Tales From The Crypt #25, August 1951
Wallace Wood and film noir. A favorite artist and a favorite fiction genre for me. I’m in, of course.
Okay, so this page is actually from Tales from the Crypt, EC’s best-known horror title. But the look and feel are pure film noir, so I’m counting it. Crime and horror overlap pretty frequently—especially in EC comics, now that I think of it. A rotting corpse—or a witch—might show up along the way, but the atmosphere is still straight out of a noir film.
But I digress.
Funny thing is, despite how much I like this page, I’ve owned it—and parted with it—once before.
Some paste-ups had me convinced that portions of the art were photostats rather than original drawings. Then I learned that Wood sometimes combined original art from different boards onto a single page, whether to incorporate shading from Craftint paper or to rework the storytelling or a “camera angle.”
Unfortunately, I learned that after I’d let it go.
Anyway, that’s probably more in-the-weeds information than you need. All you really need to know is that I really dig this page, and I paid dearly to own it a second time.
That last part I’d just as soon forget myself.
