Racks and Stacks - Creepshow from The New American Library

 In the Racks and Stacks series, Cody discusses the comic books he has been reading.

This week, a Stephen King horror anthology!

Back in 1982, two masters of horror – author Stephen King and director George A. Romero – teamed up to gift us with the horror anthology film Creepshow, which King wrote and Romero brought to the screen with the style and tone of the classic EC horror comics of the 1950s. 

While Creepshow looks like a comic book come to life, there was also a comic book adaptation of King’s screenplay, turning it into a graphic novel with awe-inspiring artwork by Bernie Wrightson, aided by Michelle Wrightson. 

Creepshow is one of my favorite movies and I love the comic book artform, so it’s a lot of fun to see the five stories that make up Romero’s movie – Father’s Day, The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill, The Crate, Something to Tide You Over, and They’re Creeping Up on You – represented on the page. Interestingly, that’s the order they’re presented in the comic book, which must have gone to press before the decision was made to swap the places of The Crate and Something to Tide You Over in the film.

When I was a kid in the ‘80s, my local library didn’t just have King’s work on the shelves with the other books, they gave him his own separate bookcase that stood against a back wall. Every time I visited the library, I would wander over to that bookcase and look over all the disturbing horror stories King that written. They had a copy of the Creepshow graphic novel on that bookcase, and I remember standing there in the library, leafing through it, looking at the great artwork, examining the stories that were told through that artwork. I may have already seen the movie Creepshow at that point, but I wasn’t very familiar with it, so looking through this book was one of the first times I was ever exposed to these stories. 

Now I’m very familiar with that movie, I have watched it many times – but it’s still awesome to see them drawn out on the page in the Wrightson style. The comic book form is perfect for this anthology, taking it right back to its EC Comics roots.

The host of the anthology, an insane living corpse called The Creep, is glimpsed in the movie but never speaks. That character is a much bigger presence in the comic version, as he not only gives us intros and outros for every story, but also guides us through the stories with boxes of narration. It adds a whole extra level of entertainment to the proceedings.

Reading Creepshow makes me wish Stephen King had decided that writing an on-going Creepshow comic book series would be a cool side gig, because I want a whole lot more of this. We eventually did get more Creepshow comics, though they aren’t written by King. I look forward to reading them at some point – but for right now, I’m mourning the fact that we never got a comic book adaptation of Creepshow 2.

 

Note: Marvel Comics will not be covered in Racks and Stacks articles, as they have their own article series.