Number 521


Go Johnny Go!


I'm partial to the writer-artists in the EC crew: Feldstein, Craig and Kurtzman. There was a real harmonic convergence of talent at EC.

Johnny Craig was one of the slowest EC artists; like Kurtzman a perfectionist, he reworked his drawings until he got them right. It meant he didn't get as much work in, so he increased his income by writing his own material. A few issues before the horror comics were killed by EC he was given the job as editor of Vault of Horror, writing all the stories and drawing the lead.

Here are a couple of my favorite Craig stories. I read them first at age 12, and while I 'got' "Star Light Star Bright" from Vault of Horror #34, "The Tryst" in Shock Suspenstories #11 partially zipped over my head. I went to the dictionary to look up the word "tryst." Sex is the basis for the story. I knew because the young girl--"fresh out of high school," as we read on page one--is sitting on the older guy's lap in her nightgown, asking for a baby. That looked pretty hot to me at such a tender age, even if I was just a bit vague on the whole process. (I grew up sheltered, which is probably why I am the dirty old man I am today.) I understood the jealousy angle, but I didn't have the life experience to put everything, the husband's obsessive possessiveness and controlling behavior, into context.


"Star Light" is like "Reflection of Death," my favorite Feldstein story from Tales From the Crypt #23. It's told in a straightforward narrative style, then switches to the main character's point of view, then back to the reader's POV, then finishes with the main character's. There's no sex at all in this story. (Unless you count Hartley Quimb's name, "Quim" being one of those old-time euphemisms for female genitalia.) At one time I read that the casket scene in "Star Light" was inspired by a similar movie scene, but can't find anything about it in my EC reference material. If you know what movie it was please let me know.

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Number 489


The Space Suitors


I've written about this story before. There's nothing very original about "The Space Suitors," from EC's Shock Suspenstories #11. It has a standard EC sex and revenge plot: a cheating wife and her partner conspire to murder the husband, and in the end get their EC-style justice. (Sex and infidelity are the basis of three of the four stories in this issue.) It has a science fiction setting, which doesn't have anything to do with the core of the story, just makes that EC-style justice seem all the more horrible. Reed Crandall's artwork raises it above the ordinary. He makes all of the EC clichés seem much fresher.

Nowadays gory stuff is so commonplace that any routine episode of one of the CSI TV programs can contain more gore than any pre-Code comic book, but in 1954 when "The Space Suitors" was published it would have been a startling experience for anyone not familiar with comic books to come across the panel of the murdered man's exploded head. It sure was for my brother, who was about 10-years-old when I shoved it in his face and said, "Look!" with all of the sadistic glee any big brother has in torturing a younger sibling. My brother never looked at another EC comic book after that. That was OK with me. Milt's "bloated ruptured face" helped keep my brother away from my collection.

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Number 134

EC: Preachy-ing to The Choir


Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, as publisher and editor of EC Comics, had social consciousness. They published several stories they called "preachies," which were stories told, EC-style, to demonstrate the racist and uglier side of life in America.

The preachy in Shock Suspenstories #11* is "In Gratitude," drawn by Wally Wood. The message is straightforward. A young soldier, Joey, returns home a hero from Korea. He has been wounded and lost his hand. His best buddy threw himself on a hand grenade and saved Joey's life. Because his buddy, Hank, had no family Joey has his remains sent home for burial in the town cemetery. The undertaker calls Joey's parents, as well as other townies, and they protest having this black person buried in their cemetery.

Click on pictures for full-size images.

  In the climactic scene Joey gets up to the podium and chews out the bigots, then sits down and cries while they walk out in silence.

Maybe no one thought about this in 1953 when it was published, but the only people shown in the story are white people. Hank, when he's shown, is pictured so his race can't be easily determined.

In a nutshell this was what I find nowadays to be outdated about the EC Preachies. White people were most often the springboards for their stories. The minority group members, blacks, Jews, Mexicans, whomever, were just props. Because of the strict storytelling strictures of EC Comics there had to be a shock ending, so the minority characters were often just a way of fooling the reader until the denouement.

"In Gratitude" was spotlighted in the documentary on the first Tales From The Crypt TV series DVD, "Tales From The Crypt: From Comic Books to Television." What wasn't mentioned that put it in some sort of historical context is that the story appeared a year before the landmark "Brown v Board Of Education" ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, two years before the savage murder of Emmett Till, three years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and ten years before the March on Washington, all watershed events in the history of Civil Rights. In all of those events African-Americans were the group that had to take action. They couldn't just depend on white people, even well-meaning white people producing comic books in New York, to precipitate the action.

As well-meaning as "In Gratitude" was, I believe that anyone who believed strongly in segregation wouldn't be swayed by this story, and the readers who would most likely be in agreement with the story would be people who had a predisposition to that philosophy. I don't think the Preachies changed anybody's minds, but even while saying that, it was brave of EC to publish them. In those days of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Civil Rights as an issue was viewed in about the same light as Communism. It was a threat to the American way of white people having absolute power and minorities knowing their "place."


*In case you're interested, two other stories from Shock Suspenstories #11 are covered in Pappy's #102 and Pappy's #99 .

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Number 102

EC: Adultery That's Out Of This World!


"The Space Suitors," appeared in EC Comics' Shock Suspenstories #11, October-November 1953. My first take on this issue was in Pappy's #99.

This story, in its short six pages, embodies everything that EC's science fiction and horror comics are remembered for: great art, sex, and gruesome dead bodies. The art is by longtime fan favorite Reed Crandall. He started his career early in the history of comics, doing Blackhawk for many years before moving to EC. In my opinion his artwork took on an air of sophistication as well as inspiration when he was given his editorial freedom to draw it how he saw fit. Crandall could draw anything, and draw it well. If he had a weakness it was that his characters often looked posed, almost like statues. He didn't have the fluidity of movement in his artwork that Jack Davis did, but he more than made up for it in the mood his drawings could bring to a story.

The story plot is EC 101: Guy falls in love with other man's wife, wife and lover plot to kill husband (didn't anyone in EC Comics ever hear of a divorce?), they kill the spouse, and the adulterous couple get the tables turned on them, usually in a most horrible fashion.

In this case we have a futuristic science fiction setting. Lots of things in the future look more modern, but the old standbys of human nature, sex and jealousy, haven't changed. Milt is the cuckolded husband, being two-timed by his partner Don and his cheating wife, Wanda. The story begins in the present, right after Milt finds out that Don's claims of a uranium-rich strike on an asteroid have been a lie, that he's been lured there to be killed.

Click on pictures for full-size images.

Wanda is not only an adulterous wife, she's vindictive, too. Before he dies she wants Milt to know what's going to happen after he's dead. She and Don are going back to the spaceship to do the interstellar-bop! Milt, who's not as dumb as Wanda and Don think he is, tells them he has known for some time about them. Well, let's hope a guy who is able to get rich has some smarts about him.

The story moves into flashback, as we find out when Don and Wanda meet they are instantly attracted. Since this is only a six-pager they have to get it on quick, which is represented by a panel of Wanda telling Don how she's hot for his body, and him indicating he has "a plan."

Back in the present on the asteroid, when Milt realizes he's going to be killed, he tells them what will happen if they kill him.

Milt and Wanda have a quick discussion and decide he's bluffing. So Don shoots Milt with his deluxe-looking Rocket Ranger gun, or whatever that contraption is that's in his hand. It actually looks more like a paint sprayer. But this is where comic book coloring comes in handy. Colorist Marie Severin colored the whole hand and gun scarlet red: red for blood, red for danger, red for sex. Even without seeing any projectile or ray from the barrel of the gun, we see Milt has been hit. This is a particularly effective panel.

But Milt wasn't bluffing! He hit the toggle as he died and the rocket ship took off, leaving Don and Wanda staring at each other in shock and horror. Oops! Honey, we screwed up! The next panel is a classic: Milt's "bloated, ruptured face," looking like a tomato dropped on the floor. I'm showing you this in color from the printed comic and in black and white from the Russ Cochran deluxe set of Shock Suspenstories. Once again the coloring by Marie Severin has heightened the shock value of this panel, although even without the color Reed Crandall's inspired drawing has created a terrifying and gruesome portrait of a dead man.

The last panel repeats the "bloated, ruptured" theme, as the lovers die with their hands outside the protection of their space suits. Space suitors, get it? A great play on words.


In the Grant Geissman book, Tales Of Terror, the story is credited to the publisher/editor team of Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein. It isn't a complicated story at all. As a matter of fact, it seems almost cookie-cutter in its set-up. It's the visuals that make it stand out. In lesser artistic hands it wouldn't have the ability to shock like it does.

The panel of poor Milt's crushed-tomato face might have been the catalyst to make my younger brother, with rare exception,* never again look at EC Comics. He was about 10-years-old when he saw it. I remember when I first saw it getting that feeling of seeing a dead animal on the road with its entrails splattered over the pavement. But it didn't keep me from looking at EC Comics.

"The Space Suitors" wasn't the first or best horror/science fiction story EC published. But since it was in the first non-Mad EC Comic I ever read, has stayed in my mind for over 45 years. I can still get a jolt when I look at Crandall's superb and ghoulish drawings. It was the sort of thing that made EC great, but it was also the sort of thing that ultimately brought them down.

*This was the other panel my brother was upset by, from Tales From The Crypt #32. This story, drawn by the great Jack Davis, had a lot of humor, and the whole thing was a joke. A really sick joke.

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Number 99


EC Comics: Adultery Is For Adults!


EC Comics' Shock Suspenstories #11 was the first non-Mad EC Comic I ever read. I was too young to read EC's when they were originally available, and I was buying them blind via mail-order from Bill Thailing of Cleveland, Ohio. Bill sold most EC's for about 50¢ each in 1960 and '61.

Click on pictures for full-size images.

I remember being disappointed by the cover; a guy and girl (even if the girl was in a bikini) on a sailboat, another guy getting knocked out. It didn't look like what I thought of as a horror comic. When I looked inside I was additionally puzzled. There was a splash panel with a pretty girl carrying a basket, a man behind a tree, and big letters, THE TRYST. I thought, "What's a tryst?"

Well, at age 12 I wasn't really expected to know, which was a problem with EC Comics. They were written for older readers, but a lot of kids read them, too. I'm sure that if parents were looking over their young boys' shoulders in 1953 when this comic came out, they had their eyes widened by that word. A tryst is a lover's rendezvous. And in the case of this story, refers to one character's perception of the tryst as an adulterous one.

When I read the story I didn't know the older man hiring the young girl wanted to protect her virginity from other men because he wanted her for himself.

Virginity was also a word I didn't know. You may think I was naïve when I was 12, and you'd be right. It's hell when you have to get your sex education from EC Comics.

The panel where the new wife asks her older husband, who has stashed her away on an estate to keep her away from other males, if she could have a baby, got my attention. I knew a bit about babies and where they came from, but I was a bit weak on the mechanics of the process. I sure did like the picture that artist Johnny Craig drew of the young blonde babe, though.

In the story the old man suspects his young wife is having an affair with another man, so he kills that man.

I knew about jealousy, but sexual jealousy of this sort was beyond my comprehension at the time. Actually, it still is. I'm aware of the crimes people commit when under its influence.

The capper is when the husband follows his young wife into the woods, thinking she's having a tryst with a lover. Craig, writer as well as artist, loads up the captions with information about her buttoning her blouse, or blowing kisses, which would lead a reader to suspect she's up to no good.

So the husband does the ultimate act: he shoots into the woods, killing the person he thinks is his wife's lover. The "lover" that the young wife was meeting was an orphan boy named Tommy, who lived behind the estate in an orphanage. The last panel shows a dead boy near a pond. Then as now, victims in fiction are objects, not "real" victims, like we find in life.

The fact that the orphanage hadn't been mentioned before didn't bother me at the time, but now I realize that it's good to plant that information in the story somewhere so the reader doesn't feel the denouement has come out of left field. Which is exactly what this ending did. We know the young woman wants companionship, but the husband's jealous mind has turned her actions into cheating, when she's innocent of nothing more than making friends with a young boy. What we don't know ahead of time is that there is anything like an orphanage nearby.

Well, that's comics for you! They don't have a lot of room for information, so sometimes this sort of thing is left out, and it weakens the ending. Still, when I read this story the first time I wondered why the husband would have a problem with his wife meeting a young boy. Wow, was I dumb, missing the whole point of the story because of my unfamiliarity with the ways of sex, love and lust.

Three of the stories in Shock Suspenstories #11 deal with adultery. Only the second story, "In Gratitude," doesn't deal with a triangle love affair.

I bet most of the readers of Shock Suspenstories were probably in the 13-to-16 year age group, almost all of them male. In that more innocent time this issue should have set off alarm bells somewhere with somebody's parents, but maybe the excesses found in the horror comics trumped this comic. I think parents were probably more upset by walking dead than jealous husbands.

In my personal opinion, showing a dead child, murdered as a result of mistaken sexual jealousy, seems over the line. By that time in EC's history I'm sure it was just another snap ending to another story. In retrospect it seems more powerful and disturbing.

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