The late, great Bernie Wrightson was born on this date in 1948. Did being born four days before Halloween turn young Bernie down macabre paths? Who can say? All I can say is that I can’t understand why it took me this long to do a Bernie birthday post. Bernie and Halloween go together like a night-mare and a spectral carriage.

Bernie and Edgar Allan Poe—who met his dismal fate in the lonesome October—also make a great combo. Mr. Wrightson obviously thought so, because he chose EAP’s darksome tales as the subject for his very first portfolio in 1976, The Edgar Allan Poe Portfolio Published by the somewhat mysterious Christopher Enterprises, who had put out portfolios by Alex Nino and Michael Wm. Kaluta in 1975, Wrightson’s portfolio contained eight full-color 12 x 16 plates which were housed in a trifold sleeve. It was limited to two thousand copies and most were signed by Wrightson.

As I recall, the cover for The Edgar Allan Poe Portfolio was the first Wrightson art I ever saw, by way of an ad in the back of an old black & white Marvel magazine I picked up somewhere. The revenant bursting from his (premature?) grave rocked me pretty hard. I figured it was way too late to order one and it was out of my preteen price range anyway. I did barely snag Bernie’s Apparitions portfolio a few years later. Signed copies of the EAP portfolio now go for upwards of five hundred dollars. What might’ve been…

Apparitions was Wrightson in his prime. The Edgar Allan Poe Portfolio sees Bernie transitioning from his comic book roots into the master of macabre art who would later create some of the greatest Frankenstein illustrations ever put to paper. There were a few birthing pangs involved.. While the plates below are still Bernie-frikkin’-Wrightson, some of them are a bit hard to suss out. Wrightson doesn’t appear quite as in control of his brush as in later years. Also, I would’ve skipped “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and gone for something a bit more horrific. However, don’t let my quibbles dissuade you; these are early gems from the brush of Bernie Wrightson and I am very glad to be able to view them in digital form, at least.

The scans below are from Bernie’s original paintings. The Christopher Enterprises versions tend to be darker and less vibrant.

Here’s the cover for the portfolio, a version of which I saw in the back of that old Marvel magazine.

Here is a DMR Blog bonus: the original painting of “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Here’s why it was rejected by Christopher Enterprises’ printer, courtesy of Wrightson scholar, Christopher Zavisa:

"One of the first paintings completed for the Edgar Allan Poe Portfolio was 'The Pit and the Pendulum'. Wrightson experimented using an impasto technique -- painting with very thick, broad strokes. The colors were very dark, being made up primarily of blacks, and browns. When the painting was finished, it was then varnished with a high gloss to protect it. The result, when lit by the printers' lights was a glare making it impossible to reproduce. When informed of the technical limitations of his painting, Wrightson painted a second version which was dominated by great areas of dark green. Wrightson's original idea for the 'Pendulum' painting can be seen in the photograph of Jeff Jones as the hapless victim of the Inquisition. Wrightson painted Jones chained to a cold concrete slab awaiting the blade of the pendulum."