Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Eerie Archives #1

Eerie Archives, Vol. 1

Rate this book
Slithering upon the heels of Dark Horse's archive collections of the seminal horror comics magazine Creepy comes its terror-filled cousin publication Eerie! Collected for fans for the first time ever, and packaged in the same amazing oversized format as the Creepy Archives, Dark Horse Comics has taken great, gruesome care in presenting this groundbreaking material to readers who have been waiting decades to get their claws on it. Eerie magazine, like its killer kin Creepy, features work from many of the masters of comics storytelling. For fans of spectacular spookiness, mind-bending sci-fi, and astonishing artwork, the Eerie Archives library is a must have!

256 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2004

77 people are currently reading
583 people want to read

About the author

Archie Goodwin

970 books69 followers
Archie Goodwin was an American comic book writer, editor, and artist. He worked on a number of comic strips in addition to comic books, and is best known for his Warren and Marvel Comics work. For Warren he was chief writer and editor of landmark horror anthology titles Creepy and Eerie, and for Marvel he set up the creator-owned Epic Comics as well as adapting Star Wars into both comics and newspaper strips. He is regularly cited as the "best-loved comic book editor, ever."

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
189 (37%)
4 stars
194 (38%)
3 stars
97 (19%)
2 stars
15 (3%)
1 star
3 (<1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
Profile Image for Diz.
1,861 reviews138 followers
April 29, 2020
This is a supernatural horror comic anthology that collects the first few issues of Eerie, a horror comic magazine that started its run in the 60s. There are a lot of good artists represented in this collection. The stories all have a twist, some are predictable and some are not. If you like horror in the vein of the Universal monsters, you'll get a kick out of this.
Profile Image for Sebastien.
252 reviews320 followers
December 22, 2017
I've been working my way through a variety of the Warren catalogue (Vampirella, Creepy, Eerie). I guess a lot of this you could kind of classify as pulp horror. What's amazing is the quality of the art (of course there is variation b/c they used a lot of different artists throughout the years) but overall it maintains a very high level imo. The work is pen and ink, which is perfect for the material and adds a sense of gloom and ominousness. This volume features many incredible artists including Alex Toth (sense of design is superb, I'm looking forward to reading his comic Bravo for Adventure), Al Williamson, covers by Frazetta, Reed Crandall (very tight style), Steve Ditko, Wally Wood (plan on reading his comic Cannon soon), etc etc. For me it is fun to discover all these various artists from this period, opened up an era of comics and illustration that I didn't know much about.

Quite a few stories are written by Archie Goodwin who was the engine behind Warren (at least in this time period, mid 60s). I tend to enjoy his stories. Some pieces are more clever in terms of twists and turns than others, some are a bit basic but in general I enjoy the ride because the stories do a good job of putting you into these dark gloomy atmospheres. There is a magic to the stories, the worlds they inhabit, there's a rawness (and often great imagination) to it that works well and the artwork brings it to life in such magnificent ways. I do recommend these but def will not be to everyone's tastes (but what is?!).
Profile Image for Malum.
2,839 reviews168 followers
August 28, 2019
3.5 stars.

A collection of horror stories (although they are all more fun and funny than scary), all with Twilight Zone-like twist endings. The main thing I liked about this collection is that all of the stories were really short, so if you come upon one you don't like, it won't be long before it's over and you are on to the next one.

Profile Image for Meg Powers.
159 reviews63 followers
June 21, 2011
Thank goodness for these reprints. I've been starving for decent horror comics for a long time, and EERIE's comics come in beautifully printed volumes, complete with covers (usually Frazetta!) in full color and letters pages, which usually read as "I think Eerie is just swell. The art is swell. The writing is swell.I'm writing this from the basement." For kicks, the publishers even throw in some kitschy monster-crap mail order spreadsheets. Each issue features a different artist per story, offering a dynamic array of monster/ghoul/cannibal/etc. renditions ranging from the tight, gothic crosshatching of Dan Adkins to the wonky, psychedelic work of Alex Toth. The comics were originally printed in black and white, so the artists didn't have to hold back when rendering in order to allow for easy coloring. Characters are fleshed out, drippy gore is wonderfully disgusting. Steve Ditko's work really shines in this venue, and some of the stories he illustrated are pretty incredible, like a weird-out story in EERIE Archives Volume II,"Deep Ruby", wherein a jeweler gets sucked into a trippy,hellish dimension located within the facets of a cursed gem.

Writer Archie Goodwin (who contributed scripts and pencils to the early Vampirella comics) clearly has a mega-boner for H.P. Lovecraft, because a lot of the stories are re-tooled Lovecraft works."Vision of Evil,"for instance, which seems to be inspired by "Pickman's Model" and "Island at World's End", which is reminiscent of "The Call of Cthulhu" and features a cyclopean city in the middle of the ocean and evil priestess-babe named "Cthylla."

The twists for some of the stories are just silly- a story will be about one kind of monster/villain, the protagonist will be preyed upon monster/villain, but then a cloud will pull away from the moon and the protagonist might declare,"One thing you didn't count on was that I was...a WEREWOLF!", and thus descend on the screaming antagonist in the final panel. Or a bad guy will take desperate measures to achieve a gain like immortality, only to ironically receive it in the form of a vampire bite and immediately get staked to death. Pretty funny. I love the idea of solving one monster problem with another monster.

Sometimes you have to slog through the standard blando Frankenstein retelling (there are a few) and incredibly boring 18th Century-inspired ironic justice stories, but for the most part the stories are legitimately spooky. "For the Birds" and "Voodoo Drum," both featured in Volume II, made my skin crawl. "Oversight!" is a good They Live predecessor , and "The Day After Doomsday" is a gorgeously drawn post-apocalypse cannibal tale.

These would be great books to own and I am excited that CREEPY magazine has also been compiled and reprinted. It will be interesting to see how (or if) the two Goodwin magazines deviate.
Profile Image for Hugo Tellez.
134 reviews1 follower
December 3, 2025
Siempre había querido leer Errie, desde que tuve conocimiento de esta revista, y ahora que por fin pude leerla, no me ha decepcionado.

Los relatos de terror son cortos, pero tienen unas ilustraciones buenísimas, así como buenas historias.
Profile Image for Will Hoover.
167 reviews46 followers
July 13, 2017
It's not difficult to understand why Eerie and its sister magazine Creepy are still so beloved by so many fans so many decades down the line. Although many of the stories feature the usual horror genre cliches, tricks, and all too familiarly scary treats, there are still more than enough terrifying twists, turns, and clever plot devices in these macabre vignettes to make it more than worth any daring reader's while.

My only major gripe with this otherwise impeccable collection of vintage comics would have to be that none of the stories seem to have been well developed enough to merit more than a few short pages each. But then, that's simply how old mags of this type were laid out as a general rule. And besides, the art is so striking, panel after exquisitely crafted panel, that just about any other shortcomings that may at first be readily discernible from the outset are pretty much automatically rendered mostly inconsequential by comparison.

So despite the fact that the vast majority of the stories in Eerie are arguably a bit on the brief side, one cannot help but marvel at the sheer creativity of it all. To be sure, the now legendary Warren Publishing company kept a lot of very talented people very busy cranking out these wonderful vintage volumes.

In particular, it seems remarkable that writer Archie Goodwin could possibly have been as amazingly prolific, multi-talented, and industrious as he obviously really was. And if anyone ever has any doubts about any of that, they really ought to take a gander at even just a few issues of Eerie. Of course, back in the day, a number of other notable and highly accomplished scribes regularly contributed to periodicals of this type, but its actually astonishing how often Goodwin's name appears in the writing credits of both Eerie and Creepy. What's more, the guy even served as chief editor for both publications! And this was long, long before he eventually lent his considerable storytelling prowess to a whole host of now legendary comic titles, such as Marvel's very first run of Star Wars, beginning in 1977 (just for starters).

What's perhaps most remarkable of all, is just how well this marvelously macabre material still stands up, even now, so many years since it first haunted newsstands. Though I suppose none of it is really on par with Shakespeare, surely, Eerie and similarly styled ghoulish publications are perhaps just as timeless in their own humble, pulp fictional right. Most shocking of all perhaps, is that these stories are surprisingly still fresh, vivid (despite the stark black and white art), and splendidly chilling, even by the media blitzed (and subsequently quite jaded) standards of today. And I'll even wager that they will continue to be just as frighteningly effective for literally years and years to come.
Profile Image for Andy .
447 reviews92 followers
July 21, 2021
The biggest disappointment here is the first issue, which was put out quickly to secure copyright on the name "Eerie" -- it's a shorter issue and most of the stories are reprints from Creepy I believe. And throughout all five issues there's a bit too many "exotic" horror tales -- you know the type, men in pith helmets stealing cursed idols or killing the village witch doctor and meeting their just demise.

What *I* enjoy most in these are the gothic-orientated stories. Stories like "The Lighthouse" from issue #3 about a writer who has retreated to a lighthouse to work where ghostly things ensue. "Soul of Horror" is based on Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and also appears in issue #3 and I can honestly say it's one of the best stories I've read in horror comics.

And there's more than enough kooky stories here that will give you a laugh, like "Flame Fiend" in issue #2 about a man who causes his business partner to burn to death and is haunted by his vengeful ghost whenever he is near fire.
Profile Image for Murat Dural.
Author 19 books627 followers
August 18, 2019
Bu aralar fazla beş yıldızlı eser okudum sanırım. bunda en büyük etken okuma alışkanlığı yoğun olan, fikrine ve hatta yazar / editör olarak kalemine güvendiğim insanlardan aldığım doğru telkinler, kitap önerileri. "Eerie Serisi" için sevgili dostum, fantastik türün kıymetli yazarı Uğur kılınç'ın baskısı, israrı olmasa bu şerefe nail olamazdım. Sanırım en önemli vurgusu "Kütüphanende olması lazım, büyük eksiklik," demesi oldu. Bir dönem çok değerli dostum Devrim Kunter ve kardeşlerimizle "Yabani Dergi"de yapmaya çalıştığımız şeyin, yazılı, çizili bir Alacakaranlık Kuşağı düşüncesinin ilk örneklerinden. Tek sıkıntı sadece iki cildinin Türkçe'ye çevrilmiş olması. Keşke tüm fasikülleri çevrilse. Bunun gibi, aynı zamanda "Creepy" ve "Weird Tales"in de çevrilmesi müthiş olur. Umuyorum ve diliyorum.
Profile Image for Doug Bolden.
408 reviews35 followers
July 30, 2014
Not sure what I can say about this (partially because I waited a couple of weeks to review it). Artworks is great. Storylines are interesting (par for course for horror comics, not quite as inventive as some of the high-water marks that EC hit). Of special note is the presence of some Lovecraftania. "Soul of Horror" heavily homages (if that's the right word) the "Dunwich Horror" [see, if you want, my blog post about it http://www.wyrmis.com/blots/2014/26/b...]. "Island at World's End" has a Cthulhu-esque entity named "Shoggath" who has a female disciple named Cthylla, of potential interest since this is a decade before Lumley using the same name for Cthulhu's daughter.

Would recommend if you like black-and-white horror comics or if you like great art in horror comics. Could use a dose of the old EC humor and gonzo flavor, but does quite well.
Profile Image for David H..
2,507 reviews26 followers
April 3, 2020
I'm not a horror fan typically, but I enjoyed most of these short horror comics (this book contained the first 5 issues of Eerie with 30 tales of horror). It's definitely a window into some interesting early 1960s comics art, though, especially with some covers from Frank Frazetta and art from Steve Ditko among others. The stories themselves were often pretty decent, with a couple of really good ones. Several were a bit cliched or hackneyed, however, but you know what, I'm reading this over 50 years later, so who knows how they seemed at the time. I actually was annoyed a bit at the magazine "character" of Cousin Eerie who "hosts" the stories, but maybe because his jokes were a little too corny, even for me. :)

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in mid-century horror comics.
Profile Image for Jeremy.
309 reviews3 followers
October 9, 2012
I miss this as a thing: anthologies of gory twist endings hosted by pun-spewing ghoul. There was a comic book revival of Creepy for a while, but it's just not the same. There's innocence buried among the corpses in these stories, and by god the art is a sight to behold. I was expecting to love Toth and Ditko and Al Williamson, but Gene Colan knocked it out of the park every time.
Profile Image for Little Timmy.
7,390 reviews59 followers
January 21, 2016
I was lucky and collected a full set of these magazines and got a chance to read the fantastic stories and enjoy the incredible art from many of the greats, many of who got their start here, from the comic world. If you like offbeat horror, supernatural, SiFi and just plan different stories then these are the magazines for you. Very recommended
17 reviews1 follower
January 8, 2015
Art work and stories are fantastic!

There's nothing like hand drawn original comics. I enjoy these flashbacks to the horror comics of the sixties so much.
Profile Image for OmniBen.
1,382 reviews48 followers
February 20, 2021
(Zero spoiler review)
Not that this is something you can really spoil, as its a collection of dozens of short stories, each running around the 10 pages mark. You couldn't spoil this anymore than you could spoil the dictionary. There is literally far too much going on to ever really get a handle on it. Now, these stories are over 50 years old, so if you are looking for something pushing the boundaries of modern horror, either conceptually or narratively, then you will be sorely disappointed. In fact, there is more cheese on offer here than an geriatric sexual health clinic. More cheese than could cover an annual supply of Garfield's lasagne. More cheese than... you get the picture. Nothing here is even remotely scary, unless you are someone who finds the Count on Sesame Street a little unsettling. And even though I found myself rolling my eyes now and then at the rather mundane twists and turns the book takes, this more dated form of horror (if horror was ever the right word) actually gave up the books greatest strength as well. The fact that it was so old and dated, meant there wasn't a modern, progressive angle to be seen for miles. Just simple short, scary tales, penned and pencilled without a second thought for who might find this or that offensive or uncomfortable. Now, there is no intent on the books part to be offensive. This wasn't some ancient form of edgey trolling. It was just people with an interest in the medium telling stories for people who also had an interest in the medium. What a novel concept I know, but there you have it. I would have been far more on board if the stories were given more time and space to breathe. There were some interesting angles and ideas on display here, but there is only so much you can do within the confines of a few pages. That being said, there are still a few little gems to be found within this collection, but you have to wade through more than your fair share of big standard stories to find them. The art is mostly stellar, and really kept me turning the pages after I'd lost interest in the stories. I would love to see some the best examples refurbished and coloured. It could easily stand alongside the best current artists of today.
In closing, Eerie Archives wasn't quite what I thought it would be. There is enough here to hook fans of this genre or this time period, although for me, all the things that this book was, wasn't enough to make up for all the things it wasn't. Still decent though. 3/5

OmniBen.
Profile Image for Nicholas Driscoll.
1,428 reviews15 followers
February 21, 2021
This sister publication that goes with the Creepy series. It mostly follows the familiar pattern of Creepy and the older Tales from the Crypt/EC comics. This time we have another horror host who is a cookie cutter of all the others (rivalry with Creepy, lots of gallows humor and puns, ugly face, etc). The stories I thought were more effective overall than the first volume of Creepy. The stories were all horror and didn't include any of the sci-fi stuff that was included in Creepy, which I think makes the publication feel more consistent. It felt like it was relying a bit less on werewolves and vampires as Creepy did, too--but I did miss the adaptations of classic horror stories that were in Creepy. Also, props for including a dinosaur story in the fifth issue!

It's kind of funny reading the letters page, too, and how the writers use lots of slang from the era. They were too much!
Profile Image for NOLA Bert.
95 reviews4 followers
March 16, 2024
Great collection of the first 5 issues of Eerie. The stories vary in setting, some in medieval times, some in Victorian England, some in modern times. All involve horror and often with twist endings (with sardonic commentary from Cousin Eerie). The art is superb with incredible covers by Frazetta and Gray Morrow! The stories range from good to excellent. Most are written by Archie Goodwin. I read the digital edition that I got in a Humble Bundle.
554 reviews
December 30, 2022
Eeerie go!

First archive of six issues of Eerie with great artwork from comic illuminaries. The influences are of classic EC tradition. Fun stories all around with some unexpected endings. Of course, cousin Eerie usually dishes out groaners of atrocious puns that are a bit tame in some respects. Still recommended.
Profile Image for Dave.
993 reviews
March 25, 2024
The first five issues of Eerie, collected. (1965-1966)
The art work is great. The black and white format really helps in telling the stories.
But be warned, if you're NOT a fan of the twist ending, then put this collection down.
The original adds are also included and they are fun to look at. (Some of these adds were still in comics, when I was a kid in the 70s)
Spooky fun!!!!
Profile Image for Peter.
4,073 reviews801 followers
April 21, 2024
Absolutely amazing. The first issues of this legendary series in one volume. Image of Blackbeard, Death Plane, The Invitation, Frankenstein, One For The Money, Eye of the Beholder... great titles and twisty stories. Back then comics were fresh and exciting. Loved to reread those classics. Highly recommended. This is horror's golden past.
Profile Image for Tony Delgado (Comics).
26 reviews
January 26, 2021
The art is the real star of this collection, and it's a real all-star lineup with Colan and Toth being some of my favorites. Nonetheless, the writing, by Archie Goodwin, is great fun, with a macabre twist to each so story.
Profile Image for Jessica.
501 reviews2 followers
Read
February 10, 2021
Meh.

Maybe I've read too many horror anthology comics lately, but nothing stood out. The host is a poor man's Uncle Creepy, and the stories are nothing special.

I didn't hate this, but I did have to force myself to finish it before I had to return it.
Profile Image for Everett Parks.
17 reviews1 follower
December 15, 2021
The art is superb. The stories are well crafted. There is a continual pattern of macabre and humor that is welcoming and lets the reader know they don’t take themselves too seriously while being masters of their craft. Absolutely marvelous.
Profile Image for Stano Várady.
161 reviews2 followers
January 30, 2022
Pulpové 60's hororové poviedky, upíri, vlkolaci, ghúlovia, mágovia a šialení profesori. Trochu slabšie ako výber prvých vydaní sesterského časopisu Creepy, no stále neskutočný art, ktorý by im mohli závidieť veľkí vydavatelia ešte aj dnes. 3,5*.
Profile Image for Josh Boucher.
41 reviews
July 1, 2025
It was good. The art is really stellar. The stories basically all end the same way, but that’s fine. There are so a lot of … Dr Frankenstein characters lol. I’m really curious how future issues of Eerie potentially changed up the formula present here
Profile Image for J.R. Santos.
Author 17 books18 followers
October 14, 2023
Every bit kt it was wonderful! Can't get enough of the art and the puns, and the silly twists.
558 reviews14 followers
November 18, 2023
Great 60s work from Alex Toth, Steve Ditko in his prime, Gene Colan, Joe Orlando, Al Williamson, and a host of others over EC style horror shorts. Unspectacular but uniformly very good.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.