I really enjoyed The Warren Companion, a new book from TwoMorrows Publishing, edited by Jon B. Cooke and David A. Roach, chronicling the company that brought us Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, Famous Monsters of Filmland and many other intermittently-wonderful magazines from the sixties and seventies. (Full Disclosure: I write a column for another TwoMorrows publication, The Jack Kirby Collector.) Expanded from an issue of Comic Book Artist, this 288-page volume is filled with interviews with Jim Warren himself and many of those who contributed stories and/or artwork to his magazines over the years. One does suspect that most parties are speaking nicer of one another than they might have, were their employer/employee relationships a more recent memory.
Still, the book does succeed in capturing a lot of what was, at the time, obviously unique to Warren Publishing. Its monarch was a charismatic, mercurial entrepreneur whose long list of skills did not include going unnoticed. Through determination and ingenuity — neither of which are intrinsic to most publishers — he built not only an empire but a new format for comics. Others emulated with much less success, and I suspect the explanation is to be found in this historical overview: Others simply did not work as hard, and throw themselves into pioneering and nurturing a fragile marketplace as did Jim Warren. Read all about it in this nifty new book.