Eerie (Avon)


Eerie was a one-shot horror comic book cover-dated January 1947 and published by Avon Periodicals as Eerie #1. Its creative team included Joe Kubert and Fred Kida. It was the first true, stand-alone horror comic book and is credited with establishing the horror comics genre.
After the initial issue, the title went dormant for a number of years but returned to newsstands as an ongoing title in 1951.

Description, contents, and creative team

Eerie is a full-color, 52 page, standard format, one-shot horror comic published by Avon Periodicals with a price of US$0.10 and cover-dated January 1947. The book was released as Eerie #1.
The comic book's glossy, cover depicts a red-eyed ghoul clutching a dagger and a rope-bound, voluptuous young woman in a derelict moonlit ruin. The book's contents comprised six full-length horror feature stories and a two-page humorous tale.
The issue featured six stories that were fairly tame in the depiction of the gore and violence generally found in horror fiction. "The Eyes of the Tiger" follows a man haunted by the ghost of a stuffed tiger; "The Man-Eating Lizards", tells the story of an island infested with flesh-eating lizards; and another, "The Strange Case of Henpecked Harry", follows a man spooked by the bloody corpse of his murdered wife. Other feature stories include "Dead Man's Tale", "Proof", and "Mystery of Murder Manor". A two-page humorous tale starring Goofy Ghost rounds out the issue. Members of the creative team include Fugitani and George Roussos.
Following the January 1947 issue, Eerie disappeared from newsstands shelves.

Ongoing series

In 1951, Eerie #1, cover-dated May/June 1951, was published by Avon and saw a run of seventeen issues. The first issue of Eerie reprinted "The Strange Case of Henpecked Harry" from the 1947 Eerie one-shot as "The Subway Horror", and issue #12 printed a Dracula story based on the Bram Stoker novel. Several covers featured large-breasted women in bondage. Artists Joe Orlando and Wallace Wood were associated with the series. The title saw a run of seventeen issues, ceasing publication with its August/September 1954 issue.
Eerie then morphed into the second iteration of the science fiction anthology Strange Worlds with issue #18.