Skywald Publications was a rival of Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella that flourished for about four years in the early 1970s. It offered non-Comics Code violence and nudity as well as some gorgeous artwork. Like the Warren magazines as well as the Marvel black & white magazines that forced them out, the Skywald stories were usually set in creepy castles. Sometimes they were set in the North.
Weird Northerns date back to the the magazines of the 1900s so there is nothing really new here. The tropes are pretty familiar: things usually don’t work out well for hunters, many are too blind to see the truth…and snow is bad.
The first story Skywald did was “A Father’s Lament” (Nightmare #7, June 1972), written by Ed Fedory and illustrated by Frank Cueto. The plot has a father and son come upon a dead man in the deep woods. A diary tells the story of the man who tracked a werewolf and ultimately killed it with an axe he made. The father believes the diary writer is mad and takes the axe because of its quality. The dead man, a werewolf revives and watches them walk away.
Ed Fedory was back with another tale of snow a month later with “Snow-Bound!” (Nightmare #8, August 1972), illustrated by Felipe Dela Rosa. A ship is stranded in the Arctic ice and the men are starving. When one of the dogs gets unruly, the sailors kill it and eat it. Later someone is mysteriously killing off crew members to increase their chances of surviving. In the end we find it is the captain. He comes to kill the ship’s doctor but the man doesn’t care. He knows the truth. They are all dead men. The dog they ate had been rabid.
The last tale of the north is something special. It was the debut of Dave Sim, the man who would give us Cerebus the Aardvark two years later. “The Cry of the White Wolf” (Psycho #24, March 1975) had art by Luis Collado. William Ashton Perry is hunting wolves with some friends. He tries to bait the wolves by pretending to be dead. A white wolf sees him but doesn’t fall for the trap. Since it is almost dark the other hunters leave. Perry goes on hunting in the dark. He sees the white wolf again and shoots. The animal is lying in the snow. When he comes for his prize, the wolves attack. The white wolf was using the same trick Perry had earlier. The next day the hunters find his torn corpse.
That’s about it. Just three stories. If Skywald had survived its business issues we might have seen more. Other companies would, of course, carry on the Northern tradition. For Marvel and DC weird Northerns look here.
These comics are available free at https://archive.org/details/skywald-comics
