could tell he was just having a great job doing it. I thought, ‘Man, the guy was just wasted editorially; this is what he should be doing! He should be drawing because he does it so well!’ I just got all caught up in that and got so excited at how beautiful these pencils were. I said, ‘Wow! Who’s inking this?’ They said, ‘Do you want it?’ I said, ‘Hell, yes!’

This is a showcase of a man at the peak of his artistic career and you don’t want to miss out on the new edition with superior reproduction and attention to detail.

Purchase

Creepy Presents Bernie Wrightson HC

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