I recently came into possession of a handful of scans of old Warren magazines such as Creepy and Eerie, which as you know featured horror stories by some of the giants of the field such as Reed Crandall, Alex Toth, Gray Morrow, Wally Wood, Neal Adams, Johnny Craig, Gene Colan, Joe Orlando, Jerry Grandenetti...the list goes on and on, all in service of outstanding scripts by Archie Goodwin and others. Also appearing in several issues was the great Steve Ditko, working in ink wash like many of the other artists in these books. Now, early-mid 60's Ditko art is golden...but his wash work is extraordinary. Above is just one sample of it- click to see it all bigger- Dr. Strange fans will immediately recognize the imaginatively weird images Ditko brings to bear in the story. there's another story in an issue that I have at home that is just insane in its detail and may be the best Ditko art job I've ever seen.
Skimming through many of these scans, besides the obvious nostalgia rush I got, I reacquainted myself with many other fine artists who also had work in these Warren mags that I had forgotten about- the likes of Tom Sutton (who went on to do a lot of Warrens after the "classic" period had passed), Rocco Mastroserio, Mark Ricton, and especially Angelo Torres, best known via Mad, who contributes some absolutely amazing realistic fantasy and horror art to several issues.
Tempering my enjoyment is that I couldn't find any from Eerie #'s 7 & 8, two fondly remembered issues from my childhood, which had some incredible Ditko, Toth, Adams, and Grandenetti work. Oh well- I intend to post some more pages here eventually, unless anybody objects, including that amazing Ditko job I mentioned earlier.
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