Earlier in the year, we celebrated EC Comics “New Trend” 50th anniversary with some great original art examples from the legendary Jack Davis. Today — and Saturday — we will celebrate once again, this time with the astonishing Wallace Wood.
Woody hadn’t quite hit his artistic prime yet when he drew this Weird Science tale, “The Probers.” But he was perhaps at his most prolific, pencilling and inking up to three pages a day(!) for EC and other publishers of the day.
That sheer volume would decrease as Woody’s detail became more and more intricate, and the finishes more and more polished. In a very short time, Wood’s peers would pretty much always refer to him as best in class.
Some of Woody’s great SF art (Non EC) can be found in his 50s comic book stories, as well as his illustrations for Galaxy magazine.
Joe Orlando brought his EC Comics horror sensibilities with him when he landed at DC in the late 60s.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time.
DC became a company where artists and visual storytellers (Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert, Dick Giordano, et al) started moving into upper management and making editorial decisions.
“…Many times we were asked to do impossible things by writer/editors who had no sense of the visual-to do things that wouldn’t work and have to argue our way out of it. We just thought that as artists, we would do a better job working with talent.”
In just a few years, Joe turned around the moribund House of Mystery and the already-cancelled House of Secrets with tales of mystery, suspense and of course, horror. He and his team took advantage of the more-relaxed standards at the Comics Code, sometimes creating even more relaxed standards in the process.
(A few years later, Marvel would follow suit with a glut of horror titles that included vampires, werewolves and zombies. But, as always, we digress.)
And sure enough, Joe’s comics nearly instantly became artistic showcases for veterans like Gil Kane and Orlando’s EC mentor Wally Wood, along with young Turks like Bernie Wrightson, Nestor Redondo, and Mr. Kaluta here.
(Plus great covers often by Neal Adams. Definitely worth 12 or 15 cents.)
By 1972, Joe had built yet another house in the neighbored, and this great Kaluta page featuring both DC horror hosts, Cain and Abel, is the delightful intro to Secrets of Sinister House #6.
Classic.
An early Joe Orlando EC horror tale, and Joe’s caricature rendered by Marie Severin at the 1953 EC Christmas party.
Dark Horse Presents #100-1, August 1995and Tales To Offend #1, July 1997
This is a great Frank Miller splash page from a 1995 Lance Blastoff story.
Wait — Who?
If you blinked, you likely missed Blastoff, Miller’s affectionate homage to Wallace (Wally) Wood’s classic EC SF stories. (With a bit of Al Williamson thrown in for good measure.)
The character originally appeared in only two short stories, both in Dark Horse Presents, both in black and white, in the mid 90s.
Ultimately, those stories, along with a few others, were repackaged in a fun one-shot comic book, Tales To Offend. For this reprint, the stories were newly colored.
And in a moment of inspired genius, Miller (or Dark Horse itself) hired Marie Severin — who colored most of the original EC stories — to color the Blastoff stories.
Nothing deep about these Blastoff stories — just some diversionary fun from the noir Sin City stories of the era. (Although the humor here is a definitely the dark kind.)
Dinosaurs. Rockets. Spacegirls. 40 years after EC’s heyday, it was nice to have them back again, even if just for a brief moment.
The legendary SF author Ray Bradbury would have turned 100 years old this year. He passed away in 2012.
Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder is my favorite time travel short story.
It’s also the very first time travel short story I ever
read. (I had already read HG Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, at that point.
Multiple times in fact.)
Thanks to the progressive spirit of my secondary school system, we read the Bradbury short story collection “R is For Rocket” in eighth or ninth grade.
A Sound of Thunder: Time travel. Adventure. Dinosaurs. In other words, for my tastes, perfect.
Nearly 20 years later, Byron Preiss and Topps struck a deal to publish comic book versions of Preiss’ graphic novel series, Ray Bradbury Illustrated. Main feature in the first issue? A Sound of Thunder, cover by the incredibly talented Bill Stout, who is generally in a class by himself when it comes to Dinosaurs.
(The comic features a new adaptation by Richard Corben and
the reprint of the classic EC story by Al Feldstein and Al Williamson.)
And 25 years after that? Stout decides to part with the
cover, and I literally stumble upon at his booth at SDCC. Hanging in the frame
that hung in his studio for many years.
Serendipity at work. Lets call this one a part of the “ permanent collection.”
Covers for both the Topps comic book version and the Byron Preiss “graphic novel.”
Richard Corben did an outstanding job on the “modern” version of Sound, while Al Williamson drew both the cover and the adaptation of the beloved EC Comics version.
Ray Bradbury’s intro for the first issue of Topps Bradbury comics, along with the cover of the 70s paperback version of R Is For Rocket, ubiquitous at the time.
Concluding (for now) our 60th anniversary celebration of the legendary EC “New Trend” comics with another classic piece of great art from the legendary Jack Davis.
“We got into the Civil War thing. It was a favorite project of mine. We were hot to do the story of the Civil War from front to back.” — Harvey Kurtzman, 1972 EC fan convention panel.
War stories were among EC’s many strengths, and many of those, thanks to Harvey Kurtzman’s obsessive editorial attention, were accurately based on historical events.
“Stonewall Jackson!” is a perfect example. Jackson, a brilliant Confederate military tactician, was accidentally shot by his own men in a nighttime battle. This Kurtzman story retells that tale through the voice of the supposed soldier who shot him.
Lighting is an illusion created by a creative combination of black ink and negative space. On this splash, one of my personal favorites, Davis indeed creates a beautiful illusion of campfire light. There is no actual illumination here of course, but thanks to the well-crafted art, our mind’s eye sees it.
The storytelling is equally effective. The camera work closes in on one figure through multiple panels — we instinctively know that this is our narrator and his story, even without reading the dialogue.
All our stories really protested war. I don’t think we thought war was very nice generally. The whole mood of our stories was that war isn’t a good thing. You get killed. That’s the way war is; you get killed suddenly for no reason.— Harvey Kurtzman, 1972 EC fan convention panel.
The splash makes the cover of Fantagraphics collection of Kurtzman / Davis collaborations.
EC’s creators discuss the legendary Jack Davis for his profile in the 1972 EC fan convention.
In 2011, Davis told The Wall Street Journal about his early career and his breakthrough with EC:
I was about ready to give up, go home to Georgia and be either a forest ranger or a farmer. But I went down to Lafayette St., up in an old rickety elevator and through a glass door to Entertaining Comics where Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines were putting out horror comic books. They looked at my work and it was horrible and they gave me a job right away!
Every time you went in to see Bill Gaines, he would write you a check when you brought in a story. You didn’t have to put in a bill or anything. I was very, very hungry and I was thinking about getting married. So I kept the road pretty hot between home and Canal Street. I would go in for that almighty check, go home and do the work, bring it in and get another check and pick up another story. [Edit: the actual cross street to Lafayette was Spring Street, not Canal.]
Continuing our 60th anniversary celebration of the legendary EC “New Trend” comics with another classic piece of great art from the legendary Jack Davis.
This is actually the fourth issue of EC’s Two-Fisted Tales. William Gaines — and other publishers — used a variety of title and numbering gimmicks to ensure they didn’t lose a slot in the challenging newsstand system.
It’s a Korean War story — ongoing at the time of publication — and one of many published prior to the “ceasefire” that ended the war.
Davis, in one of his early war stories, does a fantastic job following — and enhancing — Harvey Kurtzman’s very specific layouts.
Very specific layouts? Kurtzman was obsessive about the storytelling and the detail. If he couldn’t draw the story himself, e wanted to ensure that the finished result would be as close to his own material as possible. Again, because this is an early Davis war story, even the art style itself is mimics Kurtzman’s in places.
Davis and Kurtzman (and others) discussed Kurtzman’s methodology at the 1972 EC fan convention, and took a question from the audience…
QUESTION: I’d like to know how the individual artists
felt working with the very strict layouts.
KURTZMAN: I’d like to hear that, too.
DAVIS: I don’t know. I think the end product came out pretty good – the detail and all. There are a lot of people that appreciate detail and there are a lot of people that don’t. Once you do something you like it to be authentic. Where doing the horror books you didn’t have to be authentic, this was something that you’d like for it to come across as true, and Harvey felt very strongly about truth – the way the weapons worked and everything. We did the best we could, and I enjoyed it. It wasn’t that bad. I’d hate to do it all the time.
Marie Severin’s caricature of Harvey Kurtzman (in the 1972 EC convention program) captures perfectly his obsessive attention to detail and accuracy, especially on his beloved war stories.
2020 is the 60th anniversary of the legendary EC “New Trend” comics. William Gaines and his masterful crew published some of the most enduring comics and stories in the medium’s history, raising the bar in all categories — humor, science fiction, war, crime, and of course, legendarily, horror.
To celebrate this anniversary, we take a look at one of EC’s
greats — Jack Davis.
This Davis page is from Jack’s last horror story, “Upon Reflection,” from Tales From The Crypt #46, the final issue. Gaines, under censorship pressure — and unable to ensure distribution — raised the white flag and cancelled his horror and crime titles.
Davis telltale style drips all over this page. The old crone, the angry mob, and the tense claustrophobia in each panel spell out impending doom… for someone. (If we know the EC M.O., it will be a twist.)
The cover from this werewolf story has become one of the most iconic in horror comics history.
By 1955, Davis had easily become one of the most important artists in the EC “bullpen.” He was unfailingly reliable, tremendously gifted, and ridiculously prolific. Under the gun, he could pencil and ink three pages in day, without taking quality shortcuts.
Gaines, Davis, and nearly all of the rest of the EC mainstays reunited at the 1972 EC fan convention, organized by fans Bruce Hershenson and Ron Barlow. At various panels throughout the event, they reminisced about EC’s halcyon days, and the two spoke about Jack’s association with horror stories:
JACK DAVIS: I enjoyed doing the horror bit and they liked it, and so I kept at it. But when I looked back on it after things began to get very ticklish with the Code and everything, I began to ask – am I doing something constructive or good. I still, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s really that bad.
WILLIAM GAINES: You have to understand Jack comes from another era, and another kind of background. Jack was, and still is, a very moral, religious person. He came up here from Georgia… [laughter]…I’m serious now…and Jack did this stuff because it was his job as an artist. Jack has always had some misgivings about it, and I respect his misgivings. Jack has been more comfortable with other types of material than horror. But the fact that he’s a real pro is evident from the fact that although he wasn’t 100% comfortable with it, you see the job he did.
“Upon Reflection” is collected in both black and white and color versions, and the Tales From The Crypt cover adorns the Jack Davis EC Stories Artist’s Editionfrom IDW.
Three EC-related publications that warped my (very young) brain, and the rest, as they say, is history: The 1971 bio of Gaines that includes tremendous detail about EC’s rise and fall — and rise; Woody Gelman’s 1971 Nostalgia Press oversize collection of EC stories was my intro to the tales themselves; and the brilliant 1972 EC fan convention program which featured bios and caricatures of all the EC creators.EC publishes its own obituary.
The Iowa caucuses officially kicked off the 2020 national campaign season yesterday. (Although in the 21st century, it feels like every day, of every year, is campaign season. Sigh.)
Campaign season always makes me think of Jack Davis.
I loved his caricatures of famous politicians. Many of them
— especially in the 70s— had plenty of personality, and Davis, like a great
illustrator, could show you that personality through his art. And if they were
bland, boring, run of the mill politicians, Davis could still manage to find
something to say about them — truthful, of course –that would make you
smile.
I also liked that Davis, who went from EC horror artist to
one of America’s top commercial artists in less than 20 years, never became too
successful for appearances in the pages of Mad magazine.
This strip is from a multi-page story called “Wishful Thinking.” It appears to be done on a single board, so in all likelihood all the gags in this story are single pieces of art cobbled together to create story pages. That said, many oversized Mad original art pages have been cut up over the years, to sell individual gags like this separately, so it’s difficult to be definitive.
But it’s not difficult to be definitive about this: In addition to being one of the great American commercial artists, Davis is also one of my personal favorites. Want to offer me an original piece of art for a TV Guide or Time Magazine cover?
I’m all ears.
Published cover from early 1973, and an unpublished cover featuring Democratic candidates from early 1972. Jack’s art did not betray a specific political slant — he caricatured all comers. The unpublished piece is currently available for sale from Fred Taraba Illustration Art.
From an outstanding horror artist at EC Comics (“Foul Play,”above) — to one of America’s most recognizable and best-loved illustrators.
DC’s war comic books, taking inspiration from EC’s titles years prior, featured some of the best stories published in any genre. They often dealt directly with the human toll and sacrifice of war, and rarely emphasized a false “glory of battle.” In the 1970s, Editor Joe Kubert quietly added in the widget “Make War No More” at the end of many of those stories. (Seen in the published page below as the paste-up in the original is missing.)
The brilliant John Severin (1922-2012), who drew some of the best of those original EC masterpieces, returns here to illustrate Robert Kanigher’s haunting Sgt. Rock tale “The Bloody Flag.” Rock’s dialogue, and his expression in panel three, sum up much more than just the story itself.
Today we honor John, and millions of other veterans of the armed forces, past and present. Thank you for your service!
What if EC Comics merged with the Archie line back in the ’50s and survived through the present day? Andrew Pepoy gives us the short answer with Betty and Veronica as Wally Wood-styled space girls on this cool variant cover for Archie #646.
