Eerie 38

Eerie #38 will be today's issue. The cover is a good one by Ken Kelly, featuring a bald fanged creature fighting off a snake. The frontis is "Eerie's Monster Gallery: The Mothman of West Virginia", based on real life reports of the creature. It is drawn by Jaime Brocal and written by Doug Moench.

Moench also handles the first story of the issue, "Stake in the Game" about a vampire that works in a blood bank who is discovered by a photographer. The story is drawn by Jose Gual. At 20 pages, this is one of the longest non-serial stories to appear in Eerie, and is actually split in two parts with the second part wrapping up the issue. Unfortunately the story completely collapses on itself when it is revealed that another doctor in the blood bank is also a vampire. The fact that vampires can't appear in photographs is how the photographer discovered of the other vampire's existence in the first place, yet this second vampire was there the whole time. Quite a big screwup there.

Next up is the issue's best story, "The Carrier of the Serpent", which is drawn by Jerry Granenetti and written by T.Casey Brennan. Its about a young man who teams up with a serpent to get across a dangerous desert. As the serpent gets him to do more and more cruel and evil things, the man slowly turns into a serpent creature and is unable to return to his normal life after returning home.

Up third is "A Stranger in Hell" by Esteban Maroto (art) and T.Casey Brennan (story). While Brennan had a couple of good stories at Warren (like the one I just talked about), the majority of his stories were nonscensical garbage and this is one of them. A man in hell is unable to die. I think thats what it means. While Maroto's art is great, as usual, this story just makes no sense whatsoever. It would eventually get a sequel in Creepy #61.

Last up is "The Night the Snow Spilled Blood" by Tom Sutton (art) and Don McGregor (story). The story is about an old man who kills his wife's lover only to see the man's blood everywhere, leading to his eventual capture. Like "A Stake in the Game" this story too has a significant flaw in that the central character's alibi is that he's staying with his grandmother yet he's so old looking that I can't see anyway that his grandmother could still be alive. Either Sutton screwed up by drawing the central character too old, or McGregor screwed up big time as Moench had done earlier on.

Nice artwork, but multiple screw ups in the stories make this somewhat of a 'miss' issue unfortunately.