Check under the bed after you read the new hardcover from Dark Horse, EC’s Vault of Horror, Volume 1. There might be something lurking there, waiting for you to shut out the lights!

A delightful collection of vintage horror stories, this EC Archive volume gathers issues 12-17 of the 1950 Vault of Horror comic.

As you probably know, EC Comics became a hot ticket in the early 1950’s, with its high-quality horror and science fiction stories. The list of artists who drew stories for the various titles is legendary; Frazetta, Ingles, Davis, Wood, Feldstein, Kurtzman, and so on.

This volume shows those artists in their young, formative days. Before they were slick and polished illustrators for MAD magazine and other publications, they cut their teeth on horror. The tales are fun if a bit wordy for the 2018 reader. But even just flipping the pages can give you a jolt; talking corpses, ax murders, betrayal, revenge, melting bodies, you name it, if it’s dastardly and underhanded, it’s here.

Wonderful fun, early days of the visual masters, cleanly restored and tastefully recolored for today’s high-quality reproduction, this volume is a high mark for horror.

Dark Horse, Vault of Horror Volume 1, $49.99 for 220 pages of content, assume a Mature rating.

By Alan Spinney

After a career of graphic design, art direction and copywriting, I still have a passion for words and pictures. I love it when a comic book comes together; the story is tight, and the drawings lead me forward. Art with words... the toughest storytelling technique to get right. Was this comic book worth your money? Let's see!!