“STRAWBERRY SPRING“ A COLUMN ABOUT EC COMICS, PART 8
Chris Buse (RIP)
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 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.
Feldstein continued the theme of the significant other revealed as a monster in the highly effective tale “No Silver Atoll!”“Â 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.
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 (RIP)
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.
