Art brutal

I’ve seen a bunch of these things lately via some of the Tumblr accounts I follow that post vintage horror content, “these things” being the covers of various comics published by Eerie Publications from the late 60s through the start of the 80s… Eerie Publications is not to be confused with Eerie, the actual comic of that name which they didn’t actually publish; that came instead from Warren Publishing, who discovered Eerie P. were about to use that title and hastily trademarked it themselves. What Eerie did publish appears to have mostly been reworkings of older horror comic stories from before the advent of the Comics Code in 1954, and from what I can see Eerie’s stuff seems to have been poorly regarded in its day. Mind you, I do see one online vendor asking $150 for this particular issue, so something’s changed in more recent times…

What fascinates me is that several of these Eerie covers follow the sort of scenario this one depicts (I only picked this as a somewhat random example), i.e. monsters attacking other monsters… in this instance, what appears to be a gang of vampires being wiped out by whatever the fuck that thing’s supposed to be. Here’s another Eerie publication of the same date, for comparison…

…in which an apparently not entirely human corpse throws his own head at a vampire woman. It’s a novel choice of weapon, if nothing else (and I suppose when you’re already dead there’s no point worrying about inflicting brain damage on yourself). And the vampire woman, or ghoul woman or whatever the hell she is, is wielding an axe, so did she cut the head off in the first place? I just wonder what the reasoning was for the monsters-vs-monsters theme… I know Universal had done their “monster rally” films in the 40s where they put their classic monsters (wolf man, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster) in the same film but they weren’t at war with each other, and there was another 40s horror film called Return of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire and it also has a werewolf in it, but the werewolf is the vampire’s assistant. So I don’t think they were exactly ripping off the movies, so I’m just left wondering where the idea did come from, cos like I said, this was something they apparently did at least often-ish…

…another example from 1968 (wonder what the werewolf’s part in this situation was supposed to be)…

…and from November 1974, a bunch of ghouls challenging a vampire for the attractive brunette in the coffin…

…and from 1980, so this was something Eerie did with their cover art across their range and their lifetime. I wonder if this was more because of the artist, though? From what I can gather, the artist for these Tales of Voodoo and Weird Vampire Tales covers was one Bill Alexander, who I’m guessing (though can’t currently find confirmation) also did the rest of these, and a stack of other Eerie covers. Maybe this was his particular thing? I don’t know. I just find it kind of odd and fascinating in any case…