Split-Second Storytelling: The EC “Crypt of Covers”

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On 1950s newsstands, EC Comics covers stood out from scores of competitors for the same reason their content did — and has ever since. They told better stories illustrated by better artists who were paid better and supplied with better core material. The cover art of Crime Suspense Stores, Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt, and Weird Science, et. al. surfaced all the irony, comedy, depth of sentiment, believable intensity and, yes, artful gore, that helped make Bill Gaines’s library of horrors both unique and uniquely consistent.

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Extra! Extra!: Newsstand for Reprint Mavens Launches

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There has been an embarrassment of riches for classic comic strip fans of late. In fact, the new print-on-demand (POD) platforms unleashed an overwhelming torrent of self-publishing ventures that suddenly are too scattered to track even for addicts like us. The newly launched StripReprints.com was a group effort among some of these indies, organized by About Comics’ Nat Gertler, to solve for that problem with a newsstand that collects and cross-promotes their offerings.

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An EC Tease: Cracking Open a Crypt of Covers

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Here I was all ready to sink my teeth into the upcoming Bernie Krigstein Atlas comics reprint, when instead I got this weighty surprise at the mailbox last night. And I do mean WEIGHTY! A two-volume The Crypt of Covers: The Complete EC Covers Compendium is a monster. Over 600 11×14.6 pages in a box, this thing blows up ever EC cover to small poster size. And brace yourself when picking it up. This package is dense.

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Review: Star Wars, The Marvel+TASCHEN Way

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Marvel ‘s March 8. 1977 launch of Star Wars, the comic book, was never just another opportunistic hit-movie tie-in. In fact, no one knew then what a pop culture “Force” the franchise would become. The film itself premiered three weeks later, and many were skeptical that audiences would embrace a pulp-style space opera. But a comic book version of his epic property had been in George Lucas’s master plan all along. As Peter Sanderson recounts in his thorough introduction to TASCHEN’s Star Wars Comics Library. Vol. 1. 1977-1979, the director and his publicity man had been pitching the idea as early as 1975. Famously, Stan Lee wouldn’t even take Lucas’s first phone call, and Marvel resisted the project for a while. Ironically, the Star Wars comic series not only proved to be a massive hit once the film opened, but it outsold all other Marvel titles and helped save the struggling company.

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Shock Treatment: EC’s Opposite Direction Comics

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Unlike many previous reprints of EC Comics, Fantagraphics organized its “Artists’ Library” not by title but generally by artist. Better still, a black and white format highlights beautifully the line and ink work by legends like Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Graham Ingels, Johnny Craig, etc. And it shows these masters rendering some of the most suspenseful, violent, ghastly and otherworldly material across a range of stories so lurid and weird they attracted censorious government scrutiny. In other words, the Artists’ Library showcases the best cartoonists at the height of their powers and working on content that editor Al Feldstein deliberately matched to each one’s specific strengths. The project has been magnificent, especially in showing Davis, Wood, Kurtzman, Craig, Kamen and others evolve over time and respond to different material. It has been a thoughtfully designed series that makes even aficionados of EC think differently about what is in my mind the greatest run of comic book art ever. But the 40th volume in the Library, Shock Treatment, is unusual in many respects.

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Zeitgeist Funnies: The Paranoid Style…Of 1898

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We often forget that the first generation of newspaper cartoonists were  newspapermen.  Pioneers of the “funnies,” like R.F. (Yellow Kid) Outcault, Rudolph (Katzenjammer Kids) Dirks, F.B. (Happy Hooligan) Opper, Jimmy  (Little Jimmy) Swinnerton, Winsor (Little Nemo) McCay, as well as Art Young, Walt McDougall, George Luks emerged from newsrooms into the new comics supplements after 1896. They often spent years illustrating breaking stories and drawing pointed editorial cartoons while they were also inventing the comics as a new mass entertainment. The tone and style in these new comics pages were different – often ironic and satiric, screwball and sketchier – but they brought to these lighter arts the journalist’s deep acquaintance with all aspects of turn-of-the-century America. Outcault himself recounted how news gathering journeys through the slums of New York in the 1890s provided the raw material for Hogan’s Alley.

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Radical Physics: Milt Gross In Motion

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One of the basic joys of comics is every artist inventing their own physics. The distinctive cartoonists, at least, use line weight and figure shapes, action and reaction to create physical rules to govern their world, their own sense of gravity.

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