For a guy who says he is trying to finishing up his old posts I am sure starting a lot of new ones lately. But the thing is that I was just working on my tribute post to 36C - 23 - 26 page 3 girl Corinne Russell Yesterday and as I kept adding more stuff about the iconic horror magazines Tales From The Crypt, The Vault Of Horror, The Haunt Of Fear and other EC Comics publications like Mad to the bonus section I thought it would be a waste to put it all there instead of doing a full blown EC Comics post.
You see, when I started the latest two GHOST RIDER posts as kind of an introduction for Halloween one of the reasons why I didn't make an EC Comics post was that I thought I did not have enough material for it.
Well, when I was working on the aforementioned Corinne Russell post I realized that I have indeed more than enough for a full blown EC Comics post and so I have decided to write on and put some more material out.
At the moment my EC Comics library is extremely limited : besides the spanish edition of the first volume of Weird Science I only have the EC Covers Artist Edition, the EC Comics sampler Choke Gasp ! The Best Of 75 Years Of EC Comics and the reprints of Tales From The Crypt, The Vault Of Horror and The Haunt Of Fear that I used to pad out the boxes when I shipped some comics I could not sell to Spain which I can't bring myself to throw away no matter how beat up and battered they may be.
As a big fan of EC Comics I´ve done a number of posts on the subject : I did a special black and white tribute post to William Gaines in 2017 with two full stories, one by Johnny Craig and one by George Evans, in 2018 I did two posts, one for the horror books and one for the other titles EC published and I also did special spotlight posts for Jack Davis and a black and white post with the complete original artwork of the story And All Throughout The House by Johnny Craig from THE VAULT OF HORROR 35.
I didn´t write any EC Comics posts in 2019 but in 2020 I wrote a post in honor of the late William Gaines with stories by Johnny Craig, Graham " Ghastly " Ingels and Joe Orlando - who got a spotlight post - as well as one in tribute to the late Bernie Krigstein and two about Johnny Craig .
And back in March 2021 we had the obligatory William Gaines tribute .
Besides publishing the best comic in the genre of horror, science fiction, war, crime fiction and many others ( which every comic fan or comic book creator worth his salt needs to read to understand what you can do within the medium ) he also created a whole new genre with the creation of Mad magazine when his competitors, censorship and the Comics Code Authority forced him to cancel his most successful titles.
One of the artists who got the famous MAD Magazine off the ground and running with Harvey Kurtzman was Will Elder and if you are interested in comic history, good satire comic magazines or just good art you should check out those early issues - you can read my spotlight post on him .
Now besides being a master at cartooning and bringing slapstick humor to the printed page Will Elder was very adept at depicting the female form which probably was a very big factor in MAD´s rise in popularity.
Will Elder´s faible for drawing sexy women was also the reason why Harvey Kurtzman chose him to bring one of his most famous creations to life : PLAYBOY´s LITTLE ANNIE FANNY, a spoof on LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE.
Coming back to the genesis of this EC post I thought about gutting the Corinne Russell post and put everything about the EC Comics in this post but as the faithful followers of the blog know I try to keep my posts as faithful as possible. So while I am leaving the initial video about the 90s Tales From The Crypt tv show in the other post I am including some of the videos - like the one about the sadly godawful Tales From The Cryptkeeper cartoon that was not only an embarrassment to everyone involved but to EC Comics fans and comicbook fans worldwide.
As for the comicbook content for this post since I never made a special post for Graham " Ghouly "Ingels ( mainly because he is not one of my favourite EC Comics artists although I do appreciate the influence he had on artists like Bernie Wrightson and other ) I thought I could include some of his original artwork here as I have accumulated quite a lot. But we will start with the complete original art for the infamous story Four Way Split by Al Feldstein and Jack Davis which was one of the examples that helped Dr. Frederic Wertham and the rest of the comicbook industry to implement the Comics Code Authority and almost drive EC Comics completely out of business.
keep the crypt my ghoulies