Bernie Wrightson didn't crawl out of a swamp. The man who gave us Swamp Thing got his break when he placed his artwork in the hands of editors at a comic book convention in 1967.

		11th ANNUAL PITTSBURGH COMICON Where: Pittsburgh ExpoMart, Monroeville. When: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. today 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday;10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $17; 8 and under free; $45 for 3-day pass. Details: www.pittsburghcomicon.com.

"I was just a teenager," he says, "hauling my work around for anyone who wanted to look."

It might be a little harder these days, but this scenario still takes place at conventions like the Pittsburgh Comicon, taking over the Pittsburgh ExpoMart today through Sunday.

The young artist clutching a portfolio is just one more "type" in a virtual sea of them. In addition to the comics geeks and sci-fi geeks that make up the bulk of the Comicon crowd, there are gamers, horror freaks, anime fans and wrestling nuts.

Zombie fans are walking tall, as this year's convention focuses on the "Living Dead" series with guest of honor director George Romero, accompanied by a legion of Dead-heads from "Night of the Living Dead" and "Dawn of the Dead."

Also in the horror genre, Kane Hodder, better known as Jason Vorhees from the "Friday the 13th" series, will be someone worth keeping a close eye on. Fantasy is well represented by four stars from "Farscape" and Rystall the dancer, Amanaman and Shaak-Ti from the "Star Wars" series. From the wrestling world, there's Luscious Johnny Valiant, Johnny Diamond and Sandman.

Mostly, though, there are comic artists from legends to indie types working their own presses. Along with Wrightson, watch out for George Perez, the master behind the recent JLA/Avengers crossover; Michael Turner, the man behind the six-part story for the Batman/Superman series; John Romita Jr., who continued his father's work on Spider-Man; and Adam Hughes, who loves the ladies like Wonder Woman and Tomb Raider.

There's even a film festival with anime and superhero flicks. We can't tell you everything, because the Comicon, presented by Comics World in Windber, Somerset County, is massive. For details, go to www.pittsburghcomicon.com.

BERNIE WRIGHTSON: IT CAME FROM THE SWAMP

Bernie Wrightson says that fans at comic book conventions are surprised when they meet him.

"I think they expect me to be this guy with pale skin and long, black fingernails. I think they're a little surprised when I seem like a regular guy. I just tell them, 'Thank God I had an outlet.' "

Indeed, Wrightson has built a reputation as "the master of the macabre," a title he seems to share with Edgar Allan Poe, George Romero, Stephen King and Dario Argento, among others. Wrightson doesn't know where his fascination with horror came from, but he suspects it had something to do with a certain biblical story.

"I blame my Catholic upbringing," he says in an interview from his home in the San Fernando Valley. "A lot of the really best horror writers seem to come out of a strict Catholic background. When I was a kid, we had a big crucifix in the center of the church and I used to stare at this poor pathetic figure that was dripping blood. It has an effect."

As a kid, Wrightson was never really stirred by superheroes and their supernatural powers. Rather than DC Comics, he was attracted by EC Comics, which published lurid books like "Vault of Horror" and "Tales from the Crypt" in the mid-1950s before they ran afoul of the government's Comics Code Authority, which objected to images of severed heads being marketed to children.

Wrightson idolized Frank Frazetta, who had started out with comics like "Shining Knight" for DC and then in the '60s moved on to darker material like "Creepy," "Vampirella" and "Wolfman."

"My style developed naturally," Wrightson says, "but he had a lot to do with forming my style. When I was young, I just copied everything he did. That's what I tell people, just copy from the people you really admire."

Wrightson met Frazetta and others when he was about 20 at a comic book convention in New York City in 1967 and got his break a few years later with House of Mystery. Shortly after that, he was hired to work with Len Wein on the mutant from Louisiana that would make him a legend: Swamp Thing. The first issue, appearing in late 1972, told the story of a young scientist, Alec Holland, who had become a dripping part-plant, part-human monster out to avenge the death of his wife.

"We wanted to do a character that would resonate with the audience," Wrightson says. "Just the idea of a monster as a hero was always very appealing to me. He was the outsider."

Swamp Thing eventually took on a life of his own, hitting the big screen in 1982 and even becoming a TV series on USA in the '90s. Wrightson stayed with his creature for only 10 issues before moving on to other projects.

One of the more notable was "Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein," a book of amazingly detailed black-and-white illustrations that depict Mary Shelley's monster and the doctor's laboratory with a madness and frenzy never before imagined.

"That iconic vision of Frankenstein from the movies is brilliant," Wrightson says, "one of the most arresting faces ever created. It has absolutely nothing to do with the book. When I read the book, the monster is really not described at all. You could come up with anything. They don't mention him being sewed together. All they mention is flowing black hair. But it's alluded to in the novel that none of this is very clean. It's a charnel-house atmosphere."

Beginning in the '80s, Wrightson was called upon to create monsters for Hollywood. The first one was for "Ghostbusters," where they were "looking for artists who could draw something scary and make it funny at the same time." Most of the time, he says, movie monsters are designed by committee.

"It's very seldom that one artist designs everything, like H.R. Giger designing 'Alien.' That made it to the screen virtually intact. Most of the time they want a lot of interpretations. They say, 'Look at these [drawings] and see what you can do to push the design.' "

More recently, Wrightson worked on the Green Goblin character for "Spider-Man," a werewolf for Wes Craven and on "The Faculty" creature, which he says turned out closest to his original design.

Back in publishing, Wrightson has worked on Batman and Punisher books, and also with Stephen King, most recently on the "Dark Tower V" cover. "He's the perfect guy to work with," Wrightson says. "He tells you, 'Don't tell me how to write, I won't tell you how to draw.' "

As he was talking, Wrightson was sweating through a 90-degree heat wave in California and looking forward to his trip East. He had one request, one that suits his horror tendencies. "See if you can work up a good thunderstorm for me."

DICK KULPA: ARTIST ON CRACKED

Dick Kulpa's resume, besides showing an affinity for the bizarre, reads like the work of a man with multiple personalities. How do you serve as the editor of the Weekly World News ("I HAD BIGFOOT'S BABY!") and also on city council? How do you go from the "Star Trek" strip for the L.A. Times Syndicate to Cracked magazine?

Kulpa, at 51, calls himself the world's oldest juvenile delinquent. As a kid, he was a voracious reader of comics and encyclopedias. He was impatient, too. If the newest Marvel wasn't out, he grabbed something else. Like Mad. One day he picked up Cracked.

Now, all these years later, Kulpa is trying to revive the 46-year-old satirical magazine as editor and publisher. He realizes that people look at Cracked as the poor man's Mad -- Mad started in '52, Cracked in '58 -- but that isn't stopping him.

"A lot of people look at us, they said, 'Oh, yeah, you ripped off Mad.' My answer to that is: Ford was here first, let's get rid of all the Chevys, because the Chevy looks kind of like a Ford. They've got four wheels and a steering wheel and windows. Or look at the football teams. How many different ones are there now? 32? Let's knock it to one. Let's just have the Chicago Bears and forget the rest of them and then they can win all the games. That's how I relate Cracked to Mad."

Kulpa started out doing newspaper strips out of Loves Park, Ill., where, while serving on city council, he would occasionally wear a superhero costume. In the mid-'80s he ventured off for the more serious work of the Weekly World News, which during his tenure uncovered the mysteries of Bat-Boy and Bigfoot and broke stories like this: "12 U.S. SENATORS ARE SPACE ALIENS!"

He's mum now on the WWN because of a confidentiality thing he signed, but he loves to talk about Cracked. He bought it in 2000 and kept it alive on credit cards. Now, it's working its way back as a quarterly publication with a circulation between 25,000 and 40,000. Plans for a Cracked DVD and television show are in the works.

"We're trying to establish who the hell we are," Kulpa says. "Now, it's not as cut-and-dried as it was in the '60s when you had The Establishment vs. The Little Guy. What I do see is hard times ahead for kids, so it's Kids against So-Called Progress."

Cracked targets its satire at 10- to 16-year-olds, while also aiming to appeal to the kid in all of us.

"Weekly World has a great way of doing things. And Cracked can now do the same thing," he says. "Comic books, so many of them are reliant on beautiful graphics, shiny paper, precision stuff like that. Wait a minute -- if you want to launch an art gallery, go ahead. People are entertained by what you have to say. ... What really powers magazines is the humanity and the soul within it."

What we need, he thinks, is more of the spirit that first drew him to comics as a kid. And at a cheap price.

"Comics of the Golden Age and Silver Age, they were not meant to be collectors. They were created to entertain. I'm not sitting here trying to make collector's items. Neither did Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Curt Swan, Julius Schwartz. They didn't create them to be collector's items. They created them because it was a gig, because they enjoyed doing that work. Even in the old Superman stories of the '60s they would come up with these unique, weird stories and you had to read it, like the Fat Superman standing next to the thin Superman. Now you look at a comic book -- and I watch people in stores -- it's gone. There's nothing on a comic book cover except monsters and teeth. What are they going to buy? Give them something that kids are going to be interested in again. That's what I'm trying to do with Cracked."

CHRIS YAMBAR: FROM MR. BEAT TO MR. BART

Chris Yambar, an official member of the Caffeine Cult Society, is the kind of comic-book artist who likes to keep a number of balls in the air. One week, he's painting for Disney, the next he's working on the revival of Jetta, a 1950s comic character from outer space.

In comic shops, Yambar is best known as the creator of the underground comic Mr. Beat, but he's also one of the main writers for the Bart Simpson Comics, for which he's recently collaborated with Gene Simmons and Alice Cooper.

What Yambar is not is the typical Marvel-style comic illustrator. The 42-year-old who still makes his home in Youngstown -- "I love the blue-collar ethic" -- recalls being bribed with comics from an early age.

"My dad bribed me with comics to sit still for haircuts. I started with Casper the Ghost and moved on to Hot Stuff and to Tarzan. Then, it all happened. I got an issue of Spider-Man in '64-65 (they said I was reading early). I started getting into superhero comics, especially Marvel. Batman was cool."

Then, in the summer of '73, he says, "somehow I got a copy of Zap Comics and I discovered underground comics, especially R. Crumb, with the Snoid and just about every other wrong thing you could think of. I realized you could draw anything you want. It didn't have to be the mainstream gig. Everybody wanted to do superhero comics, but after you read them for 10 years, you see the same stories recycled, and ... so what?"

Ten years ago, Yambar created Mr. Beat, a jazz-loving, beret-wearing, big-nosed secret agent with a special room in the back of his coffee shop.

"You and I could open it and it's just a broom closet," Yambar says. "He gets knocks on the door from the inside and gets sucked into a situation in the mega-verse. And he has to use his thinking to make things right. The more you know about pop culture and history, the more fun Mr. Beat is."

Mr. Beat led Yambar to Mr. Bart. The folks at Bongo Comics were reading Mr. Beat and considered him subversive enough to write the debut issue of "Bart Simpson" in 2000. "People say, 'Oh, you just write for that.' I say, 'Without the writing, they just kind of stand around with their big eyes sticking out.' The hardest thing about writing for the Simpsons is finding new things for them to do."

The one time the characters are written "off the model" is for the annual book called "Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror." For the Monsters of Rock issue, coming in October, Yambar, a Kiss fan from way back, got to work on stories with Gene Simmons and Alice Cooper. The latter, he says, was very story-driven. As for Simmons, he says, "in about 40 minutes, we came up with the bones of it and he said, 'You fill in the rest.' That was a lot to fill in, trust me. He had a lot of ideas I was just not going to do with the Simpsons."

Working with those guys, Yambar says, fits his rock 'n' roll philosophy of "Let's go. We have this moment. Let's live to the fullest and get out there and shake hands and, hey, I think we'll get paid, too.

"If you're going to be an artist," he says, "you have to be an exhibitionist."