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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