Oh, Uncle Creepy, You Are a Naughty One.

Once, decades ago, there was a boy. This boy was frequently dragged to flea markets by his antique-loving parents. This was largely torture and nowhere near as fun as the sign-stealing trips to abandoned gas stations that the boy and his dad used to take. (We had many Mail Pouch Tobacco thermometers. I don't know why, except that my dad thought they were cool.) But most flea markets had at least one stall selling dusty old comic books at bargain prices, and it was here that the boy would spend his time leafing through old issues of Charleton Comics Fightin' Army or Kamandi. Usually, having spent his allotted amount, the boy would track down his parents, who would still be oohing and aahing about some ancient knick-knack they'd found. But once, the boy came back with a stack of black and white horror magazines bearing the names Creepy and Eerie. Now, the boy's mom was a pretty open-minded ex-hippie who was pretty difficult to appall. She objected to too much television on principle and the sexism of James Bond movies, but she and the boy went to see Fellini Satyricon when the boy was in the seventh grade, so this was not an uptight household. This makes it very difficult to be a rebellious pre-teen. But here, finally, were some pop culture artifacts that were just appalling to the boy's mom. She insulted the magazines' readership with unprintable (by me, anyway) epithets. A love affair was born. And yet, like so many love affairs that happen in early adolescence, it was a fleeting passion that burned out all too quickly. The magazines lay forgotten in a box somewhere, and were probably thrown out with relish by the boy's mom when she moved. Still, though, a tiny flame burned in the boy's heart, and it rekindled into quite a blaze when the boy found out that Creepy and Eerie are now collectors' items that fetch many tens of dollars per issue in the unlikely event you can pry one from the cold dead hands of a collector. And now, Dark Horse Comics has begun reprinting old issues of Creepy, with Uncle Creepy introducing demented tales of terror. And the boy bought the reprint, was mocked by his offspring for spending fifty bucks on a comic book, and it was good.