UTTER TRASH

UTTER TRASH

by Mike Baron

Vampirella: The Bloodsuckers Bible

Vampirella, an attractive young lady wearing the remains of a silk handkerchief, came from the planet Drakulon where blood flows like water; in streams. They drink it from mugs there, and nobody calls them bloodsuckers. But through an unfortunate series of catastrophes Vampirella was displaced to the planet Earth, alone and thirsty. She was surprised to discover that blood flows only in veins down there.

Vampi’s adventures are chronicled monthly in an elegant comic book called Vampirella, sister magazine to the equal*, ly elegant Creepy and Eerie: black and white, large-format comics selling for 75 cents apiece, featuring tales of gore, vampirism, cannibalism, science fiction, sodomy, suffering and ecological retribution. They are not controlled by the Comics Code Authority, that industrycreated board of censors which Watchdogs subject matter in lieu of offical government censorship. The Code paws the ground and lifts its keen nose to the morning breeze, questing for a whiff of sex or the consequences of violence (blood and bones); two elements which appear with some frequency in Warren stories. Warren kicks are not for kids.

Would you want your kid to stare at bodies being ripped asunder? In detail? Does the prospect of the near-nude Vampirella bending over her sleeping I male victim fill you with dread, dismay, or both? Do you suffer from Fear or Mind Rot?

Jim Warren, editor and publisher of the comics, does not deliberately attempt to erode moral health. As a life-long lover of the comics and graphic arts in general, he is in the process of moving comics into a more respectable niche in the unsteady wall of American art by giving his contributors more or less complete freedom to tell their own stories. He’s on one side of the fence and straight comics, along with their watchdog the Code, are on the other.

“We couldn’t compete with the comics on their own terms in the early 1960’s because there was the Comics Code Authority. I didn’t like comics because of the Code. I didn’t approve of the comics because the Comics Code Authority — big word, *authority’ — turned me off terribly. I don’t like any authority or any outside party telling me what's good or bad in the way of graphics.”

Back in the early fifties during the big communist scare, comics received a peripheral flurry of attacks from outraged parents and psychiatrists who had just become aware of the . . . uh, somewhat questionable stories and art in so-called “crime” and “horror” comics. Although the heat has since dissipated, censorship still exists and the result is a flow of comics that are almost uniformly bland. So Warren placed his publications outside the Code.

The result has been a remarkable series of stories dealing not only with traditional themes of terror and the supernatural, on which the basic formats of the magazines are based, but with modern themes in every region; industrial caveats, perceptive comments on the changing quality of life, and short morality lessons on the relationship between power and justice in the United States. The graphics have been excellent, undiminished by the strict stylistic control suffered by other comics.

Fifteen years ago Warren began a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland, a pulp publication featuring synopsi of current horror films and many, many gory pin-ups. The level of writing was not high; the larger portion of the rag was given over to pictures accompanied by intolerable puns; i.e., scene of corpse with ax inserted six inches into skull: “Ohh, have I got a splitting headache!” Sounds too much like a James Bond movie. Despite the dubious literary quality. Famous Monsters performed an important function in attracting many of the artists and writers who would later contribute to the three horror comics.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 74.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 54.

Warren considers his three magazines to be in direct competition with other comics, particularly the offering of National (Superman) and Marvel (Spiderman). But where the latter companies dictate policy from a clinical, objective, commercial viewpoint far removed from the aesthetics of story and art, Warren putsues his policy of complete artistic freedom for the contributor. “Find a good man and give him his head.”

“I was a fan of monster and horror movies and Saturday afternoon serials and comic books and everything graphic and exciting long before I was eight years old but I did not publish the magazine because I was a fan of these things* I published it as a business enterprise to make a profit.”

When he first proposed the idea of Creepy, a large format black and white comic book, he was fortunate that a number of the best talents in the field were longstanding fans of Famous Monsters despite its execrable puns. Creepy was unique to the U.S.; its stories made no compromise for the sake of age or sales: “Never underestimate your readers,” advises Warren. “We don’t.” Of course if a person is not pre-disposed towards comics in the first place, he will likely be disgusted by the Warren fare, but somebody must like them because they have been highly successful.

Creepy begat fat cousin Eerie, which begat Vampirella, Warren’s most unique baby. Warren had the option of purchasing rights to certain pulp heroes, including Tarzan and the Edgar Rice Burroughs material, but he did not wish to waste money buying temporary rights which might be returned to the estate at a future time, and in this respect, he feels he has exercised more wisdom than National and Marvel, both of which are now deeply into such old pulp heroes as Doc Savage, the Shadow, and Tarzan. Warren had always admired girl heroines, and there is a certain, supernatural mystique connected with vampirism. Jeez — did you know we were in the thick of a Dracula revival? Three books on the hoary count have been published this year; United Airlines offers a Dractila tour to Rumania. Everybody loves a vampire. I especially love Vampirella. I have a six foot poster of the delicate creature on my bedroom wall.

The exact nature of her appeal is elusive; certainly part of it is sexual. She is the acme of female beauty, a graphic type that the Warren artists have perfected. Esteban Maroto, Jose M. Bea, Jose Gonzalez and the rest can draw them in their sleep. The exquisite sameness of these mythical beings becomes distracting, as if the story tellers are dealing in abstractions and analogies that transcend, and consequently rob, the stories of much of their immediate impact as pieces of fiction.

Recently, Vampirella went through a heavy scene with that old reprobate Dracula who turned up in the series on a mystic quest for. divine exoneration. Dracula was given a series of moral tasks to perform and while his spirit was willing, his bloodlust was too strong and he flubbed it. No amnesty for Dracula. The count’s bad habits convinced the romantically-smitten Vampirella that perhaps she had ’ misplaced her devotions. A strong element of soap opera runs through the continuing saga; the series can be superficially compared to television’s “Dark Shadows,” but Vampirella features better acting. And of course television suffers from the sarnie conservative malaise as the straight comics. While a dead body may occassionally be suggested, it is seldom depicted. In Vampirella, when the bodies arrive, they do so unmistakably; trailing entrails if necessary.

The implications for comic art are fairly straightforward. Artists working without restrictions produce consistently more interesting graphics and stories than artists working within conditions. There is a matter of taste involved; the Warren group contains few superheroes. Vampirella and Dax, the Warrior, who rarely engages in superheroics, are the only ones that come to mind. I’d like to see the Warren free-wheeling method applied to a variety of characters and story types. I’d like to see Batman or Spiderman told with a similar format, without the constrictions of the code.

Warren has shown what good artists can do in black and white; now he is branching out into color publications, large, five-dollar books of his artists’ previously published Spanish editions, with translations. The first of these is visually magnificent and a rare treat for ioVers of psychedelia, but the stories are tepid, not as good as the later Warren material. Hopefully, future editions of Warren’s Dracula will contain original material and will escape the all-pervasive “Gothic” atmosphere. Gothic is great, but enough is too much.

(Reprinted from the Boston Phoenix with permission.)