(I originally read these comics in mid/late December 2016)
This latter-day revival of Warren's long-running horror anthology is a real disappointment. The decision seems to have been made to make it a sci-fi/horror comic, in keeping with the second half of the original mag's run and to distinguish it from Dark Horse's concurrent 'Creepy' revival, but this isn't consistent.
The first issue is an inauspicious debut, with two reprints. I made the decision to skip the reprints in every issue, so as to not spoil them for when I get around to a proper 'Eerie' read-through. Of the two new strips, the lead one by David Lapham, about a paranoid man coming to believe his family are robots, is gruesome and memorable. You'd be hard-pressed to find many jewels in the rest of the run, though, despite the artistic talents of Mike Allred, Evan Shaner and Mike Royer, amongst others. However, the two strips drawn by Kelley Jones in issues 4 and 6 deserve a mention. The first, written by Al Ewing, has a psychotherapist separate a man from his 'shadow self', in order to ease his guilty conscience. The second, an M. R. James adaptation by Jones himself, tells of a condemned witch exacting vengeance through an ash tree. For much of the rest of it, there's an issue with stories requiring too much investment - even over just eight pages or so - for too little pay-off. Bernie Wrightson provides back cover art.
I bought each issue of this incarnation of Eerie as they were farted out over a period of three and a half years, without reading any. Safe to say, if I'd read them as they came out, I'd have dropped the title from my pull list before it was halfway through. In a time when real life horrors are a staple ingredient of TV news and social media, you have to try much harder than this. I'm afraid 'Eerie' is best left in the past and viewed through the lens of nostalgia where you can at least imagine the world was safer and cosier and that these types of tales still had the power to frighten.
The original stories from Eerie (2012) # 1-8 are collected in:
Softcover:
