This is a cover by the great, Ghastly Graham Ingels. Curiously, it doesn't quite reflect the usual skewed rendering of the denizens of his stories. Later tonight, if I have a moment, I'll scan some stuff and post an update. But he was definitely the proprietor of the grotesque, and for most of its run, he was the lead artist on The Haunt of Fear. He could really pull the nasty out of The Old Witch.
Here's a cover by EC artist Johnny Craig, who may be my favorite of the group. His crisp, concise drawing style foreshadows the Bruce Timm era of cartoon-like rendering (Batman: TAS). Craig also wrote many of the stories he illustrated. To me, he was the perfect counterpoint to the awesome grotesqueness of Graham Ingels' stories. Maybe I'll post some of his twisted, horrid drawings next Monday.
Well, I had planned on returning to this subject on a weekly basis but as usual my attention has crawled on to other things. Gotta love these covers though. If only we all had more time in the day. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't need sleep? Think of all you could accomplish before you had to trudge into work at 8am. I'd get into my thoughts on an alternate dimension that you could visit for indefinite periods of time, but I guess it's a little implausible. Not to mention hackneyed.
Due to my recent resurgence of interest in EC Comics, Zombie Monday has become EC Monday! I read a very good issue of Tales From the Crypt yesterday and was going to scan some panels emphasizing the different artists. Alas, I am at work, so it will have to wait until next week. But I figure that this is a great way for me to really wrap my head around this amazing archive of stories and art, since as a kid I really just had a fleeting, morbid interest in the whole thing. And considering the wordiness of the stories, I didn't even read half of them. But don't worry. If the whole thing seems a bit too academic, there's certainly enough to poke fun at, which I will surely do.
One last thing, I just learned yesterday that a comics publisher called Papercutz is producing all new issues of Tales. They seem to have a definite indie-comic flavor to them, which could work. I ordered the first issue off of ebay, so we shall see. Here's the cover:
Looks like the subsequent covers will be in the traditional EC format. There seems to be a lot of respect for the original run, which will help its longevity.
EC Comics. Thanks to Gladstone's reprints in the eighties, they were as much a part of my childhood as they were to the baby boomers. They featured some pretty gruesome stuff sometimes, not just of the horror variety. Crime Suspenstories and the like could be pretty outrageous in that pre-politically correct sort of way. But the art was amazing. Johnny Craig, Jack Davis and the rest really knew how to render disembowelment quite beautifully.
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