Here we are again, another year, another EC Comics Halloween post.
I've not finished overhauling my SCOOBY APOCALYPSE post from last year but since it is not technically a Halloween post and I promised all of my faithful readers that I would do a new post for Halloween IF I managed to give all my Halloween posts that I started last year the old once over before Halloween I guess I have met my goal so here is a new post for Halloween and you know that if I can make only one Halloween post this year it has to be about EC Comics iconic horror anthology titles TALES FROM THE CRYPT, THE HAUNT OF FEAR and also THE VAULT OF HORROR.
At the moment my EC Comics library is extremely limited : besides the spanish edition of the first volume of Weird Science and the third volume from the EC Comics Library - Weird Science I only have two Biblioteca Grandes Del Comic pocket books from Planeta DeAgostini ( which are black and white reprints like the spanish Biblioteca Marvel pocket books ) : Classicos Del Terror - The Haunt Of Fear 15 ( which is the last issue ) and Classicos Del Suspense - Crime Suspenstories 1 ( which is the first issue and includes my favourite Johnny Craig EC Comics story The Sewer from Crime Suspenstories 5 and you can find the story in my EC Comics Johnny Craig bonus post from 2020 ), the EC Covers Artist Edition, the EC Comics sampler Choke Gasp ! The Best Of 75 Years Of EC Comics and the reprints of Tales From The Crypt, The Vault Of Horror and The Haunt Of Fear from Gladstone Comics that I used to pad out the boxes when I shipped some comics I could not sell to Spain which I can't bring myself to throw away no matter how beat up and battered these issues may be.
As a big fan of EC Comics I´ve done a number of posts on the subject : I did a special black and white tribute post to William Gaines in 2017 with two full stories, one by Johnny Craig and one by George Evans, in 2018 I did two posts, one for the horror books and one for the other titles EC published and I also did special spotlight posts for Jack Davis and a black and white post with the complete original artwork of the story And All Throughout The House by Johnny Craig from THE VAULT OF HORROR 35.
I didn´t write any EC Comics posts in 2019 but in 2020 I wrote a post in honor of the late William Gaines with stories by Johnny Craig, Graham " Ghastly " Ingels and Joe Orlando - who got a spotlight post - as well as one in tribute to the late Bernie Krigstein and two about Johnny Craig .
In 2021 we had the obligatory William Gaines tribute in 2022 I did an Al Feldstein spotlight for Halloween, another Halloween post in 2023 and then last but definitely not least my EC Comics Halloween post in 2024.
Besides publishing the best comic in the genre of horror, science fiction, war, crime fiction and many others ( which every comic fan or comic book creator worth his salt needs to read to understand what you can do within the medium ) he also created a whole new genre with the creation of Mad magazine when his competitors, censorship and the Comics Code Authority forced him to cancel his most successful titles.
One of the artists who got the famous MAD Magazine off the ground and running with Harvey Kurtzman was Will Elder and if you are interested in comic history, good satire comic magazines or just good art you should check out those early issues - you can read my spotlight post on him .
Now besides being a master at cartooning and bringing slapstick humor to the printed page Will Elder was very adept at depicting the female form which probably was a very big factor in MAD´s rise in popularity.
Will Elder´s faible for drawing sexy women was also the reason why Harvey Kurtzman chose him to bring one of his most famous creations to life : PLAYBOY´s LITTLE ANNIE FANNY, a spoof on LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE.
With the obligatory EC links out of the way we come to the material that I selected for this post and I found quite a few pages from various EC Comics publications but since this is a Halloween post I dispensed with all the artwork from CRIME PATROL, CRIME SUSPENSTORIES, FRONTLINE COMBAT, IMPACT, SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES, TWO - FISTED TALES, VALOR, WEIRD FANTASY and WEIRD SCIENCE. Maybe I will make a post with some of that material next month in an EC COMICS GO TO WAR spotlight post.
Longtime followers of the blog know that over the years I developed a soft spot for Johnny Craig's art so I was toying with the idea of doing a third spotlight post for him but a lot of that post would have been covers and as anybody who has read my posts over the decades knows I prefer to include interior pages over covers because one can always use covers elsewhere while I always get the feeling of wasting interior pages if I use them when there are covers available. So instead of a Johnny Craig post we have a mix of EC Comics regulars from all three horror anthologies.
trifecta
