Shock Treatment: EC’s Opposite Direction Comics

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

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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