"'Taint The Meat...It's The Humanity!" and Other Stories (The Fantagraphics EC Comics Artists Library, 3) - Hardcover

Davis, Jack; Feldstein, Al

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1606995782 ISBN 13: 9781606995785

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2013

Synopsis

Tales From the Crypt was the quintessential American horror comic book, and Jack Davis the quintessential Tales From the Crypt artist. Mostly written by EC editor Al Feldstein, "'Taint the Meat: It's the Humanity!" and Other Stories collects every one of Davis's 24 Tales from the Crypt stories in one convenient package. They run the gamut from pure supernatural horror, to the classic "disbeliever gets his comeuppance" story, to EC's bread and butter, the ridiculously grisly revenge-of-the-abused tale, seasoned with buckets of blood and some of the most god-awful punning titles ever committed to newsprint.

About this title

About the Authors

Jack Davis (1924–2016, b. Atlanta, Georgia) was a founding cartoonist of Mad and one of the most in-demand caricaturists and cartoonists in the world throughout his 60-plus-year career. Among many other honors, he was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2003.

Albert B. Feldstein (1928–2014; Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, 2003) was a triple-threat writer, artist, and editor, renowned for his work on such titles as Weird Science, Tales From the Crypt, and Mad magazine. He received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.

Gary Groth is the co-founder of The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books. He lives in Seattle.

Reviews

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606995782
• ISBN 13: 9781606995785
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Groth Gary