Choke Gasp! The Best of 75 Years of EC Comics is now released by Dark Horse. This hardcover collection is a gorgeous assembly of the very best of EC Comics. And it’s worth your attention.
This is a big volume, at 534 pages of full-colour stories. There’s no ‘fluff’ here, it’s all good. Or all bad. Let’s put it this way: the winners write the history books, and the others appear in EC comic stories. The drifters, the grifters, the sisters of evil. The butcher, the baker, the little dog that lives down the lane. They all have a part to play in misery, regret, and tongue-in-cheek horror. Those lost in space, those lost in evil, plotting and scheming and always losing out.
Choke Gasp (named for the shocked expression of horror that is a running cliche in these stories) is organized by artist. There are some big names here, of course, and this is the very best of the stories that they produced for this 1950s publisher. Collection editor Daniel Chabon has brought work by Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, George Evans, Al Feldstein, Russ Heath, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen, Bernie Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, John Severin, Alex Toth (!), Al Williamson and Wally Wood
The dozens of stories themselves come from horror, sci-fi and war books. Digital colouring is by Carlos Badilla, and it’s tastefully done, to be a reasonable facsimile of the original book colouring.
Dark Horse, Choke Gasp! The Best of 75 Years of EC Comics, $49.99 for 534 pages of content, Assume Mature rating for explicit horror
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