It was the horror comics that made EC’s reputation, both for good and for ill, and they remained the firm’s best-sellers all the way up until the nascent Comics Code put them out of business. Readers were attracted to EC’s style in general, but it was in the horror comics, where the bounds of good taste were often stretched if not sometimes exceeded, that EC made it’s greatest mark. And that’s interesting to me, in that EC often underplayed its horror books. Take the cover to this issue. It’s almost understated in its horror, allowing the viewer’s imagination to fill in the details of the creature bursting up through the roadway. There’s a sense of mood and menace, but not the sort of in-your-face horror that the competition was often fielding.
As usual, this issue followed the standard EC format of containing four self-contained horror stories of between 6 and 8 pages each, all designed with the patented EC shock twist ending. Some of those endings hit better and were more clever than others, and the longer the venture went on, the more certain riffs wound up being repeated. It wasn’t easy to generate this many memorable stories in so short a period of time. This opener was both written and illustrated by Johnny Craig, a mainstay of the EC horror books. And it’s got a pretty solid punch line to it.
The story centers around a reclusive actress who avoids all camera and who refuses to make movies. This is obviously because she is a vampire, who can neither come out during the day nor be photographed. Matters become more interesting as she becomes involved with her new co-star, ultimately intending to feed upon him. You see, he’s secretly a ghoul. So it’s a case of monster love where both parties don’t realize the truth about the other. The two wind up snowbound together in a remote cabin, and to save one another, the vampire drains her own blood and the ghoul consumes his own flesh. This is ultimately too little, too late, and when rescuers find them both dead, the reveal is the punch line. It’s Gift of the Magi but with more bloodletting.
The second story was illustrated by Jack Davis and written by the usual pairing of editor Al Feldstein along with contributions from EC Publisher Bill Gaines. This figure on the splash page of a desiccated corpse rising up through the roadway proved to be popular with freelance artists in the period, and you can find people swiping it on the covers and splash pages of other horror stories throughout the field following its debut here. Alas, the story in this one is kind of dumb, and the punch line lacks, well, punch.
It concerns a group of corrupt councilmen and officials who line their own pockets by contracting for a roadway to be built through property that they own. To do so, they have to divert it through a local cemetery–and to save on costs, they don’t relocate all of the buried dead, they simply move the headstones. This turns out to be a short-sighted decision as, when the group is headed out for the opening of the new road, they’re waylaid by the disrespected dead who climb up from their now-unmarked graves and wind up flattening the fat cats into their own road. The final image is meant to be horrific, but it comes off as a bit too comedic for that.
The third story is also a clunker, though it has some very interesting artwork by an artist named Sid Check who only did a couple of stories for EC, but who had a long career in the field. It’s about a man who develops a split personality; one half of him is good, the other evil. He tries medicine and psychotherapy to keep his evil half in check, to no avail. Finally, with no other recourse, he seeks out a voodoo witch doctor. Using a fetish, the witch doctor kills the man’s evil half. But this results in the left half of his body literally dying and decaying, and on the final page he’s looking for an undertaker to embalm the deceased half of him. Now, this doesn’t really make a whit of sense at all, and it’s steeped in the racism of the time. But it’s all about getting to the final panel reveal where we see, like Two-Face, the character in question is half-dead and decayed. Not a great piece.
The final story in the issue is illustrated by “Ghastly” Graham Ingles and is one of those by-the-numbers EC jobs, a variation on an idea the shop had already done countless times. In this particular version, the wife of a compulsive fisherman grows increasingly lonely as her husband is away toiling at his passion, always returning with a mounted fish and a story about its capture. But it turns out that the husband is cheating on the wife, that his stories are all made up to cover his absences. When she finds out, she winds up stuffing and mounting him on the wall like one of the many other fish that decorate their domicile. Bingo, bango, bongo.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Of course the ending to Graft on Concrete didn’t work, because a steam roller over human bodies would never look like it belongs in a Warner Bros. cartoon but much more bloodier and gruesome.
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Also I wonder if like the Atlas Age, if EC books had plots that pre-date Twilight Zone & Outer Limits stories or Stephen King ( Christine — 1983 ) or Blade Runner ( 1982 film — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep — 1968 by Philip K. Dick — only the Atlas Age Rick Deckard didn’t know he was one too ) or Skynet type story.
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The cover of this issue, see Doc Samson on page 15 panel 5 of The Incredible Hulk#315 ( January 1986 ). I could be wrong but during the Iron Man Bob Layton years first run I have a vague memory of him doing that in the pages of Iron Man too.
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Correction it was Colossus in X-Men#118 ( February 1979 ) stopping Moses Magnum’s fleeting henchmen in a big rig.
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It may be a good thing that EC didn’t last. This way it got to be a briefly shining (if gruesome) Camelot whose legend has lasted decades, rather than decaying into a story mill whose formulas wore out their welcome.
I mean, pity about the decades of repression and all that, but 40 years of MAD Magazine was probably a better thing to have than 40 years of TALES FROM THE CRYPT.
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I was just musing about what it might have been like if EC had survived into the era of a shared universe and better characterization. They wouldn’t necessarily have been stuck with doing formula twist-ending horror stories forever. Maybe they could have followed a trajectory similar to Marvel, merging horror and soap opera dramatics, like “Dark Shadows” did a decade later.
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I dunno. Could be, but was there anything in Feldstein or Kurtzman’s future careers that suggested they ever go an interest in ongoing continuities? Recurring characters, sure, we saw that in MAD and Annie Fanny, but even as the ongoing series became a bigger thing (and it was already thriving in the newspaper strips they were well aware of), they never seemed to reach for it.
It might have been interesting to see Kurtzman in particular take a swing at it, but overall, it didn’t seem ever to be where their sensibilities were at.
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Well, as the DC mystery books, the Warren mags and Marvel books like Chamber of Chills indicated, there was still a market for those twist ending horror stories, almost into the 1980s.
As the last years of Warren and the DC Mystery books indicate, continuing characters were likely to have developed at some level.
I wonder, since the Science Fiction books were already adopting Bradbury stories. if something like a continuing adaptation of The Martian Chronicles (one story was adopted from that “fix-up” book, There Will Come Soft Rains) wouldn’t have been the natural development?
Then, perhaps they could have tried other “fix-ups,” like Simak’s City or even Asimov’s Foundation,
Possibly. Two Fisted Tales could have adopted things like The Longest Day. I’m not suggesting they should have become Dell, but those early 1960s Sam Glanzman war books sort of amounted to this and were not all that far removed in style.
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