Comic Review: EC Covers Artist’s Edition (IDW Publishing)

For those of us who love great comic book art, this new IDW Artist’s Edition title is mouthwatering: EC Covers!! You’re in for a treat, and it ain’t even Halloween, heee heee!

EC Comics, those infamous “Educational Comics” of the (mostly) 1950s were known for their shocking depictions of horror, their frontier-expanding stories by leading sci-fi writers like Ray Bradbury, and their later evolution into publishing MAD Magazine.

Well, with that breathtakingly brief intro, here’s what the EC Covers Artist’s Edition entrails. Oops, I mean ‘entails’. Heee heee. It’s a BIG coffee table-sized book, with more than 120 covers reproduced in high quality from the black and white original art. *This stuff is priceless, with these original covers selling for approximately $100,000 EACH.

The artists include Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Al Williamson, Johnny Craig, Al Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman, George Evans, Bill Elder, Bernie Krigstein, John Severin, and Reed Crandall.

It’s all amazing stuff, hand-drawn to the highest of standards: well-executed faces, figures, zombies, corpses, elements of torture, aliens, soldiers, murderers, disembodied parts and pieces, and so on. All lovingly rendered with care and precision. The shadows, the textures, the compositions, all designed to make the 1950s fiction reader squirm and purchase the comic from the drugstore, bus station or newsstand.

You will love this book.

IDW, EC Covers Artist’s Edition, price not available, check with local comic shops.