“STRAWBERRY SPRING“ A COLUMN ABOUT EC COMICS, PART 8

The best art, in a comic book or otherwise, is of its time as it“s simultaneously timeless. Artists will want to capture what“s going on around them. There is an urgency that will come with raw talent, to not only record what is happening, but to elevate and re-shape it in such a manner that what“s hidden or what“s right on the surface, yet concealed all the same, is made visible if you“d just took the time to look closely. This is the truth about the art from any creator with something meaningful to say. Maybe Stephen King put it best when he remarked that “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”“ Art needs to have a timeliness to reflect on what can“t be said out loud, the things we don“t want to hear, the things that will hurt us. Art can be pretty, but it must be ugly and brutal all the same. And the very best art will go beyond its simple core message to endure. Because truth be told, every lie we“ll tell one another and ourself to make our lives more palatable, is as real as any car you“ll see on the street or on a hand-drawn comic book page. The gleam from a shiny new appliance is the sheen we put on as our wool coat against the darkness we know exits in us and all around us. If anything, we hate those who dare or simple can“t help themselves, those who talk to us with their art to give us the lowdown in bright colors or a hushed whisper and who will tear off our masks as if they were a tiny band-aid placed over a mere scratch. In the end, we all will stand naked and exposed for who we truly are. And as we suspect, it won“t be a pretty sight to be seen. If there ever was a time when comic book art did exactly that, it came in the 1950s when EC Comics put out a handful of comic book titles loosely branded as “New Trend”“. Originally intent on capturing a new trend that the company“s publisher Bill Gaines and his employee Al Feldstein, a so called good-girl artist turned writer-editor, perceived in the market, namely a demand for horror comics among its very young readers, boys and girls alike, both men soon used their pamphlets to reveal what lay behind the picket fences of the well-kept front yards of the new suburbia of the new American middle class. In that, these two men, who were very much middle class themselves, were brothers onto William Butler Yeats. The Irish poet foretold the fall of the British Empire when in the aftermath of the First World War he wrote: “Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold.”“ Gaines and Feldstein sensed that this was the case with the new middle class which had begun to emerge after yet another world war. Men of what was to become known as “The Greatest Generation”“, silent men, and women who enjoyed their newfound freedoms which came with the jobs they held, or with their husbands“ absence from home during the day. They were the protagonists in most of the stories Feldstein would go on to tell (and later, a select few highly talented freelance writers as well). But in contrast to Yeats“ sinister, terse predictions (“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”¦ The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”“), the terror that showed up in EC Comics at around 1952, was one of many silent horrors. These men and women EC“s readers would see in any given story, did not put on any outlandish costumes like a decade earlier when there were the superheroes. These couples, newlyweds and parents alike, looked a lot like their moms and dads or the parents of their friends or neighbors. But still, they all wore masks, but not for long. And the kids ate it all up. These were the children of the Atomic Age, but strangely, before the giant ants and other creatures who got caught up in a nuclear blast, began to proliferate on the grainy film stock of every other B-movie that played at your local drive-in, these boys and girls wanted to read comic books about real people doing everyday stuff until what was wrong with them slowly bubbled to the surface and everything went oh so terribly wrong. This was exactly the type of stories Feldstein and his hired hands wanted to tell outside their more traditional horror stories on which EC Comics“, and by extension the whole industry“s top horror artist Graham “Ghastly”“ Ingels ruled supreme. There was only a scant number of artists who could do this properly or at least in the way Feldstein wanted this done. Sure, EC had their crime writer-artist in residence. Johnny Craig, the longest serving EC creator who had started with Max Gaines, and who had worked with Feldstein using the name F.C. Aljon, preferred urban settings for his stories which betrayed the massive influence his idol Will Eisner had on his artwork. The artists who worked best with Feldstein“s up-ending of suburban bliss were arguably Jack Kamen and up to a certain level, Wally Wood. As outstanding as the work produced by these two artists was, and that it was, there were certain shortcomings. Kamen“s people were always handsome, and while there was something subversive in seeing such nice folks get at each other in violent ways, as they unmasked their grotesque selves in front of each other and the readers, they maybe looked a bit too pretty. If that was the case with the men and women Kamen drew, it applied to Wally“s men and women ten-fold. Wood created men who always looked like heroes, superheroes even. They all were built like a Superman who would discover that even out of his red and blue uniform he would fool exactly nobody by simply putting on glasses. And Wood“s women radiated sex appeal, but not like the Hollywood type glamour babes a reader could always expect in Kamen“s stories with their glammed-up housewives and selfish office girls that dreamt of a rich husband they could boss around, and who called every other guy “Buster”“. Wood“s women wore their sexiness and their lust on the sleeves of their impossibly tight dresses, which seemed too clingy and form-fitting for any underwear and which always gave off a shimmer that was a promise. But then, at the end of 1952, an artist darkened Feldstein“s door at the EC offices at 225 Lafayette Street who had lost his comfortable job in editorial at the comic book division of the formerly hugely successful publisher Fiction House a while ago and had been working as a freelancer at Fawcett until they got out of the comic book game entirely. This artist came on the recommendation of his friend Al Williamson, a major get for Feldstein and his team. The Fawcett hook-up had been brokered by Williamson as well as it turned out. Looking over the man“s portfolio, he was already thirty-two, certainly much older than Williamson and Wood, Feldstein saw that he“d done everything during the short six years he“d been in the business of producing comic book pages. Jungle Comics, Science Fiction Comics and Military Comics, everything except superheroes who were not EC“s trade and who were going out of style anyways. But there was indeed a common thread. While he did draw airplanes very well and this might be something that would make him an ideal candidate for the war comics Feldstein“s colleague Harvey Kurtzman did, who was an artist turned writer-editor as well (Reed Crandall, the artist of Blackhawk wouldn“t join EC Comics not before another six months had passed), his characters had a normalness about them which was something Feldstein liked. They looked like regular people you could very well imagine in suburbia.

At this point in his rather short career which had taken him all over the place, EC Comics seemed a most logical next step. Fiction House, one of the major players in the pulp magazine business since the 1920s, who at the end of the 1930s, had muscled its way into the then burgeoning comic book industry as well, was slowly going away. And Fawcett“s comic division was currently getting shuttered. For one, because the drawn-out legal battles brought on by DC/National Comics for an alleged copyright infringement of Fawcett“s immensely popular Captain Marvel character on their marquee superhero Superman, hadn“t gone in Fawcett“s favor and hadn“t only seriously depleted Fawcett“s coffers, but this had finally led to the untimely demise of Captain Marvel altogether. Everyone knew of course, that the motivating factor behind these legal wranglings was pure and simple old-fashioned greed. Since his inception, the Captain had cut into DC/National“s bottom line and its owner, Harry Donenfeld needed him gone. And it wasn“t a secret either, that the sons of Fawcett“s founder Wilford Hamilton Fawcett, who had greatly expanded the company after their father“s death, wanted to solely focus on the greener pastures of magazine and paperback publishing which brought in a shinier coin. Ironically, while more and more children, boys as well as girls, got into all sorts of comic books than at any point in time since the rise of the superheroes, for the simple fact that there were more kids around, the number of publishers decreased significantly. Companies were either consolidated or went away entirely. Only a handful superheroes had remained, and they were still selling good numbers, since the underlying concept was timeless, or they“d offered a little something extra like Fox“s Phantom Lady. Everybody else was just chasing the latest trend. These new kids were fickle with their appetites. But then something strange had happened. By sheer luck EC Comics had stumbled onto something new. Horror Comics. And they had taken it from there. The tales that were spun by writers like Al Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman and to smaller degree by Johnny Craig did not only look interesting, but the guys didn“t write down to their kid audience. Instead they seemed to share certain secrets with their young readers, secrets that those kids had half figured out themselves. Horrors might occur behind the moldy walls of an old manor house or those of a prestigious boarding school which was run by a dictatorial headmaster. But the horrors might just as likely come about inside every new dream home right across from your street. In these stories by Feldstein at least, middle class couples that had seemed perfectly normal, could suddenly lapse into spousal homicide when a newer, prettier or more virile romantic partner for one of the spouses entered their mundane world. A deadly double-cross, either committed in the spur of the moment or ingeniously planned to only go awry, was around every corner, as Feldstein and artists like Kamen and Wood gleefully deconstructed the lives in these houses with their perfectly manicured lawns. Only it wasn“t that suddenly. These marriages were on the skids long before the handsome stranger showed up on their doorsteps, a long-lost brother or a greasy, yet attractive drifter with a sinister past, or the new girl was hired in the offices of the husbands. At the same time when EC Comics was really drilling down to where the meat of such stories lay, there was something strange going on at his former places of work. Surprisingly, Fiction House had launched a new series, but a closer examination of the title, which was centered around their jungle hero Kaänga, the star of the once long-running series Jungle Comics, revealed that not only did the book offer reprints of material John Celardo and he had worked on in the 1940s, but these yarns were heavily edited, with some of the artwork re-drawn to considerably tone-down the violence, if not also the depiction of some of the jungle girls, whose cheesecake poses were seen as too over the top in the early 1950s. And there were the milquetoast imitators of EC“s horror titles. While he began to close his account with Fawcett, and he handed in his last few stories for books like Beware! Terror Tales, which featured its own horror host called The Mummy, though in the midst of shutting down their comics line, Fawcett had a lookalike artist lined up as his replacement, a guy named Bob McCarty who copied the crisp line art he produced. This after he had worked on their licensed property title Captain Video (which was a smash hit with the kids and kept them glued to the little television screens in the afternoons) and he“d done an over thirty pages long adaptation of the movie “When Worlds Collide”“, which was published as a one-shot in their Motion Picture Comics line. His friend Al Williamson had pitched in on the inks as well, and the results were outstanding. Not the first time Al had helped with inks. Al was now fully ensconced at EC Comics. In a way it was not surprising that the Fawcett and Fiction House books were selling less copies. He only had to look at the names on EC“s team roster, which included two of his friends, Williamson and Graham Ingels, and on occasion a young artist he had met during his Fiction House days as well, Frank Frazetta. He would later say: “They had, I guess, the best people on staff because they were paying a few dollars more per page than other companies and they had good stories to work on.”“ But if in a way Superman and DC/National“s lawsuit had driven Fawcett out of the comic book market, when he later came to DC looking for work, the publisher would mess with him for a second time. This was when he learned that there was a difference if you were a writer or an artist. While writers mostly used house-names, and it was uncommon to credit the artists (to make it easier to re-distribute the art duties should one of the freelancers leave), artists were still identifiable through their own style, and the guys who gave out the work assignments and signed the checks knew who you were anyway. Otto Binder, the legendary pulp writer who had come to Fawcett with the help of his artist brother, had been the main voice for Captain Marvel and his Marvel Family. He also came to EC Comics when these books were stopped. Binder was much too prolific to just open up a bar like his main artist C.C. Beck. EC Comics had welcomed Otto with open arms naturally since they were already thinking about adapting some of his pulp stories anyway.

After the EC Comics had gone away ultimately, Otto had no problems with getting hired by DC Comics, even for work on the Superman titles. Surely, he was hugely talented, and he had an in, since the editor of the Superman family of books Mort Weisinger was a friend of his, but still the company was run with an iron fist by Jack Liebowitz, publisher Donenfeld“s numbers guy. Apparently, nobody had any qualms about hiring the man who had mainly been responsible for Captain Marvel“s huge and enduring success with his young readers and who had expanded the brand further and further into new titles. The writer, who had also just recently written some of the best EC Comics tales, the breathtakingly beautiful “Lost in Space”“ with gorgeous artwork by Al Williamson included. But Binder was a writer. And perhaps it was also because he had never been that closely associated with Al Feldstein who was less interested in the poetic worlds in outer space, but in the alienation which was apparent, to the writer-editor at least, in the interactions between the real people you saw on Long Island where the Feldsteins lived, who were basically his neighbors as he soon found out. Feldstein liked to go fishing on Jones Beach and Fire Island which gave him ample opportunity to observe the folks around him, or when he took the train into the city for his meetings with Bill Gaines or one of the artist like a regular guy who worked a nine to five job and who had settled with his family into a dream house in the suburbs. He had done the same. This was something he had dreamed about when, during his three years in the Air Force, he had been stationed on Long Island for some time. Meanwhile he lived with his wife and his four-year-old daughter Carol in Levittown, a newly developed suburb, right next door to the family of another one of his close friends Graham Ingels whom he“d known since the old Fiction House days, and who became his colleague once again. However, when he showed his art portfolio to editor Robert Kanigher (another writer-editor who was the second most prolific writer at DC Comics, second only to another old pulp magazine stalwart Gardner Fox), he could feel the air leave the room of his Manhattan office. This was shortly after Gaines, not unlike Fiction House and Fawcett had abandoned the field of comic book publishing, mind you. He would have been able to hear a pin drop in the silence that developed while the sun set over the skyline, he could see from Kanigher“s office window. His work for Gaines had not ended with the crime or horror books. Those had gone away once the comic industry had set up its very own watchdog organization to stave off being pushed over a cliff by politicians, enraged parents and overzealous church groups and a media that had a field day with this spectacle. Gaines had tried a number of titles called New Direction. He had worked for most of these like many of the other guys. There was even an aviation series named Aces High which felt like it had been made right for him. But none of these books, like many publishers, outlasted another year. Gaines still had MAD, but Harvey Kurtzman had demanded half of it. After the initial shock, rumors had it, that Gaines had laughed the balding funny man out of his office. Then Gaines did what he always did. He hired Feldstein as an editor. Al turned MAD, which Kurtzman had converted into a magazine just recently, into a huge hit by hiring the right kind of people and by making the most out of this format which meant that they wouldn“t have to answer to the Comics Code Authority. Some of the original artists who had worked on MAD stayed on, others like the mercurial wunderkind Wally Wood and the superfast Jack Davis, felt that they owed some loyalty to the ousted Kurtzman and left. Many artists of the EC bullpen had already begun working elsewhere, himself included, after another initiative of the publisher, the so-called Picto-Fiction line, had also folded. Some, like Reed Crandall and Joe Orlando and his friend Ingels and himself, were working for Classics Illustrated and Gold Key. There were still newspapers with their dailies and Sunday strips which offered work opportunities if you could get them. However, when Milton Caniff had left the immensely popular Terry and the Pirates series, a newspaper strip he had originated, there were one hundred artists who applied for the job. He looked Kanigher“s face, then at his hands as they closed his portfolio. His most recent work was placed on top. Space Conquerors, a series he“d done for Boys“ Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. DC Comics was of course the top of the food chain, again, if you could get work from them. Even though some years had passed, he knew the answer he would get from the editor-writer before he opened his mouth. His work for Feldstein had not been overly brutal, but still, with the scripts he had given him to turn into sequential art, he must have struck a nerve. Husbands married for money, women hated their husbands and their lives. Best friends killed one another because of a woman, one brother murdered the other brother because he was either a raving madman or he was jealous of him. The inhabitants of a home for the blind fed a cruel landlord to his own starved dog. A guy in a wheelchair made sure that his beautiful wife would drown. “You“re one of those [expletive deleted] from EC who ruined the whole industry and now you think you“re going to move in here and we“re going to pay you?”“ At this moment, when Bob Kanigher told him that his name was ruined, artist George Evans decided to become a ghost!

George Evans was perhaps the first fan turned professional, only the thing was, when he was a kid at the end of the 1920s, comic books were not as popular as they would become just a decade later. Sure, there were the newspaper strips, and young George had some favorite creators, but ultimately, what got him hooked as a fanboy, were these cheaply produced pulp magazines with their imaginative worlds of wonder which prepared readers for comic books in a more profound way than the shiny dailies ever did. The daily strips, and especially those on Sundays, were created by master craftsmen like Milt Caniff and Hal Foster, and they were delivered in a serious environment, the newspaper, which provided them with additional credibility. Pulps on the other hand, were sold on their own, and they often came with lurid covers which only made them more enticing for children and young adults. George was nine years old when he saw his first pulp magazine close up. This happened in 1929 and in Kulpmont, Pennsylvania, the fast-growing coalmining city George“s folks had moved to from quiet, rural Harwood where he was born. There was a certain irony in the fact that in a town in which everybody was concerned with what lay beneath, he would develop a lifelong love for what was going on in the sky. The magazine, Sky Birds, belonged to the uncle of a friend from school. The man struck a deal with him. If he went out and looked for discarded cigarette butts, and he collected a tin full of those, and he stripped the paper from them, the magazine would be his. George went all in. Thus, began his love for aviation and for the stepchildren of entertainment for adults, the pulp magazines and comic books. And he learned a valuable lesson in the process, a lesson not every character in the scripts by Feldstein he would much later illustrate, ever fully learned, not as kids and especially not as adults. If you wanted something, you simply had to work for it. What George wanted was to fly an airplane or at least fly in a plane, and to contribute to the pulp magazines. Flying a plane himself was complicated by the fact that his eyes were really bad, and he had to wear glasses from an early age on, those that made him look like an accountant, a look that came to define his appearance even when he was an adult. He found that he had talent for writing and drawing, but to make a name for himself, he needed training, which cost money. So, while he worked on his art and his writing style, he began to work as a mill hand first and then as a store clerk. With enough money in hand, he registered in a correspondence course. Once he“d finished high school, George took up work as one of the many coal-truckers that hung around Kulpmont. Meanwhile, he“d been able to sell some artwork and a poem he“d written to one of the aviation pulp magazines. This gave him encouragement to pursue a career in the arts. Truth be told, he wasn“t cut out for the life of a trucker who were a rough and tumble bunch. George enrolled at the Scranton Art School in Pennsylvania but left the school after a year when the war in Europe went underway. He was there to volunteer long before America entered into the fray. But due to his poor eyesight, he was soundly rejected. But the increased arms build-up as a preparation of what was most likely to come, especially in the field of avionics, made new jobs readily available in the defense sector of the airline industry which was located in Kansas and California. George decided he liked sunshine more than wheat fields and he moved to Shaw Field in Southern California. He soon was able to secure employment as an aircraft mechanic since he knew his way around engines from his truck driving days. After two years, he tried to enlist again. With America“s involvement in the war effort, and with his new skills for plane engines, George had even gone on flights with experimental planes, albeit as a passenger, he was accepted by the Air Force. Though he wasn“t strictly cut out for a life in the service and he would stay in America with the support crews, he got a promotion during the three years he served. With his air mechanics team deployed to Long Island, he seized the opportunity to enroll at the Art Students League in New York City for evening classes. Evans found himself a girlfriend who he would marry once he was discharged in 1946. Still very much wanting to become an artist, and with a family to support, Evans realized that the publishing landscape had severely changed. For a short period of time, comic books had peaked to incredible heights with even soldiers reading stories about men in tights and caped crusaders and women with domino masks who looked like pin-up models. And comics had so much but killed the pulp magazines. Some of the publishers had set up own imprints for comics in time, and they were still in business, though the comics trend was waning considerably. It was a shrinking market, but kids loved these colorful pamphlets, though the superheroes had outlived their usefulness. Young readers wanted to see some jungle action and alien worlds or some gangsters in a shoot-out with the police. With his clean lines and easy to follow layouts, George quickly found out that he could cut it among the other artists who worked in this field. And soon enough, Fiction House, formerly one of the largest publishers of pulps, hired him for their comics line. Like so many other artists who were new to the industry, his first assignments were clean-up jobs and doing background inkings. When one of the editors saw what he was doing he was quickly moved into doing pencils and inks. After a few stand-alone try-out pages in their successful jungle title Jungle Stories, he did his first yarn, which came for Wings Comics, and lucky for him, it was an aviation story. Though George noticed something. While the superheroes had come and gone and those pulp magazines that were still around had been forced to clean up their act, nobody was really paying close attention to the comic books. Fiction House had always liked to put sexy ladies on the covers, and they continued this trend with one major change.

The women who proliferated these four-color pages were as gorgeous as they were competent. Often, girl heroes had their own serials within these anthology titles. This had brought on a number of female readers the pulps simply never had. And for boys, these women characters, who did know how to pose like pin-up models, were a powerful incentive to get a certain book. George knew his artwork was much better than that of a fellow named Bob Lubbers who did the lead-in story for Wings Comics No. 72, the issue in which his first story was to be published. Lubbers“ story was incredibly racist and violent, but it was not well-drawn, and it was a story that (mostly) had no female characters. But right after this story, there was the Jane Martin strip. Jane was highly competent, and she looked beautiful. And every other artist, like John Celardo and Joey Cavallo, made darn sure, that if they had a female character to draw, they would find good reason for her to take center-stage at one point in the story, best of all with one or more full-body shots. Not so much luck with the script he got, a featured called “Air Heroes of World War II”“, an oddity in its own right since it was a prose piece which came with several panels. This wasn“t so much different to the interior pulp illustrations he had done as a teen, and he put a lot of work into rendering the airplanes the script called for in the most detailed and realistic manner. But George made a mental note to do as the other guys did whenever he got a script with a female character. But looking at the issue when it came out, he quickly realized that the artist who did the Jane Martin series was by far one of the best in the industry where female characters were concerned. To his surprise he was told by one of his colleagues that the artist in question, who also worked on the Camilla series and on Gale Allen in Jungle Comics and Planet Comics respectively, was a woman. Not only this, but she also did two serials in the latter title, the second one, Mysta of the Moon, was also centered around a pretty woman space hero. This artist was uber-talented, and she was amazingly fast as well. Fran Hopper was beautiful woman herself. George would spend hours closely studying every page Hopper did, like the splash page of her heroine Gale Allen for Planet Comics No. 37 (1945), which was a full-body shot that set the mood of some sinister going-ons perfectly. And so, did her splash page for Mysta in the same issue. He quickly realized that if he wanted to learn how to better draw female characters, here was his ideal role-model. Whereas Matt Baker, who was widely hailed as the king of what was soon called cheesecake poses and good-girl art, clearly had the adolescent-gaze of many of his young male readers in mind, Fran Hopper“s grasp of the female anatomy in motion was incredible. It went beyond anything he managed to do. Her female characters looked gorgeous and fit without being over-the-top. Even when they did nothing, but just stood on a page or were seductively posed, they transcended the idea that they were mere objects to be gawked at. Hopper“s woman looked real and they were always realistically proportioned. Indeed, he soon got ample opportunity to practice, since in addition to providing some inks for John Celardo on a Kaänga story in Jungle Comics, and Ann, the blonde jungle hero“s raven-haired girlfriend in particular, and him continuously working on the pilot series in Wings Comics, he was soon picked as the new artist for the Auro Lord of Jupiter feature in Planet Comics, a serial on which Rafael Astarita had done fantastic work. This time around, the script not only featured the blonde Dorna, the bikini-clad girlfriend of the brave Auro, but the villainous Naga, who was equally scantily attired. Looking at the finished product, George knew he still had ways to go. Compared to the work Fran Hopper produced or even John Celardo whose women looked more generic, his female characters looked like stick figures devoid of any charm or personality. The editor didn“t seem to mind, however. In the next issue he had two stories. The Auro serial and the ongoing Space Rangers. This doubled his page count while he still got do to very detailed depictions of fighter planes in Wings Comics. This was like heaven and he decided to get married to his girlfriend and to move out to a little ranch style house on Long Island, right next door to where his friend and former colleague Graham Ingels lived with family. George had met Graham at Fiction House before he taken up freelance work with Eastern Color, another publisher of comics across many genres. Ingels, who was five years his senior finally got a staff position with Ned Pines to oversee the Standard Comics line in 1947. This was also the year when George had two things happening: he was made an editor as well, but at Fiction House, most likely because he also had a talent for writing, and Lily Renée stopped working on The Lost World, a series that had started as an also-ran in Planet Comics, but which became a massive hit once the original premise was re-worked from a straight-up science fiction series into an exciting blend of horror-scifi, and a new artist took over who could perfectly express this new direction. The new artist was Graham Ingels. As it turned out, the moody, atmospheric backgrounds of cities that had been half-destroyed centuries ago, but were still recognizable as New York City and Chicago, aliens that looked like lizard-people in German First World War uniforms, a dashing hero and sexy, long-legged blonde, who was the queen of the titular Lost World, were an intoxicating mix for boys and girls across America, and Graham was the right artist at the right point in his career to make this series a huge hit.

The Lost World ran from issue No. 21 (1942) until issue No. 64 (1950) of Planet Comics, the last issue of original art before the series went into reprints except for its final three issues. This series, for which a total number of 435 original art pages were produced, was groundbreaking in many aspects. Though it used the serialized format, it did so in the context of an overarching narrative, the fight to liberate Earth of the 33rd century from the invading Voltamen, and in that it foresaw the narrative flow of modern TV shows. There were even episodes that were designed to introduce guest stars. While each installment was a complete story, every new tale fed into the main storyline. Much of what made the series great came from Graham Ingels“ visual stylings while the artist was still figuring things out. Though after eight issues, he wanted to go back to drawing interiors for the then still viable pulp line of Fiction House, and the talented Lily Renée took over, the other highly prolific female artist working in comic books for the publisher. Lily, who was one year younger than George and a year older than Fran Hopper, came from a wealthy Jewish family from the old world, namely Austria. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria, she and her family fled to America where, as a teenager, she began doing illustrations for fashion items for Woolworth“s catalogues. This was when merchandise was still drawn in the promotion material instead of simply taking photographs. When her mother saw an ad in the paper that Fiction House was looking for artists, she applied. She was immediately hired, and she would become the only woman who would do covers for their comic book line, many of which were for Planet Comics. Lily had her own stand-out character, though, a lovely spy-hunter called Señorita Rio. This was one woman who was ahead of her times for sure. The raven-haired Latina knew how to talk tough and how kick even tougher and she was surely easy on the eyes and to the delight of many male readers, she surely did not shy away from using her talents and looks to seduce men who were mostly leery, gullible Nazi invaders. While her artwork for the covers and the Señorita Rio strip was remarkable, it heavily skirted the border of being a tad too racy, even for the 1940s, her work on The Lost World was not as good. Perhaps because the series was meandering of late. Hunt Bowman was not the sharpest knife to begin with, but the real driving force behind their plan to free Earth from the invaders, Lyssa, the descendant of Earth colonists on a far away planet called the Lost World, came across less competent as the series went on. Though Graham Ingels had already done a storyline in which Lyssa and her companion trapped a bunch of invaders in a room to poison and burn them in a fire caused by highly inflammable film stock, the blonde heroine had asked her companion to ignite, a scene that would be eerily mirrored many decades later when the character Shosanna did exactly that in Quentin Tarantino“s “Inglourious Basterds”“, once Ingels was off the book, not only did Lyssa go back to wearing the most impractical attire, but the heroine never bothered with putting on any shoes thereafter. While this might have been of interest for the idiosyncratic filmmaker, it surely did not help her credibility as freedom fighter on a rat-infested, apocalyptic Earth. Evans, who was clearly happy to get this job on top of his promotion, did not change this, either. Lyssa would never be seen with shoes for the remainder of the series, which got much cleaner in the process as comics in general slowly began to become a bit more brighter towards the end of the 1940s. While Lily Renée“s line art felt a bit rushed and undefined, George had figured out a very crisp line by now and he was sure with his inks as well. Her Lyssa had some of that exotic, pouting look of Señorita Rio, sans the over-the-top sex appeal, when George took over, the Queen of the Lost World began to look like a wholesome, all-American girl from the Midwest. The dirty, grimy backgrounds that spoke of devastation, and which were rife with decay, rot and all kinds of possible diseases that were carried by rodents and bats, Ingels had introduced, fell away more and more, and with George on the book, never had a destroyed planet looked more orderly. The writers also undermined the original premise to a point of silliness at the tail-end of the run. While it had always been something extraordinary whenever Hunt and Lyssa had come across a survivor on this barren Earth centuries after the war of planets was waged, and the survivors were either mostly broken in body and spirit or nasty collaborators, now the protagonists and the little crew they had assembled during the course of the series, found whole pockets of civilizations and none looked too hungry or in need of a bath. During his tenure as editor for Ned Pines, Ingels had discovered a very young, highly talented artists for whom he secured work. When Graham sent him over to Fiction House, George did the same. The artist was Frank Frazetta. But Evans also discovered a great talent all on his own and he would start him with inks. His name was Al Williamson. George and Al became fast friends and Al helped out with the inks on the final issue he did for The Lost World series. This was after the management of Fiction House had decided to let everyone on staff go, including George. He could stay on as a freelancer. But for George, what was the point, really? The writing was on the wall. He soon followed up on Al“s tip and went over to Fawcett, albeit as a freelance artist again, but into what seemed a secure haven at that time. It would only last for roughly three years, before Fawcett began to go away.

The first assignment George Evans picked up from Feldstein was a horror story for Tales from the Crypt. Published in issue No. 32 (1952), “Roped In!”“ told the story of three businessmen who shrewdly have their partner get blamed for the collapse of a shoddily constructed hospital in which twenty-one people have perished. With him now incarcerated, the three are happily off in a small private airplane to secure a new building contract in South America. Though when one of the guys maneuvers the aircraft through a gap between two mountains during a thunderstorm at night, the machine gets caught in what appears to be some thick cables. They are stuck. When one of them goes out and climbs across one of the ropes, all the other two hear are his terrible screams. When daylight breaks, they see what they are caught in, a giant spider web. And there is a giant, hairy spider, naturally. One of the men gets caught. The spider devours him alive. The last guy, who is also the leader of the group, makes it back into the cabin of his small plane. This is when the action cuts back to the States for one panel and we see the fourth partner who has a mental breakdown in his prison cell from being blamed for a horrible accident he has had no hand in. And back in the cabin, his former business partner, who has brought him into this situation and who is responsible for his current state of mind, loses it as well with the giant arachnid hovering outside the window of the plane, waiting and waiting. It was most certainly not the best tale Feldstein had ever written, and it came with a simple, almost Ayn Randian moral: the guilty are not rewarded, though the innocent did get penalized. What makes it so effective is the rather ordinary world of corporate intrigue Feldstein and Evans set up. There are many panels that almost feel boring in their procedural manner. The offices are bland, the men look dull, even the police detective looks like any other guy on the street. We spent a really long time with the plot getting explained to us and then with the trial which finds the unfortunate fall guy guilty. All this world building, which is basically a look outside the window, and the extremely detailed depiction of the small airplane, all beautiful and meticulously rendered with a finely detailed line and crisp brushwork by Evans, makes the supernatural element much more shocking when it is introduced into the story. This would be a method to which Feldstein and he would return right in their third story, but before Evans did the next horror story, the editor tried an interesting experiment. Feldstein had the artist on whom he most heavily relied when he wanted mundane scenes of everyday life depicted in the most naturalistic manner, go and ink Evans“ linework. However, the team of Evans and Jack Kamen doesn“t really work. Though Kamen tries to retain the sparseness of Evans“ pencils, his trademark thick inks make the art look too heavy. Still, the characters look like slimmed down versions of Kamen“s figures, like everyone has lost weight, and consequently lacks in presence. And what usually makes Kamen work effective, the stark contrast between light and shadows that slowly creeps into the proceedings, is mostly missing. These were two artists who worked diametrically from one another. To combine them, effectively made them cancel out the individual strengths of their qualities. “This Trick“ll Kill You!”“, which appeared right in the next issue, Tales from the Crypt No. 33 (1952), is not a bad little story, but it gives no inclination of the heights to which Evans would go as a sequential storyteller at EC. His third assignment from Al Feldstein was a charm, however. “A Creep in the Deep!”“, from The Haunt of Fear No. 16 (1952), made it very apparent that Evans was one of those artists who could elevate one of Feldstein“s more routine scripts into something rather special, and it also shows that Feldstein knew from the start that Evans was the perfect collaborator for stories that used ordinariness as a backdrop. The plot was innately simple, and the writer basically recycled one of the earlier stories he“d done with Evans“ friend Graham Ingels. Both stories are about a woman who falls prey to vampirism. “Blood Type ”˜V“!”“, from Tales From the Crypt No. 22 (1951), is a very different story altogether, though. First, there“s the setting. Whereas Feldstein“s tale is set in modern day, the art gives the impression of a more gothic period of time. In contrast to modern cars, houses seem very old, and even the telephone shown, is not from the 1950s, but rather the early 1930s. The way Ingels depicts the interiors, readers feel reminded of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft which began to appear in Weird Tales around this time. Everything feels less grounded but seems like tropes of the fantastic fiction genre. The woman“s boyfriend is a reporter of course, who is friends with a doctor, additional clichés of pulp fiction of the weird science and horror variety. When the girlfriend goes missing after a car accident, and bodies start to pile up, the doctor is quickly convinced that there“s a vampire on the loose, and the two men go hunting. The doctor is killed when they come across the vampire, but the reporter is able to stake the fiend. Only then it“s revealed that he has just killed his girlfriend. Freddie, the reporter is clearly intended to be the hero of this story, albeit a tragic one in the end. Fred accepts the conclusion of his doctor friend right away and he“s ready to act and to do what they truly believe is necessary. It is interesting to see that when Feldstein revisited the pulp-like reporter trope only two years later in a story called “Sweetie-Pie”“, which was published in Shock SuspenStories No. 10 (1953), the second story with art by EC late arrival Reed Crandall, he had a lot of fun with subverting such a stock character of many pulp tales entirely. In the latter tale, the young newspaperman is not only completely useless, he also gets his girlfriend killed by the monster he“s been tracking. Though “A Creep in the Deep!”“ has a similar basic premise like the Ingels tale, Al Feldstein was a better writer just a year later, and either by design or subconsciously on Feldstein“s part, the subtext is much clearer defined, with Evans being the ideal artist to visualize the world Feldstein had committed in words directly onto the artboard. Evans“ rendering of the characters and settings is very vérité, which works as a perfect foil for the supernatural elements in the story, which Feldstein may or may not have intended as allegorical. The story follows two narrative threads, one set in present day, the other from a year earlier. The past segments take place at night and are colored completely in blue by EC“s colorist Marie Severin. The flashback sequence, seen from the perspective of the protagonist, are full of vibrant colors at first since the take place during the daytime which gives us the opportunity to get familiar with the setting. The present and past segments are interwoven. At the outset we see a man getting into the water at a lakeside retreat. He is a regular guy in his late twenties, we can tell, because except for a pair of swim trunks and his rubber diving mask he is naked. Feldstein opens with a narration that is poetic, but also sparse and powerful: “The moonlight shimmered over the nervous black water of the lake! The man adjusted the rubber diving mask over his face and started down the silver sand beach! The spear and lamp hung limply in his hands! The black rubber flippers on his feet”¦ slapped against the wet lake shore.”“ The man is Philip, an artist who comes to his cabin at the retreat to paint and to spear fish. Just a year ago, he“d brought his young bride Margaret to his cabin. Margaret and he seem perfectly happy. There are several shots of the two of them in nature to emphasize that they“re a regular couple who is just enjoying the scenery. Though we never see Philip share his art with his bride, he does take her out to the lake in rowboat. Philip wants Margaret to be part of his hobby, to admire how good he is at spear fishing, despite the fact that she can“t swim. It is already dark when they are on the lake. Immediately, Margaret is anxious when he leaves her alone in the boat to go diving and spear fishing. The colors are gone, and this segment of the flashback has the same blue tones as the part in the present. He is indeed good at spear fishing and he soon catches a colorful fish which he has impaled on his sharp spear. He is very proud, and he swims back to the boat to show off his catch, but this is also when he hears his bride scream. Phil thinks she is afraid because he is too far away from the boat and she can no longer see him in the dark. But when he reaches the boat, it is turned upside down and there is a strange noise which reminds him of flapping wings. Margaret is gone. Heartbroken, Phil figures that she must have drowned.

The lake is searched for days, but when her body doesn“t turn up, the search is stopped. Philip is grief-stricken and he asks a real estate agent to sell his place. When he returns after a couple of months, he“s annoyed to learn that his cabin is still unsold. He needs the cash. Since Margaret“s death he hasn“t been able to create new artwork. The real estate agent tells Phil that nobody wants to buy his place because three people have been found dead. Each of them went for a night swim, and when their bodies washed ashore, these were drained of their blood. Philip decides to stick around, and when a fourth corpse is found, the real estate confides his theory to him, which was the same as in the Ingels tale: there had to be a vampire on the loose, a vampire who lived in the dark waters of the lake. This is when Phil realizes what he must do. Phil rushed back to his cabin and began to sharpen his spear once more. At this point, the flashback sequence caught up to the present with Philip now in the dark blue water which was only illuminated by the little light from his lamp. Finally, he catches his prey in the small shaft of yellow light: “It came at him”¦ slowly”¦ white and turning! The light gleamed on its shiny fangs”¦”“ And once again, he is good at what he does, and he knows it. The pointy spear in one of his assured hands, he waits for his prey to move a bit closer: “Suddenly, it flashed at him”¦ its sharp little teeth lashing at his throat! Philip raised the needle-like wooden spear, kicked hard with his rubber flippers, dodged the attack and, as it turned so that the light fell on its face, Philip lunged, ramming the stake through its vampire heart.”“ He is not surprised one bit who the vampire in the lake actually is. Philip knew right away when he left the office of the real estate agent. He doesn“t hesitate now: “Margie“s lifeless body settled to the lake floor, the wooden spear sticking angularly from her chest”¦ sending up little bubbles”¦ as Philip moves out of the lake into the cold night air”¦”“ The closing shot that Evans provides of Philips as he slowly wades to the shore is very similar to his opening shot, but it is very different in subtle ways. For one, the mask is missing, and we see his face. The expression we see in his eyes, while his forehead is wrinkled, perfectly lines up with his body language. The steely, tense determination his posture initially expressed is gone. His shoulders are slumped. Phil“s arms hang to the sides with his fingers holding the mask and his lamp, which have outlasted their usefulness. He takes wide, deliberate strides to get away from the lake. His face is sad, but he“s clearly relieved. What is so fascinating about this story is that Philip is a regular guy, and Evans captures this perfectly. He is no hero reporter and he is no warrior of ancient times. Sure, he has an exciting hobby, but actually Phil“s in the same business as the guys from EC, including Feldstein who was still doing cover art. Phil“s an artist. Yet unlike Fred Duncan, Philips knows who he“s hunting in the lake. The fact that the vampire is his wife is not only revealed to him once he put the stake into her heart. He knows and he gets confirmation once she swims into the beam of his lamp. He gives her rest. Maybe Feldstein“s script, as unimpressive and garden variety is it would seem, revealed a bit more than the author himself was aware of. Artists will want to capture what“s going on around them. The writer owned a Surfcaster fishing rod he was proud of. Like Philip, he would routinely go on fishing tours, also sometimes late at night. It is interesting that when Philip explains his fishing gear to Margie, she seems very much like a child in his recollections. While Margaret loves the view from his cottage and she feels right at home in nature, the newlyweds seem awfully mismatched once Philip introduces Margie to his hobby. Right from the start she is unsure and afraid, and for good reason as it turns out, since she can“t swim. Philip on the other hand takes his sweet time to explain every detail to her, while Margie excitedly asks him questions to let him know she is interested because it means a lot to him obviously. Once he is in the water, she keeps calling for him, because he quickly swims away from the boat, which is pretty callously when you consider that she is inside a tiny rowboat in the middle of a lake at night. While this might be a little story about a vampire, it also talks about relationship issues, those any ordinary couple might have or face at some time in the future. Margaret is not the right kind of person for Philip, as he quickly discovers. On the other hand, this is the first time he has brought her to his cabin at the lake to show her his hobby. To generalize this a bit, the person you thought you“d married was not that person or not that person anymore. Ultimately, the titular “Creep in the Deep”“ is the unknown, the things you don“t know about your partner, yet you sense are there, beneath the surface, lurking and waiting. While it does seem like a bit of a stretch, it still needs mentioning that Feldstein ultimately divorced from his first wife Clair Szep, who was his high school sweetheart and who he“d married when he was eighteen. In a way, Philip comes across like a man getting divorced. The pain is there, and Evans makes it feel real. He continued to live with his wife Evelyn and his daughter Carol in their cute ranch house in Levittown and he enjoyed the response his artwork was getting from readers who sent in enthusiastic fan letters.

As Feldstein had suspected, Harvey Kurtzman, who was responsible for the two war titles he had Gaines convinced to put out, liked the realistic art and the detailed drawings of airplanes George Evans brought to the table. Right around the same time he was doing more horror stories for Feldstein, one of which was his only Ray Bradbury story (based on an adaption by Feldstein), George did some highly meticulous yarns based on Kurtzman“s scripts, though there was a catch. Whereas Feldstein only ruled the artboard before any artwork was done, since he put the captions, i.e. his script, directly on the pages, Kurtzman, who was a masterful visual storyteller himself, broke down his scripts into detailed layouts. This drove many of the artists in the EC bullpen crazy whenever they worked with the writer-editor. George didn“t mind so much since here was the opportunity to draw his beloved airplanes like he did in issue No. 12 of Frontline Combat which was cover dated May-June 1953 (comic titles usually appeared on the stands four to six weeks before the cover date). In “F-94!”“ Kurtzman and he told the story of how Lockheed F-94s intercepted a B-29 bomber during a training exercise. As subversive as Kurtzman“s war stories often were, this was an example that felt like a paid advertisement for the U.S. Air Force, and it came with a terse message that revealed one of the major anxieties during the early 50s, namely nuclear holocaust: “keep watching the skies.”“ Though it must have irked Evans a little, that Alex Toth, who occasionally did some work for EC and who had a much simpler, looser style, drew rings around him with the story which was placed second in the issue. Toth“s yarn, also from a script and based on layouts by Harvey Kurtzman, also featured fighter planes, but the story was much more exciting, and not only because there was a lot of action going on, but due to the incredibly innovative way in which the story was told visually. And to make matters worse, Kurtzman“s script got you right into the head of one of the pilots, like you were right with him inside the small cockpit. Toth perfectly knew how to create this sense of claustrophobia, with extreme close-ups of the pilot“s face which in some instances were so tight that you lost your sense of orientation, like the pilot had who was now flying upside down. Then, in one glorious shot, Kurtzman and Toth resolved the tension, and Evans witnessed that the writer-editor used his own name (in what was a common expression during those years): “By George, I broke out of the clouds and there was the sky, just where it was supposed to be”¦”“ Like he“d done with the artwork that the amazing Fran Hopper had produced for Planet Comics, Evans studied what his fellow artists were doing to improve. His overly detailed style began to loosen up a bit in the process, something which served him well. Though he did some competent art for a couple of stories for Kurtzman and Feldstein, the latter tackling such themes as an ordinary marriage gone wrong when the wife got hooked on sweets and a biting satire of the type of game shows that began to show up on television, it“s fascinating that Evans“ arguably best work came at the tail end of the entire run of the New Trend books. Whereas some of the stories in the later issues of Tales from Crypt and The Vault of Horror began to feel a bit tired, with storylines getting rehashed a bit too often with the puns feeling more often than not mean-spirited and shallow simultaneously. But right around 1954 and early 1955 things started to fall apart. “Seduction of the Innocent”“ was published in 1954, Dr. Frederic Wertham“s seminal book about the perceived decline of morals in comics, and the effects this had on the minds of children. Dr. Wertham, not the only voice in a choir that had identified comic books as the cause of violence in children, had already started his attacks on comics in the 1940s, but he was gaining more traction now. A year prior, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency was established by the Senate to investigate the issue of violent teens. With “Seduction of the Innocent”“ getting a lot of press coverage, comics become the center of attention for a total of three days during several public, even televised hearings, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency subsequently conducted. What occurred on April 21-22 and on June 4, 1954, with Dr. Wertham and EC publisher Bill Gaines taking the stand as expert witnesses, would eventually up-end the whole industry. But Gaines and Feldstein had also grown much more cynical. Gaines had divorced from his wife in what very much was an arranged marriage. And he and Feldstein stepped up their game considerable where stories about dysfunctional families were concerned and their own anxieties in regard to strong women like they“d already done with “Wined-Up!”“, first published in Crime SuspenStories No. 19 (1953), Gaines and Feldstein“s idea of “Scenes from a Marriage”“, though it“s unknown if either the writer or his “idea-man”“ Gaines ever saw a film by the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman who concurrently was making a name for himself with showing the break-down of a relationship and its aftermath. “Wined-Up!”“ starts with a shocking confession once we have been introduced to the main players with one caption. Laura, the wife of three years of independently wealthy Charles Ashland gives him the lowdown on the state of their marriage with a mocking smile while she casually refreshes her lipstick. Five months ago, they“d been in a car accident from which Laura emerged unscathed, but Charles had ended up in wheelchair. As the doctors had explained to him at that time, the paralysis he suffered in his arms and legs was not brought about by any physical injuries he sustained in the crash during which his wife had been thrown clear of the automobile right before he tried to take control of the steering wheel. His effort had proven in vain, though, and he helplessly watched as his convertible sports car crashed headfirst into a couple of trees. They“d been on their way to the beautiful summer home near a large lake he owned. Instead, his quadriplegia was caused by his psyche. But as Laura now revealed to him, she wasn“t sick and tired of living with him because of his impairment, the crippling disability which made him ineffectual in many ways and in those that mattered to a beautiful woman. She admitted freely, that she“d never loved him. In fact, Laura had married him for his money she would stand to inherit, and she“d caused the accident.

Thus, begins one of the best crime tales ever put out by EC Comics. One thing that makes it outstanding is the art, of course. Charles and Laura seem like any other couple. Though Charles has money, he is not an older, leering guy who had managed to get a gorgeous woman to marry him because he offered her security and an affluent lifestyle. He was not obese or ugly or both, and he was not somebody who liked to brag about his success in life and who treated his wife like another object he had bought. There were many stories by Feldstein (often with art by Jack Kamen) who started with this kind of premise. Charles was just a regular Joe who had enough money to live comfortably. Laura, though attractive, was not a former participant of a beauty pageant nor was she a Hollywood type glamour star an artist like Wally Wood might have easily turned her into. She and Charles looked like the neighbors of any ten-year old kid who happened to live in one of the wealthier suburbs along the East Coast. They were middle class.  As Canadian comic historian Bill Mason points out, who began writing about comic books in 1954 when he had his fan letter published in Weird-Science Fantasy No. 27: “One imagines what Kamen, Krigstein, or Wood might have done with this story ”“ until one sees Laura“s A-line skirt and those hypnotic drapes in the opening scene and surrenders to Evans“s skill at laying down an atmosphere.”“ The setting, Evans created was very mundane, it needed to be. Charles Ashland“s summer place was situated next to the house in which the Petersons resided, another couple who enjoyed the simpler things of life like fishing. Then there was the plan. Every crime story that was a mystery needed a meticulously prepared scheme, and this story was no exception. The difference was, though, that the wife explained it to her husband before she set about to murder him, this time without botching it. Like on every other day Laura would wheel Charles outside the house and to the mooring dock, and like every other day, she would kiss him right before she went for a swim. She“d wave to the Petersons who were out on their own dock, close enough to see what was going on, but too far away to get involved. However today, Charles“ wheelchair would roll forward and along the wooden dock. It would plunge into the water with Charles in it. She“d be in the water, but unable to reach him in time, and neither would the Petersons who could only watch with horror as the poor man found his wet grave. Laura had considered every angle. She had a piece of wire which she“d use to pull Charles wheelchair forward from a safe distance. Leaning forward and with glee in her eyes she told her husband of three years: “Yes, Charles! I“m going to attach it to your wheel chair”¦ swim out”¦ and pull you in!”“ Laura mocked him like Lily Renée“s Señorita Rio did so with a guard she was about to strangle to his death. When the beautiful spy-hunter had found herself in a prison cell with a barred door in Fight Comics No. 39 (1945), she seduced the young, naïve German with her sultry looks, only to sling a wire through the bars around his neck, while commenting: “A trained man would have thrown his keys far away!”“ Laura was about to get the keys to her freedom as well. Should Charles try to scream to the Petersons before she had swum enough of a distance to the dock for her to tighten the wire, she“d thought about that as well: “Your mouth will be stuffed with this rag”¦”“ While she forced the cloth into his mouth and he was helpless to stop her, she told him how much she despised him, that only his money was attractive to her. Then she left him to get changed upstairs. This was when Charles began to create a plan of his own as he remembered the pain from seeing her whenever she came back to wheel him outside: “Laura coming down”¦ her suit clinging to her, revealing every line of her body”¦”“ Laura had a routine of her own. Once in her black, strapless bathing suit she would pour herself a drink. And as Charles remembers what she looked like in those moments, readers identified with his suffering. They saw the change that had occurred, and they were unable to be close to Laura as well. Once in her swim wear, Evans made sure that readers saw that underneath it all and despite her nastiness, she was a very beautiful woman to behold. This only made the contrast to her invalid husband the more striking. As usually, she poured herself a glass of sherry, only this time she toasted him goodbye. Then she knelt down and fastened the end of the wire to his wheelchair: “You must admit this is clever, Charles. When I“m valiantly diving”¦ trying to rescue you, I“ll remove this. When they bring up your body and the chair”¦ the evidence will be gone!”“ Then she wheeled him outside. There were the Petersons with their fishing rods. She kissed him like she was wont to do before she got into the water. With the Petersons fishing at their dock, Laura swam further out, while unbeknownst to them, she began to pull the wire taut. His chair started to roll forward. The Petersons began to scream to her almost hysterically and completely ineffectual at the same time as Charles was about to fall into the water of the lake that was as black as her bathing suit. But then, once he was in the water, it was Laura who was screaming. She had a severe cramp, and to her surprise, there was her husband swimming right next to her. He had suspected that Laura had caused the accident and he had pretended to be paralyzed to see what happened next. What happened next, was that she was drowning because of her cramp. As she begged for mercy, she finally showed how ugly she was. Later, with a smile, Charles got rid of the sherry he“d mixed with denaturated alcohol while she was getting changed upstairs. Charles knew that this stuff could cause severe cramps. This was a tale about a marriage gone wrong trimmed down to its bare bones. Not a word or panel was wasted, and Evans“ vérité art made it simultaneously raw and real. Grown-ups, like the Petersons, spied a rather true-to-life couple that seemed normal, with the beautiful, young wife devoted to her husband despite his physical impairment, a rather sweet couple, really. But if you looked closer, and Al Feldstein and George Evans asked their young readers to do just that, you saw what you knew was true. This was a harsh world in which a couple was caught in a cell with a barred door that was locked from the outside.

Feldstein continued the theme of the significant other revealed as a monster in the highly effective tale “No Silver Atoll!”“  from The Haunt of Fear No. 23 (1954), this time around, combined with a real mystery story as well as with one of his favorite motifs, namely that a beautiful, self-assured woman was capable of anything. She“d even kill her romantic partner without prejudice and without compunction once he“d shown a side of himself to her that she was unable to tolerate and once she was convinced this needed to be done. On the outset of this story, a small group of survivors makes it to atoll in the Pacific after a plane crash. Among the little group is the captain of the plane who informs them that he has managed to grab a gun and the medical kit. The story is told from the perspective of a young woman named Ruth, one of the passengers. During the flight, Ruth has fallen in love with a stranger called Clark. The man is obviously much older than her, but Clark looks like a distinguished gentleman with his carefully coiffed hair that is already graying at the temples and his expensive, tasteful business suit and tie, which makes no difference now that they are stranded on what appears to be an uninhabited little island. Yet trapped in this unfamiliar and perhaps dangerous space while surrounded by strangers, Ruth clings to Clark. And for good reason. With only a week gone by, some of the passengers notice missing possessions. A ring has been stolen and the buckle from a belt. Then money goes missing, all coins. It is the flight attendant and Ruth who figure out that the items stolen have one thing in common: they are all made from silver. And on the next night they find out why. There is a loud scream and when they go to examine what has caused it, they find one of the survivors murdered. With the dead man on the ground, the color scheme switched to green, the color colorist Maria Severin was fond of using to indicate that something terrible was happening. One of the other passengers who is from the old country connects the dots. There can be only one explanation. Among the group survivors there must be a werewolf and only a silver bullet to the heart could kill this creature that wore a human visage and moved freely and thus far undetected in their midst. It“s understandable that Ruth, our narrator, seeks shelter with the man she had just met on their doomed flight: “In the days and weeks that followed, I scarcely left Clark“s side. I was frightened and he was the only one I could turn to.”“ For good reason, since Ruth knows that in the following week the Moon was full again, but Ruth gleaned solace from the manly strength Clark radiated in abundance, and the promise he gave her: “I“ll protect you, honey! Don“t worry!”“ Clearly, he came across like a man who knew how to make a woman feel safe and who you could trust. But right on cue, four weeks after the first attack, there was another scream in the night. This time it“s the blonde flight attendant who is found slain on the beach with wounds all over her face and body. But soon enough, with some tell-tale signs, Ruth begins to suspect, and her instincts are proven correct. Clark is the werewolf and he changes right in front of her. However, Ruth is prepared for him and she surely has matured a lot in these weeks. As he lunges at her in his werewolf form, without hesitation she plunges a hypodermic needle right into his chest. Though Clark had made sure that he had collected all the silver on the atoll, he had forgotten the silver nitrate in the medical kit. Cleary, Ruth hadn“t. Again, Evans comes through with the art which is moody, but never gothic, and the atmosphere he sets, gives the tale the look of a documentary rather than relying on the tropes that were typical for a mystery yarn with supernatural bent. The werewolf is only revealed at the end and he looks more like a wild animal than like a mystical creature from folklore. What again proves most effective about Evans“ art, is his willingness to give the protagonist a plain look. Ruth is very much a little girl at the beginning of the story, and though she seems a few years older than the very young flight attendant Miss Kirby, she comes across as younger in spirit. Ruth seeks guidance and protection from a man she doesn“t really know and who she has just met, but who feels like a rock she can hold on to. It isn“t a coincidence that Clark looks old enough to be Ruth“s father. Clark clearly feels comfortable in the role of lover and protector even though he“s conscious of the fact that trapped inside of him is a wild animal. And while he is the one who is cursed and who transforms whenever the Moon is full, it is Ruth who goes through a much more profound change. Looking at the tale solely from an allegorical angle, it is a story about growing up. About how some girls seek out a man who resembles their fathers most closely, a man who provides the stability they once knew or have lacked so far, while they instinctively know that they“ll need to murder their father on a metaphorical level. It“s when Ruth finds out that Clark is just another man, a man who is a beast beneath his cultivated, polished exterior, he has outlived his usefulness as surrogate father. When she kills the wild animal and her father-figure, and thus her father in effigy, this is the moment she becomes an adult. But “No Silver Atoll!”“ also speaks about a father“s fear of losing his daughter to adulthood. Feldstein had two daughters with his first wife.

The taboo of murdering a member of your own family, metaphorically or for real, is also at the core of the next tale Feldstein and Evans worked on together, and with Evans doing the artwork in his patented vérité style, “Blood Brothers”“, from Crime SuspenStories No. 21 (1954), very much arrived with the look and feel of the true-crime documentary genre that wouldn“t be invented for many decades. This story, like so many Feldstein scripted, was based on an idea by Bill Gaines who perhaps was working through a few unresolved issues of growing up with a highly accomplished father who looked down on him. As it stands, Feldstein gives us the plot in one caption, and he and Evans set the mood perfectly. Alex visits his brother at his beach house in Florida. While he takes the train and he has put on his best suit to look like a success story, his brother wears a loud shirt, and he drives a brand-new Cadillac convertible which is red and as flashy his clothes. Frederick is a jovial guy. Alex smiles, too, but we learn what he is thinking: “You wave back and smile and try not to show your hatred for him, your jealousy of his wealth, and the fact that you“ve come to Florida to murder him.”“ Alex hates his brother for his luck, for the fact that he does have a summer retreat with servants who rushed about to satisfy his every whim. Alex hated that he had to lie and to pretend that he was going places with his work when in fact he wasn“t. But once in the guest room of Frederick“s beach house and all by himself, the pretend play stopped. Alex took the axe he“d brought from his luggage and fondled it tenderly. With the servants off, Frederick would be a lonely man who had fallen prey to a maniac on the loose. Nobody would suspect him, and he would be rolling in his brother“s cash soon. He“d planned everything very carefully and had set up an alibi. He was clever, indeed. He had even asked Frederick for a pair of swim trunks so he would not end up with blood spatter on his own. Frederick was already on the beach with his back to him and he did not see the axe he held hidden behind his. As he brings the axe down numerous times, Alex“s shocked brother asks why while he begs for his life. Alex tells him: “Because you“re rich. You have everything you want! And I have nothing! Because when you“re dead, I“ll have everything of yours”¦ everything!”“ Then, with the bloody deed done, Alex rose to his feet and stood in the moonlight like an ancient warrior who had slain a vile monster, his skin red with the blood of his brother. Alex was now a brother onto Cain, and he felt very sick. He needed to cleanse himself, get the stains from his brother Frederick and the crime washed from his body. So, Alex raced into the cool water of the gulf stream. He was too late to realize that he wasn“t the only predator out that night. There was a shark in the water. It was attracted by his brother“s blood. In “Pearly to Dead”“, Tales from the Crypt No. 40 (1954), Al Feldstein and Evans told a similar story (once again with story input from Gaines), but this was a much more sweeping tale that involved World War Two and two men who were rivals and best friends and who had fallen in love with the same girl before they were drafted. Larry had always been jealous of his friend Phil who was able to be beat him at every turn. Larry had asked Gladys to marry him, but she had stalled, and once the men were discharged from the U.S. Marine, he found out why. His friend had clinched the deal and Gladys was waiting just for him. Evans art is terrific, as he delivers with the romance aspects of the tale and the underwater action. The two men serve as deep-sea divers tasked with setting explosives underwater as cover for the invading forces. By chance they discover an oyster bed, rich with valuable pearls. This earlier segment feels very much like a man“s adventure story with the handsome, detailed art Evans creates. His thin, sharp lines make it easy for readers to follow the story. The artist gives every detail a clean expression. This is also when EC Comics colorist extraordinaire Marie Severin again proves how significant her color work is to the storytelling. Though the tale starts with a blue tone, the color of the night and the water, when the men go on the dangerous mission to plant the charges, Severin changes to the light green hues she was wont to use to conceal some of the more out-there horrors the artists would depict very regularly. Now, though the underwater world with its tendency to induce claustrophobia and a fear of suffocation was sure frightening for some young readers, this was nothing out of the norm. There was the added thrill of the explosives the two friends are ordered to place at a strategic site, but what warranted this sickly green tone was the discovery of the pearls or so it would seem. Since the tale appeared in a horror title, naturally, readers were well-primed to expect that these two guys would come to blows over their find. But on the contrary. The men show restrained and go through with their mission and promised to each other that after the war they“d come back and collect the pearls which surely were worth a fortune. Yet the story does turn into a crime tale, but with a twist. When Phil and Gladys announce their engagement no sooner than the men get their discharge on V-J Day, and Larry discovers that his buddy has beaten him once again, he decides to lure him into a trap. This when we learn that it isn“t the newfound wealth that sends Larry over the deep end. On the night before the wedding, he coaxes Phil to a lonely beach, claiming that they won“t get the chance to test out their new swimming equipment this freely once Phil has tied the knot. It is there that Larry violently drowns his friend and rival. This time, with this shocking killing which goes on for several panels, Severin keeps the blue tone consistent. To Larry, murdering his erstwhile friend is really a casual thing. The shot of Larry walking away from the scene of the crime that Evans provides, and which is tinted completely blue save for his thin black inks, is arguably one of the best panels George Evans has ever done. There is no remorse on Larry“s face. He has a mocking twinkle in his eyes and his thin lips are contorted into a sneering smirk. Finally, he has bested Phil. The tale goes into full horror mode eventually, but this is the high point. This one panel would have made for a great cover, but like Lily Renée once did for Fiction House, Evans delivered in that department as well. In fact, his cover for Crime SuspenStories No. 23 (1954) was so effective in depicting a violent murder, that this cover was among those Senator Estes Kefauver pointed to during the hearings on Juvenile Delinquency.

It is fascinating that arguably Evans“ best and most frightening story for EC Comics appeared right after the introduction of the Comics Code Authority, albeit without the self-regulatory body“s seal of approval of course. “Maniac at Large”“ was first published in the last issue of Crime SuspenStories, No. 27 (1955). It remains unclear who wrote it, with some scholar assuming the author to be Jack Oleck. Evans pencils and inks are stunning and on point and they offer a perfect synergy with Marie Severin“s colors and the script. The narration is delivered from the perspective of Blanche, a young librarian who is very anxious. We get why she is frightened from the first caption: “From the very minute I came to work this morning for my new job in the public library, I“ve had that horrible feeling”¦ Ever since old Mrs. Pritchard, the head librarian, assigned me to the check-out desk”¦ I“ve sat in the whispering silence and felt the terror inside me mounting. All day, I have seen the people come and go in the quiet”¦ All day, ”¦ I have dreaded the moment when closing time would come and I“ll have to go out into the night streets, the streets where a homicidal maniac stalks his eighth victim.”“ It“s close to closing time, almost nine, and this is when kind Mrs. Pritchard offers to stay longer to show the young woman how to do some of the filing work. Blanche agrees to stay longer as well, but when the gray-haired woman tells her that she“s going to leave, so she can get them some fresh coffee and sandwiches, Blanche is immediately in a state of terror. As she leaves, old Mrs. Pritchard uses the catch-buttons on the door which locks library from the inside. There is just one problem. The attractive, blonde librarian isn“t alone. There is still a patron left, a man in his forties who“s been eyeing her the entire time and who sits in the otherwise empty reading room. Though she tells him that it is closing hours soon, the man refuses to move right away. As Blanche nervously moves to the main desk, the clicking sound from her high heels seems especially loud. Clearly, the man keeps staring at her. She is acutely aware that the maniac, who has killed seven people could be anyone. What if he was this man? She is deep in thoughts: “Suddenly I know what“s been bothering me all day. I know what I“ve been afraid of. It“s been a kind of premonition, a warning! Tonight, I know it now, tonight that maniac is going to get me!”“ The tension mounts when the stranger begins to involve her in a conversation. He“s belligerent and he seeks her attention. At least that is how it feels to her. He offers to stay, and he just won“t leave. That is until he finally does. While Blanche listens to his footsteps, he slowly walks off into the night “where somewhere a maniac waits”¦ waits for me!”“ But then there is another guy. He presses his face against the glass door and wants to gain access. He holds up a book he wants to return. She won“t let him in. It is after closing time after all and she has the right to refuse him, even though he does not want to take no for an answer. “He rattles the knob”¦ raps on the door glass, glares at me”¦”“ Even after she“s pulled the shades over the glass, “the knob-rattling and glass-rapping continues.”“ Finally, Mrs. Pritchard returns. However, this is when the old head librarian, who once again comments on Blanche“s nervousness, points to flaw in her logic: “What makes you think the maniac is a man? You know, it could be a woman! You see, Blanche, I happen to think the Maniac is a woman! There are many reasons”¦ like all of her victims being men!”“ Once again, with Evans creating a sense of claustrophobia as he places the women close to each other during the conversation, the tension begins to increase. What felt safe, the return of the kind old lady with the silver-colored hair, has quickly turned into a threatening situation. The woman continues to advance the theory she has espoused regarding the gender of the deranged homicidal manic: “Wouldn“t it be clever of the maniac to switch now”¦ to throw the police off”¦ to pick a female victim?”“ This was when Blanche was certain that the woman had poisoned the coffee, she was handing her. Naturally, she tried to get away. As she ran, the space around her got increasingly smaller, with the tall bookshelves surrounding her and the old woman, who moved closer and closer. Blanche simply had to defend herself, she had to save herself. Now she realized what she must have known all along. Mrs. Pritchard was the killer: “”¦ and I squeeze! I squeeze the life from the maniac“s writhing, trashing body”¦ I turn and step out of the library door”¦ out into the night. That gnawing fear is gone”¦ that horrible feeling that I was to be the maniac“s eight victim is purged from my tortured mind”¦ Once again”¦ I have saved myself from becoming the maniac“s victim”¦ as I have saved myself seven times before tonight”¦ by killing the maniac before it could kill me.”“ With these words the story fell shut which very much felt like an Alfred Hitchcock thriller with a blonde heroine who managed to get saved during the last minutes by a lantern-jawed, manly guy who was a clueless executive turned hero. Until it didn“t, and Evans effective artwork strung the reader along until the shocking twist. While this was nothing groundbreaking new, Jim Thompson“s seminal novel “The Killer Inside Me”“ had come out three years earlier and had shocked many readers with its first-person account from the perspective of a ruthless serial killer, it was genuinely surprising though, that in this story the killer didn“t know that he was the killer, or she in this case. Surely, there would be a similar twist, with a gender-bending angle, in “Psycho”“ (in the book and the film), but these weren“t first-person accounts. Though it is not known if Stephen King was aware of “Maniac at Large”“ (King is big fan of EC), still one of his earliest efforts that saw print (first in Ubris, the literary magazine of his college), “Strawberry Spring”“ (1968) uses basically the same plot. When a killer strikes on a college campus during a time that is referred to as “Strawberry Spring”“ (a faux Spring that sets in too early in Winter and is followed by another period of cold weather), panic begins to grip the student body and the faculty. Before the weather changes and the killings stop as suddenly as they had begun, the serial killer, who was never apprehended, had claimed four victims. These events, which happened eight years earlier, are told to the readers by an unnamed narrator who was a student during that time. Another Strawberry Spring has arrived in the Maine college town where our narrator has settled, who is married by now and a teacher himself. The mutilated corpse of a co-ed was just discovered during the first hours of the new day with some parts of her body missing. Clearly, the original killer had come back to Sharon, Maine. Like with “Maniac at Large”“, King closed with a twist, the future English teacher and bestselling horror writer delivered via his unnamed first-person narrator: “I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night. And oh dear God, I think so too.”“ In the end, both stories tell us, that before we judge other folks, we want to take a good look into the mirror first. At EC Comics, maybe it was George Evans who brought this point home the best. His character looked like us. As far as his own career was concerned, once the Comics Code put an end to these kinds of tales, Evans stayed on during the New Direction books. Evans delivered great art for titles such as Valor (in which he paid tribute to one of his idols Hal Foster) and a slew of competent but fairly uninspired books, such as M.D. for which Evans“ clean art and his depiction of ordinary people was perfect. Of course, with the short-lived title Aces High, he was once again given the opportunity to do what he loved best: to draw airplanes. The kid readers had lost interest, though. By the mid-1950s, with the Comics Code, comic books had become a bit dull, and there was a new thing that really caught on and captured the attention of the baby boomers in the middle class suburbs and across the Nation: television. And as it turned out, older readers weren“t into magazines, yet, like Gaines Picto-Fiction line, his last initiative before he decided to focus solely on MAD. As for George Evans, after had worked as a freelancer across the industry once again and after his unpleasant appointment at DC with writer-editor Bob Kanigher, he got a miracle of his own in a major way. George Wunder, the artist chosen among one hundred artists to continue work on Milt Caniff“s syndicated newspaper strip Terry and the Pirates, was looking for an art assistant, which meant he wanted to hire a ghost artist. He picked George who would work on the strip for the next thirteen years, albeit uncredited. During this time, he did return to comics now and then, especially when James Warren attempted a revival of EC Comics in the magazine format. The artist began to draw aviation stories like “Death Plane”“, which George did for Creepy No. 8 (1966). He discovered that some of his erstwhile colleagues worked for Warren, guys like Johnny Craig, who had gone into more respected lines of work, choosing a moniker. Evans also worked for Blazing Combat and Eerie, a war and a horror title which Jim Warren started in 1965. Like Vampirella, which began in 1969, these were black and white anthology magazines that offered sophisticated tales intended for older readers. Since they were displayed on the magazine racks, these titles existed outside the Comics Code. There was some risqué stuff, but these were less violent than what EC had published.

In 1973, a publisher called East Coast Comix began to reprint some of the old EC material in comic book format, four tales each, without the Comics Code, sold for a dollar. He saw that the first issue included one of the most brutal stories he“d done, “Blind Alleys”“, the tale about the landlord who is torn to pieces by his own dog in a cruel revenge plot by those blind people he had tortured. His heart sank. He hadn“t signed the first page, but his style was unmistakable. Nevertheless, he went to the appointment he had arranged. The man, Murray Boltinoff, hardly looked at his portfolio when George once again sat in one of the offices of DC Comics. Many years had passed since his meeting with Robert Kanigher, and things had changed. MAD, which under Feldstein“s tenure as editor had achieved a circulation of two million copies on average per months, had been purchased by the Kinney Parking Company with the agreement that Gaines and Feldstein would carry on as before. Gaines even became a board member in the deal, which was a strange turn of events. The man who had called them into his office at 225 Lafayette Street during last days before he decided to leave comics behind, to tell his editors, writers and artists: “They say we“re hurting kids and I don“t to hurt kids”“, now sat on the board of directors of one of the largest media conglomerates in the world (Kinney had bought the run-down studio Warner Brothers). And Bill Gaines sat right across from Jack Liebowitz, who had sold DC/National Comics to Kinney as well. These men, for better or worse, had shaped the history of comic books like nobody else in the industry, with perhaps the notable exception of Martin Goodman, the publisher of Marvel Comics, who had long since sold his company as well. But Gaines and by extension Al Feldstein weren“t the only holdovers from the EC Comics days who had found their way to Warner Communications. Joe Orlando, his fellow artist had started with DC/National only a short time after Kanigher had rejected George. Orlando, who was good friends with Carmine Infantino, who was an Art Director at that time and later became the publisher of DC/National, was made an editor for a line of horror books, ironically. Then Orlando rose to the position of Executive Editor. If Gaines or Orlando, who had just been on a recruitment drive for artistic talent in the Philippines with Infantino, had pulled some strings for him, he would never be able to say. What he could say however, that after a few minutes spent with Murray Boltinoff, who had taken over the direct stewardship for the horror line which Joe Orlando had vacated once he“d move further up the corporate ladder, George Evans left with his very first art assignment for DC Comics, which not only came for one of DC“s revived war comics, G.I. Combat in this case, but it was an aviation story. What the chances. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and he went on to draw many fantastic tales for DC Comics for their military comic books and horror titles and for those that combined elements from both genres. Though East Coast Comix reprint initiative would only last for two years and twelve issues, soon another attempt was made to bring these books to a new audience in their entirety. Publisher Russ Cochran had already put out two oversized EC portfolios in 1971 and 1977, when in 1978 he began to reprint every issue of the New Trend comics in hardbound volumes that came in cardboard slipcases. After so many years, it seemed that EC Comics had found a new lease on life, albeit as reprints. Still, generation after generation of fans can enjoy the work George Evans and his equally talented fellow artists and writers did during the days before there was a Comics Code. George Evans continued with Terry and the Pirates, and when that was done, the artist briefly worked for Marvel Comics, and he did cover illustrations for publishing houses. A painting Evans did for a book about Eugene Jacques Bullars, the first black combat pilot, is on permanent display at the National Museum of The United States Air Force. In 1980, his old friend Al Williamson passed the Secret Agent Corrigan newspaper strip on to him, which lasted till 1996. Eventually, George continued work on the Flash Gordon newspaper strip, Al Williamson had also been working on. When he died in 2001, he was drawing the Flash Gordon Sunday page for January 21, 2001.

Author Profile

Chris Buse

A comic book reader since 1972. When he is not reading or writing about the books he loves or is listening to The Twilight Sad, you can find Chris at his consulting company in Germany... drinking damn good coffee. Also a proud member of the ICC (International Comics Collective) Podcast with Al Mega and Dave Elliott.

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