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EC Comics: Difference between revisions
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A short-lived but influential publisher of [[Anthology Comic]] books.
EC Comics, aka "Entertaining Comics" and "Educational Comics", was founded in 1944 by Maxwell Gaines with the aim of producing fact-based comic books aimed at churches and schools. After his death in 1947, his son William Gaines inherited the business, producing comic books in typical genres: western, crime, romance. Starting in 1949, the younger Gaines began introducing the "New Trend" series focusing on horror (''Tales From the Crypt'', ''The Vault of Horror'', ''The Haunt of Fear''), crime (''Crime SuspenStories''), realistically depicted war (''Two-Fisted Tales'', ''Frontline Combat'') and [[Science Fiction]] (''Weird Science'', ''Weird Fantasy''). The horror, science fiction and crime stories almost invariably had a [[Twist Ending]]. EC made extensive use of the [[Karmic Twist Ending]] before ''[[
A combination of evocative (if sensationalistic and florid) writing and excellent art by some of the top comic book artists of the time, combined with outreach to the fans, quickly caused EC's sales to skyrocket. In addition to a strong theme of often gruesome poetic justice, EC's titles often tackled social issues of the day, especially in their science fiction and suspense books.
EC was not shy about "borrowing" ideas from prose stories and were caught at it by [[
This was also the birthplace of a little comic book called ''Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad'', a satire and comedy title. Its first issues sold poorly, but it soon found enough of a following to inspire a number of imitators, including one published by EC itself (''Panic'').
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Notoriously, EC was told to change the ethnicity of a character in a reprint of the classic [[Does This Remind You of Anything?]] story [http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/54803.html "Judgment Day."] This was the last straw, and the story was reprinted unchanged in the final comic book published by the company.
The black-and-white [[Mad Magazine]], which had switched from the comic medium for reasons unrelated to the Code, ultimately became the sole surviving EC publication and went on to decades of success. But the influence of EC has continued through multiple reprints, homages by subsequent horror and SF writers, a pair of early-'70s British [[EC Comics (
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=== Tropes associated with EC Comics include: ===
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* [[Walls of Text]]: Notoriously, the script was always written first, often directly on the storyboard, so that the art was stuck wherever it could fit.
** This was averted, however, by Harvey Kurtzman who storyboarded his scripts before giving them to other artists. His work employs very different pacing and tone than the other stories.
* [[What the Hell, Townspeople?]]: In the ''Shock SuspenStory'' "In Gratitude..." an injured white war vet ends up giving his hometown kind of callout after they choose to recognize him for his valor, but wouldn't even bury his black friend, who had saved his life in the first place, in the town cemetery.
* [[Who Wants to Live Forever?]]: "The Precious Years"
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