Eerie #139 - Warren

I has talked about the last issue of Creepy awhile back and so I thought it was past due to talk about the end of Eerie, too.

I've always been interested in final issues, final episodes(I've watched final episodes of TV shows I've never watched previously...weird, I know). So I purposely sought out these final Warren publications to see how they ended their legendary runs.

Of course, this is a final issue only on a techincal sense, in that there was never an Eerie #140, but Warren didn't know that at the time, so this issue doesn't have any special "goodbye" content. Heck, even poor Cousin Eerie's face is obscured by a blurb. Sheesh!

Anyway, the cover is by the legendary Kelly Freas, about the issue's main feature, an adaptation of A.E. Van Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle!" by Rich Margopoulos and Luis Bermejo. It's about the lone survivor of an alien race that comes across pesky--yet delicious--group of human space explorers, who foolishly let it aboard their ship. The story continues into Part 3, which appears after the color insert.

The insert was Warren's experiment in "color comics", a standard-size comic story bound into the inside of the magazine. The story in this case is "Infinity Force" by Bill DuBay and Rudy Nebres. A group of space travelers discover a mysterious metal that allows them to travel back in time, where they run the risk of destroying all of humanity.

I never fully understood what the point of these color insert sections were--they looked and read like regular Warren stories, yet they were in a regular comics size, sort of stitched dead center into the rest of the magazine. Weird.

"Space Beagle" Part 3 picks up here, with the hunt for the mysterious, muderous alien continuing. The crew of the Beagle do find a way to defeat the alien...maybe.

And...that's it. We get some fun Captain Company pages(Star Wars stuff, posters, Biotron, Warren back issues, even some DC Comics...never did understand that), and then Eerie is officially history.

While I enjoyed the "Beagle" story just fine, I could never quite accept all the sci-fi that appeared in Eerie. I thought the stories should be more...eerie. Y'know, ghosts, monsters, demons, or just people gone plum loco. But at this point, Warren Publishing was responding to trends, not creating them, so if kids wanted sci-fi, that's what they got. Poor Cousin Eerie seemed out of place in his own magazine.