Fantagraphics continues its long and impressive history of preserving the obscure and delightful bit of comics history with The Complete Web of Horror.
As with any of the publisher’s impressive archive collections, the book’s front matter contains a wealth of information to initiate the unfamiliar of its mostly obscure subject – put together by its creators and fans for whom it was never forgotten.
Originally running three issues in 1969 and 1970, Web of Horror was a black-and-white horror magazine released by a questionable fly-by-night publisher known as Major Publications, Inc (or Major Magazines, Inc). “The whole company was about lowball imitations,” according to WoH’s editor, Terry Bisson, the publisher looked to capitalize on whatever was popular in magazine publishing at the time. Their most notable contribution to culture is Cracked, the long-running knock-off (and ongoing web presence) of the much more popular Mad Magazine (initially an EC Comic, Mad was released by Warner Bros and DC publisher National by the late-’60s and ’70s – it remains a DC Publication).
Major might best be likened to the much more influential Warren Publishing, who had their own fair share of knock-offs (Playboy competitor After Hours, the Fangoria-inspiring Famous Monsters of Filmland). More importantly for our subject, Warren had more inspired successes with the historic black-and-white pulps Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella.
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Bisson and his friend Clark Diamond had done some writing for Creepy and Eerie before Bisson found himself editing at Major; when Diamond suggested they pitch their own version of those magazines, Web of Horror was the result. Luckily, they were in a comic club with some major untapped talent, artists who had been making names for themselves in the fanzine circuit but hadn’t quite tapped into the major comics markets.
And what talents: artists like Bernie Wrightson, Bruce Jones, and Michael Wm. Kaluta, all of whom would go on to impressive success in the more mainstream Big Two sphere. Bisson and Diamond were joined by impressive writers like Marv Wolfman, Otto Binder, and Mike Friedrich.
The result was a finely crafted take on the black-and-white horror anthology, inspired by those Warren mags as well as the godfather of horror comics, EC Comics, whose Crypt-Keeper and Vault-Keeper mascots were emulated in Webster, the bizarre, spider-like host of Web of Horror. Fans of those magazines will recognize the structure of each story: an initial novelty (space or time travel, mysterious magic seeds, an unassuming costume party) inspires various protagonists to bad behavior (murder, mostly, but also general tomfoolery) before they receive, in an ironic twist, their much-deserved comeuppance.
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While any of its inspirations were home of incredible craftspeople making impeccable illustrations (and occasionally featuring luminary writers like Ray Bradbury), what set Web of Horror apart was the creator’s true passion for the medium – unlike the professionally-trained illustrators from classic cartooning ‘studios’, these were young people who had started as fans first. That passion shines through in both inspired and occasionally failed creative strives.
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Perhaps most importantly, The Complete Web of Horror is the presentation, for the first time, of the magazine’s lost fourth issue, which had been lost in the middle of its creation when Major unceremoniously – and without warning – moved shop without giving the team any forwarding information. Some of that work – whatever pages the company hadn’t absconded with – ended up in fanzines throughout the 1970s. For years, fans had whispered rumors of the other stories – lost treasures by Wrightson, Kaluta, Ralph Reese, etc.
The splash of a long-lost Bernie Wrightson story.
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Some of those pages showed up, in 2014, in a Heritage Auction that was being called The Cracked Vault Collection. Treasures of comics history, thought forever lost, were finally returned. The book closes with six of those treasures, wrapping up the magazine’s legacy and submitting that package whole.
The Complete Web of Horror is indeed complete, and it does an incredible job of presenting some remarkable early work by now-legendary creators. With its release, Web of Horror cleanly enters the wider cultural and academic zeitgeist; a shining lost artifact, found.
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