This is the first of a handful of reviews of books I received at Xmas. Ok, I’m late, but there’s a lot of people in my neighborhood who still have their Xmas decorations up.

This compilation comes courtesy of Dark Horse Books. full title: The EC Archives Weird Science Volume 4: Issues 19-22 and Weird Science-Fantasy 23-24.

The Introduction gives a nice potted history of EC (Entertainment Comics), which the casual reader may dimly associate with the early days of MAD magazine. The slightly less dimly aware will recognize the name of William M. Gaines, the publisher of EC and eventually MAD magazine.

EC’s origin goes back to William M. Gaines’ father, Maxwell C. Gaines, who founded EC as “Educational Comics” in 1945, featuring such titles as Picture Stories from the Bible (still being promoted in 1953 when the Weird Science issues reproduced here were published).

I particularly like the thorough ad copy below this image, right above the mail in coupon:

Wow, indexes. Serious stuff.

As Dana Jennings wrote in a NY Times article about the heyday of EC comics:

“EC’s glory (and gory) years were 1950-1955, when it mutated from Educational Comics to Entertaining Comics, stopped printing tame titles like Saddle Romances and Tiny Tot and shifted to Two-Fisted Tales and The Vault of Horror. In this new, skewed world, axes were rarely used to chop wood, and meat grinders weren’t for shredding beef. Buxom bombshells lounged on distant planets, cannibalism was a hobby, and the dead just didn’t know how to stay dead.”

How about a shout out to Dana! They could have used her at EC back in the 50s.

“Tales from the Crypt” was another EC title that might be familiar to many readers, if only through its video/film avatars. This type of not-Bible-stories content led to Congressional hearings in the 1950s, which featured exchanges like this:

Chief Counsel Beaser: Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?
Mr. Gaines: My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
Sen. Kefauver [alluding to the cover illustration for Crime SuspenStories #22]: This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic….
Sen. Kefauver: This is the July one [Crime SuspenStories #23]. It seems to be a man with a woman in a boat and he is choking her to death with a crowbar. Is that in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: I think so.

The hearings did signal the demise of EC as the comic book industry instituted the Comics Code Authority, with the sticker familiar to buyers of DC, Marvel and other quality comics. Here’s an example from my private collection (which consists of one Jughead and one Dagwood issue):

But by then the damage to the psyche of many adolescents (mostly male) had been done; and fortunately, the EC comics were reprinted over the years, prolonging the decline of western civilization that delights so many of us.

EC had their own seal, which promised what you really wanted to read:

There is also an enchanting Forward by Paul Tobin, in which he states: “Like most kids who grew up reading Weird Science and the rest of the EC comics, I naturally assumed that humanity’s number-one cause of death was irony.”

I immediately recognized Mr. Tobin as one of the great thinkers and writers of his generation.

Mr. Tobin goes on to explain that the writers of EC comics subscribed to “a rousing school of science wherein every action had a far greater and much more dire opposite reaction. Did you cheat on your date? She was going to turn out to be an alien with a taste for human flesh.”

There are six fully-reproduced comics in the collection. My favorite is the opening story, “Precious Years”.

The first frame sets the stage:

The set has a space-age-bachelor-pad-cum-glory-of-Rome vibe, and our hero is definitely not the skinny guy who has to send away for the muscle-building lessons. He may well like gladiator movies.

(BTW, that body-building ad with the beach scene of the weakling getting sand kicked in his face should have created an enormous stream of royalties for some talented cartoonist and/or writer.)

You immediately understand why this guy has had it. The scroll above the scene lays it out in fine fashion:

No solid-state stuff here; it’s all relays and servo-motors whirring away. We’re basically talking a mid-century-modern take on mind-blowing automation. Bonus point awarded for the word “specules”, which does not appear as a noun in the dictionaries I checked, including the OED, where it does appear as a verb meaning “to regard attentively”, but only in Middle English, a usage obsolete for over four hundred years. Alright, make that two bonus points.

Even getting out of his home is enough to drive a man – well, Martin, anyway – crazy. Although he does not seem bothered by the horned image on the lower door panel.

That “All Right! All Right!” has a Jack Benny ring to it, recalling a great radio bit:

Robber with gun: Your money or your life.
Jack Benny: (says nothing)
Robber: Well!?
Jack Benny: I’m thinking, I’m thinking!

I will not reveal how this story ends but rest assured irony ensues as Martin seeks a way out of his many-divorced-wife condition, in company with the type of woman (Jean) who makes sense to appear in this tale, attired as is Martin in sprayed-on clothing and striding in jutting profile. Did I mention that 90% of the readers were adolescent boys (or just eternal adolescents)?

Jean is damned if she’s going to be number 12!

As an added treat, there are five stories in this collection that were originally authored by Ray Bradbury, including “Surprise Package”, which is adapted from “Changeling”, a story originally published in 1949 in Super Science Stories. It has a noir flavor as exemplified by the opening frame:

Cigarettes, strychnine, hammer, gun . . . I like it. The original story had an ice pick instead of a gun, and wine crystals instead of a bottle, a nice you-are-reading-sci-fi signal. All writers must bow down to the image of the “elevator . . . floating up the iron throat of the house”. Masterful.

Another story, a sort of early meta-fictional assay, “EC Confidential”, actually features Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein (the lead writer at EC) as characters, who are called on the rug by their fictitious boss Phineas T. Fables, for creating comics that have predicted the future.

P.T., who is fat, bald and smokes a cigar – a proper publisher, in other words – has them dead to rights, though I admit I was not expecting an eerily askew treatment of transexual issues in the military (and I apologize for any insensitive handling of the subject here):

And when P.T. demands they sign loyalty oaths, the Future Shock shivers increased:

I’m not sure it’s irony, but in a big plot twist, flying saucers appear outside P.T.’s window, and aliens barge in and seemingly kill the entire EC Staff . . .

. . . but somehow the murdered staff are robot imitations, the aliens are Martians and the actual EC staff are the handful of Venusites (I would have thought Venusians, but what do I know) who escaped the Martians’ conquering slaughter long ago. I guess.

BTW, I love the aliens asking in their ellipsis-filled patois “Is . . . this . . . E.C. . . . .?”; and I don’t understand why Gaines did not say “Hell no, this is DC. We’re working on the latest Superman in the back room . . . EC’s over on Broadway, let me draw you a map (to DC headquarters, heh, heh!).”

The EC product most familiar to the broad reading public was, of course, MAD magazine, which began as a comic, under the direction of Harvey Kurtzman in 1952. Here’s an ad for MAD from the Weird Science archive collection:

MAD was wildly successful and led Bill Gaines to launch a sister publication, PANIC, under the leadership of Al Feldstein, which reportedly did not make Kurtzman happy. Here’s an ad for PANIC:

PANIC only lasted two years, and MAD continues to this day, perhaps the most influential magazine on comedic/satiric artists in history. But that’s a story for another day.

The Weird Science compilation is recommended for those who . . . well, you know who you are.

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