Now as a supporter of the series, I don’t want to spend a lot of words spewing a bash-o-matic description of the sub par stories. However, eventually the world righted itself and the final talesreplenished my hope that the early tales were just a bad stumble. To be fair, even in the early going there were a few bright spots, but certainly nothing worthy of the standard of vile, degenerate awesomeness on display in The EC Archives: Crime Suspenstories Volume 1 and EC Archives: The Vault Of Horror Volume 1.

However, it was 'touch and get going' there for little while as that initial batch of stories was a prescription strength sleep inducer that had me struggling to wrangle my wandering attention span. Thankfully, my twisted, horror-happy was salvaged by the demented doings of last two issues which largely rehabilitated my admiration for this collection. Most of the early stories in this volume were simply not up to EC's standards of juvenile corrupting excellence. This title was EC's best seller, and was the inspiration of several feature films and the HBO series of the same name.Īs a devoted fan of EC Archives, it's with no small measure of sadness that I confess my nut-shrinking disappointment with the sad sack stories in the first half of this collection. This volume reprints the first six complete issues (24 stories) of the comic book Tales From the Crypt, originally published in 1950, and features classic horror stories of vampires, werewolves, ghouls and monsters in the vein of hte early Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolf Man movies. The subject matter for EC Comics were horror, science fiction/fantasy, crime stories, war stories and stories with a social message that generally had a twist or 'shock' ending. EC Comics were superior to other comics of the 1950s because of a higher quality of writing and artwork, and they were widely imitated by other comics publishers.

These comic books were accused of having no redeeming value to society and were effectively banned by the actions of these groups in creating the Comics Code.

Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham and Senator Estes Kefauver's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency attacked horror comics as causes of the rise in juvenile delinquency and crimes by minors. EC Comics (Entertaining Comics) were all published from the late 1940s until around 1956, when the Comics Code Authority whitewashed all comic books to remove all themes of horror and violence.

The EC Archives by Al Feldstein