Foul Play And Other Stories (The Fantagraphics EC Comics Artists Library) - Hardcover

Feldstein, Al

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1683969545 ISBN 13: 9781683969549

Publisher: Fantagraphics, 2024

Synopsis

The ultimate collection of Jack Davis EC stories!

When Jack Davis took up his pen for EC Comics, he imbued his stories with a playful sense of (gallows) humor that made his innocent victims more eye-poppingly terrified, his ax-murders more gleefully gruesome, and his revenge-seeking corpses more morbidly motivated than any other EC artist. These horror and suspense tales ― from the pages of Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, Crime SuspenStories, and Shock SuspenStories ― include frightful fare such as “Hyde and Go Shriek!”, “Tombs-Day!”, “Witch Witch’s Witch!”, “Head-Room!”, “Chop Talk!”, “Coffin Spell!”, and more, all leavened with the cackling, pun-laced wit of scripter Al Feldstein and illuminated as only the virtuoso brushwork of Jack Davis could present them.

But the standout story has to be “Foul Play,” the most infamous of all EC horror stories, in which a baseball team takes revenge on a murderous rival player by, um (spoiler alert), “repurposing” various parts of his anatomy for one final blood-spattered, organ-scattered inning. You’ll never see a baseball game the same way again. And as gruesome as that sounds (and is!), Davis deftly pulls it off with aplomb and a mordant sense of absurd humor that will have you cringing and laughing at the same time. Plus, not one, not two, but three Davis-driven adaptations of haunting short stories by Ray Bradbury: “The Coffin!”, “Let's Play Poison!”, and “The Black Ferris!”.

We round out this volume with all three of Davis’s EC science-fiction adventures, and all five of his aerial war stories from the legendary EC title, Aces High. 40 stories in all, most scripted by EC legend Al Feldstein, plus in-depth commentary by EC experts Thommy Burns and Grant Geissman.

Black-and-white illustrations throughout

About this title

About the Authors

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.

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.

Grant Geissman is the four-time Eisner Award-nominated author of several books related to the EC comics and Mad magazine, the most recent being The History of EC Comics (Taschen). He is also an Emmy-nominated guitarist and composer (for co-writing the theme to Two and a Half Men), and his most recent solo album, BLOOZ, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2022. He lives in Los Angeles.

Thommy Burns is the founding administrator of the EC Fan-Addict Club on Facebook, appears frequently as a speaker on pop culture and comics-related podcasts and livestreams, and co-hosts the EC Fan-Addict Podcast and YouTube channel. He lives in Southern California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1683969545
• ISBN 13: 9781683969549
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Davis Jack
• Number of pages: 312