Cool Things for the Apocalypse: Eerie Presents Hunter

While investigating the largest local new/used book store (there aren't many of them around here, unfortunately) I found a really cool gem worth mentioning:

Hunter retails for on $20 with 172 pages of gruesome post-apocalyptic tales inside, a real deal!
I snagged it for $10. Woot!

Awesome cover, and contains the full run of the "Hunter" stories presented over several years' worth of issues in Eerie magazine between 1973 and 1981. This is great stuff, and its something I would have loved back when it was new and I was too young. I remember being fascinated by the likes of Eerie, Epic, Heavy Metal, and Savage Sword of Conan....those were the "mature" cntent magazines I was forbidden from buying. By the time I had the freedom to do so, hunting down back issues was a pain...so it's great to see Eerie getting compilations like this, which I can add to my Dark Horse collection of Savage Sword of Conan (up to Volume 8 so far although I'm still reading volume 3).

If you're not familiar, Hunter is a character (the first of several, actually) who holds the name, a wandering adventurer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland as only the seventies could imagine it, inspired by the likes of Omega Man and Planet of the Apes (as the book indicates in its foreword). Hunter is a half-mutant armed with ancient artifacts of the old war, and mankind's last hope against the slavering hordes of demon-mutants. This book has all of his stories as well of those of his successors in very clean restorations of the original black and white tales. It's some got very good art. Those grognards out there who predate me by a few years probably were lucky to read some of this when it was new.

If you love mutants, post-apocalyptic adventures and that special vibe that only the seventies could pull off with its crazy spin on SF and a perpetual terror of the cold war blowing everything up for good, you'll love Hunter. You could probably get some good story bits out of this as well for a Mutant Future or Mutant Epoch campaign.

It turns out Dark Horse is reprinting all of the old Eerie magazines in archived volumes. They're a bit pricey, but I may have to start collecting them. If there's one thing I believe hasn't aged as well over the years, its comics; I don't really know why, but for me the late sixties and seventies were a unique golden age in the evolution of storytelling in comics, when story still mattered more than graphics. Anyway, I'll have to keep an eye out to see what's next in the Eerie releases now that I know about this.