Eerie 139

Eerie's very final issue was number 139, carrying a cover date of February 1983. Warren's bankruptcy was quite sudden, and as a result there are no signs from this issue that it would be the final one. Unfortunate that things had to go out this way. Although by this point, Warren's glory days were far, far behind them.

The majority of this issue (including the cover, by Kelly Freas) is dedicated to an adaption of A.E. Vogt's "Voaye of the Space Beagle". The artwork for this story was done by Luis Bermejo and the adaption was done by Rich Margopoulos (who did a large number of adaptions for Warren over the years). Having never read the original story, I am unable to say how good of an adaption this is. Based on some research, it appears that this adaption was only one segment of the book. It is quite a good story, if you can get around the fact that its a sci-fi story in a horror comic (although for the last 3-4 years of its existence, Eerie barely had any horror at all and was almost all sci-fi/adventure stories). The story is about an alien creature, the last of its race, that comes across a giant spaceship manned by Earthlings. The creature, which looks just like the alien from the Alien movies attempts to take over the ship and repopulate his species by inserting eggs in live human captives. Although many die, the humans aboard the ship are eventually able to outsmart the creature into leaving the ship and trap it from returning. They also are able to rescue all of the captives and ensure that the birthed aliens are quickly destroyed. Very good story for Eerie to go out with. It should be noted that this was originally meant to be a series across multiple issues, but ended up being printed in its entirety in this single issue (split into three parts).

The only other story in this issue is "The Infinity Force", by Rudy Nebres (art) and Bill Dubay (writer). Although the story is uncredited, Nebres's art is easy to identify him with and Dubay is credited as a writer on the contents page, making him the author by process of elimination. This story is in color, but not the kind of color that Warren originally did back when it first started having color stories in 1973. In the late days of Eerie, Warren returned to having color stories, but unfortunately did that as standard comic size inserts rather than the magazine size that Warren had done during its glory years of the 1970's. As a result, the art and color quality of these stories was generally quite poor compared those those it had done in the past. Anyway, this story surrounds a trio of heroes who go back in time and find out the true origin of humanity, that we were brought here by an alien civilization. A short and lousy story, as most of these types of stories were in Warren's waning days. Warren was a horror comic expert, but when it came to doing superhero stories like this, their flaws were quite apparant.

Not that bad an issue for Eerie to go out on. Eerie's quality was in the dump significantly for the last 4 years or so of its existence, and this was a nice, higher quality issue that it went out on. The fact that it has no series connections with any other issues also made it an easy one to pick as one of my early Eeries to review.