BARRY PEARL REMEMBERS EC COMICS...

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Bold-but-bashful BARRY PEARL has done it again!  "What has he done?" you ask. Only gone and provided yet another fascinating and informative article about how he discovered (he's a 'discoverer', remember) EC comics.  So don't let me hold you back, straight over to Barry.

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How I discovered EC comics.

I grew up during America's Comics Code era, the 1960s, when comics were heavily censored.  There were no stories about true crime, real relationships, drugs, zombies or racism.

I had read Mad and had gotten the reprint paperbacks and I loved them.  But as much as I'd heard about EC comics in newspaper and magazine stories about the Comics Code being started, I had not seen much.  The old newspaper articles always presented the EC comics in a horrible light, and I knew they had led to the creation of the Comics Code.

In the early 1970s I picked up the oversize colour book, The EC Horror Comics of the 1950s,  and loved it.  I also picked up a badly printed black and white EC Convention book.  (See further down.)

Around 1978 I gave up reading new comics (see this link).  I still loved the medium, just not the comics then produced.  I began looking for older comics, and in the 1980s I discovered the Russ Cochran EC sets.  These republished, in black and white and in a larger than usual size, the various EC titles of the late 1940s to the mid 1950s.  They were beautiful reproductions!

Upon reading, the set's second biggest surprise was how consistently well drawn they were.  They were just beautiful, every story, every issue.  They were also so well written - perhaps a bit to wordy at times - but incredibly consistent.  I felt Marvel had much of that for the 1960s, but EC was just outstanding.

I loved the Sci-fi titles the most.  The suspense stories were excellent, often including social issues (racism, sex, drugs, infidelity, etc.) totally absent from then modern comics.  I was not a fan of the censored war or western comics of the 1960s; they were action adventure comics with none of the issues regarding war.  My biggest surprise was the Harvey Kurtzman war comics. They dealt with real issues of suffering, death, heartache, and patriotism in great dramatic fashion.  The stories were outstanding and rivetting, not like then-current war comics of Marvel or DC.

I had not previously known about Panic, but I loved them too!  They were funny, in a different way than Mad, and done by Al Feldstein who would later edit Mad.

I was not a fan of the horror stories and really thought, and still think, they often went a bit overboard.  The horror genre also invaded the other genres at times. Again, they were drawn and told well, but just not my favourite.

I waited nearly two decades for Picto-Fiction to be published and I found them mostly not very interesting.  (Don’t anyone here hit me!!!!!!!)

My last surprise came in the last decade or so.  I had not seen many of the competitors' comics from the 1950s - the Harvey, Avons, St. Johns, etc., until PS Publishing and Gwandanaland starting reprinting them.  Simply put, they just were not very good and didn’t compare to EC.  There were occasional well drawn and well told stories from artists such as Matt Baker, but no consistency from one story to another, or even one issue to another.  Often, future EC artists would appear, but they saved their best work for EC.

EC had a very short life and didn't live long enough to lose their artists or repeat many stories.  But nothing has ever topped it, although many have tried.

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(Take a look below at just a small part of Barry's extensive library of collected edition books.  Impressive, eh?)

And below are some of the newspaper articles about the Comics Code and what eventually, perhaps inevitably, led to it.

And below is one of the pages (plus a close up) of the kind that resulted in the sensational stushie.  Overreaction, perhaps?  It's important to judge things by the standards of the time, not the inured outlook of today.

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