Happened to stop at a local used record store today and noticed they had around 4 or 5 boxes of comics and other magazines, with a sign saying "Buy 1, Get 1 Free." Most of the stuff was 99 cents each. They had some oddball stuff in there, like issues of "Battlestar Galactica" and "The Krofft Supershow."
I ended up getting 4 mags (one of them a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly for 99 cents), the comics-related ones being:
So, the 4 mags together cost me only $1.49. Pretty cool, huh?
The Sherlock Holmes mag is not a comic, but a text magazine with lots of illustrations, many of them by Luis Dominguez who did many horror covers for DC in the 1970s (often signing them with his initials). There are 8 full color, full page illustrations (paintings?) by Luis (including the front & back cover), and 4 full page B&W illustrations, accompanying a new Sherlock Holmes prose adventure in the issue. It also reprints some items from The Strand Magazine from 1892.
It seems to me that these type of B&W magazines are often overlooked by fandom simply because of their different format. Also, it seems to me that they were a good way to reach beyond the regular comics-reading audience, perhaps to an older audience who was embarrassed to be seen reading a color comicbook. They also avoided the (supposed) stigma of the comics spinner, since they would be placed next to regular magazines on the magazine shelf, not next to the superhero & Archie comics. A publication like the aforementioned Sherlock Holmes mag is nearly like a modern-day (or 1970s, anyway) equivalent of an old pulp magazine like The Shadow.
I wonder why companies (or anyone) no longer publish magazines like this today. The last B&W comics magazine I remember seeing on the magazine shelves was DC's "100% Weird" which contained reprinted "strange but true" short stories from their "Big Book of..." trade paperbacks. There must be some reason that the format is no longer being done because even Love & Rockets, which was revived last year, is now the size of a comic instead of a magazine as it used to be.
Of course, MAD and Cracked magazine are still being published, although both titles now use a lot more color pages than before. Cracked was on hiatus the past several months, but a new issue finally appeared on the magazine shelves this week. (For background on Cracked's problems, click here.) The current issue of MAD contains a Spider-Man parody, with a Mort Drucker illustration of Alfred E. Newman as Spidey on the cover.
