EC Comics relied a little too heavily on formula to suit me. The 'poetic justice' plot was way over-used; some awful person mistreats someone in a distinctive way, and that victim turns the tables and gets revenge in the same way they were abused. If a man bugged his wife by insisting his clothes were pressed perefectly, she'd go nuts and burn him ( Read more... )

These pages are from PANIC# 6, way back in 1954. Despite the fact it had MAD artists like Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder, PANIC just was never half as funny as MAD was. This is because Al Feldstein wrote it instead of Harvey Kurtzman and the demented satirical Kurtzman viewpoint wasn't there. To be honest, I have a theory that those first ( Read more... )

That's Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder and Jack Davis, of course. But my strong suspicion is that the young woman is just following policy and going along with them. She's a Playboy Bunny, a hostess skilled at making guests feel relaxed and welcome while serving drinks... sort of like American Geishas. And my bet is that after they left, she turned to ( Read more... )

Some very neat visual puns in this panel from PANIC. With all respect to Wally Wood, John Severin and the other artists of early MAD, Will Elder was the star. He could mimic other artists with deadly accuracy, and he was the master of jamming little gags into every panel so that the more you looked, the more you found. For example, I just noticed ( Read more... )

"Plucked!" from WEIRD SCIENCE# 17, back in 1953. Don't let the cover blurb mislead you, this is not a Ray Bradbury adaptation but one of the gems pounded out by Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein.


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EC Comics were before my time, but when I was starting out with Archie and Little Lulu and Superboy, I was suddenly thunderstruck. Our landlord left a box of old comics he was going to throw out and I dove into them like my life depended on it. They were from the 1940s and 1950s, before the Comics Code cleaned things up. I was used to polite, ( Read more... )

From WEIRD SCIENCE# 15, October 1952. Story by William Gaines and Al Feldstein, art by Jack Kamen. When I read this as a kid, it seemed like a funny little skit very much in the droll TWILIGHT ZONE style. But thinking about it later, something unsettled me.


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Amidst all the murderous couples and walking corpses and slimy aliens, EC managed every now and then to take a strong stance against prejudice. This was fairly rare in the early 1950s, especially in the lowly comic book, and it showed some courage on the part of Bill Gaines ( Read more... )

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