EC Comics

E.C. Publications, Inc., (doing business as EC Comics) is an American comic book publisher. It specialized in horror fiction, crime fiction, satire, military fiction, dark fantasy, and science fiction from the 1940s through the mid-1950s, notably the Tales from the Crypt series. Initially, EC was founded as Educational Comics by Maxwell Gaines and specialized in educational and child-oriented stories. After Max Gaines died in a boating accident in 1947, his son William Gaines took over the company and renamed it Entertaining Comics. He printed more mature stories, delving into horror, war, fantasy, science-fiction, adventure, and other genres. Noted for their high quality and shock endings, these stories were also unique in their socially conscious, progressive themes (including racial equality, anti-war advocacy, nuclear disarmament, and environmentalism) that anticipated the Civil Rights Movement and the dawn of the 1960s counterculture. In 1954–55, censorship pressures prompted it to concentrate on the humor magazine Mad, leading to the company's greatest and most enduring success. Consequently, by 1956, the company ceased publishing all its comic lines except Mad.

The firm, first known as Educational Comics, was founded by Max Gaines, former editor of the comic-book company All-American Publications, and it was initially a shell company of All-American. When that company merged with DC Comics in June 1945, Gaines retained rights to the comic book Picture Stories from the Bible, and began his new company using the EC name with a plan to market comics about science, history, and the Bible to schools and churches, and soon expanded to produce children's humor titles. A decade earlier, Max Gaines had been one of the pioneers of the comic book form, with Eastern Color Printing's proto-comic book Funnies on Parade, and with Dell Publishing's Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, considered by historians the first true American comic book.

When Max Gaines died in 1947 in a boating accident, his son William inherited the comics company. After four years (1942–1946) in the Army Air Corps, Gaines had returned home to finish school at New York University, planning to work as a chemistry teacher. He never taught but instead took over the family business. In 1949 and 1950, Bill Gaines began a line of new titles featuring horror, suspense, science fiction, military fiction and crime fiction. His editors, Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman, who also drew covers and stories, gave assignments to such prominent and highly accomplished freelance artists as Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Will Elder, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen, Bernard Krigstein, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton, and Wally Wood. With input from Gaines, the stories were written by Kurtzman, Feldstein, and Craig. Other writers, including Carl Wessler, Jack Oleck, and Otto Binder, were later brought on board.

EC succeeded with its fresh approach and pioneered forming relationships with its readers through its letters to the editor and fan organization, the National EC Fan-Addict Club. EC Comics promoted its stable of illustrators, allowing each to sign his art and encouraging them to develop distinctive styles; the company published one-page biographies of them in comic books. This was in contrast to the industry's common practice, in which credits were often missing, although some artists at other companies, such as the Jack Kirby – Joe Simon team, Jack Cole and Bob Kane had been prominently promoted.

EC published distinct lines of titles under its Entertaining Comics umbrella. Most notorious were its horror books, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear. These titles reveled in a gruesome joie de vivre, with grimly ironic fates meted out to many of the stories' protagonists. The company's war comics, Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales, often featured weary-eyed, unheroic stories out of step with the jingoistic times. Shock SuspenStories tackled weighty political and social issues such as racism, sex, drug use, and the American way of life. EC always claimed to be "proudest of our science fiction titles", with Weird Science and Weird Fantasy publishing stories unlike the space opera found in such titles as Fiction House's Planet Comics. Crime SuspenStories had many parallels with film noir. As noted by Max Allan Collins in his story annotations for Russ Cochran's 1983 hardcover reprint of Crime SuspenStories, Johnny Craig had developed a "film noir-ish bag of effects" in his visuals,^{[page needed]} while characters and themes found in the crime stories often showed the strong influence of writers associated with film noir, notably James M. Cain.^{[citation needed]} Craig excelled in drawing stories of domestic scheming and conflict, leading David Hajdu to observe:

To young people of the postwar years, when the mainstream culture glorified suburban domesticity as the modern American ideal – the life that made the Cold War worth fighting – nothing else in the panels of EC comics, not the giant alien cockroach that ate earthlings, not the baseball game played with human body parts, was so subversive as the idea that the exits of the Long Island Expressway emptied onto levels of Hell.

Superior illustrations of stories with surprise endings became EC's trademark. Gaines would generally stay up late and read large amounts of material while seeking "springboards" for story concepts. The next day he would present each premise until Feldstein found one that he thought he could develop into a story. At EC's peak, Feldstein edited seven titles while Kurtzman handled three. Artists were assigned stories specific to their styles; for example, Davis and Ingels often drew gruesome, supernatural-themed stories, while Kamen and Evans did tamer material.

With hundreds of stories written, common themes surfaced. Some of EC's more well-known themes include: