"'Taint The Meat...It's The Humanity!" and Other Stories (The EC Comics Library)
Although excelling in many popular genres, including science fiction, war, and crime, the legendary EC comics were most notorious for their horror titles, which revolted the nation’s tastemakers in the 1950s. And while other EC artists were moodier or spookier, Jack Davis’ stories stood out for their distinctly cartoony tinge, leavening the terror with a mocking humor. In these compact tales, each introduced by the pun-obsessed Crypt-Keeper, greedy businessmen, jealous husbands, and cheating wives meet grisly fates, graphically depicted, at the hands of their revenge-seeking victims or from werewolves or vampires. EC’s emphasis on text-heavy captions and verbose dialogue balloons—sometimes taking up more space than did the illustrations—did a disservice to its talented artists. Davis’ skill would be better displayed in subsequent decades as one of the country’s leading commercial illustrators. Although amassing 25 of these stories accentuates their formulaic nature, especially the reliance on sub-O. Henry twist endings, they remain entertaining six decades later, or as the Crypt-Keeper would put it, “There’s no ghoul like an old ghoul.” --Gordon Flagg