“THE UGLINESS OF BEAUTY“ A COLUMN ABOUT EC COMICS, PART 6
Chris Buse (RIP)
Even though Al Feldstein put together some amazing stories when he worked on EC Comics“ New Trend books, and fast, and the writer-editor adapted some of the finest tales by Ray Bradbury and Otto Binder, by and large, comic book historians and comic fans alike seem to associate EC Comics with two aspects first and foremost. There is the name Tales from the Crypt, of course, the one publication from among the many different titles EC“s publisher William Gaines put out across several genres which has become synonymous with what comic fans think of when they talk about EC Comics. For many, EC Comics stands for taboo-breaking, extremely gory horror stories which somehow brought the Comics Code of America into existence. Really, who could forget “Foul Play”“ which seems the most exemplary tale when it comes to the hacking and slashing which goes hand in hand with the violation of social norms and good taste alike? Stories, in which the use of a bone saw or even common gardening tools for beheading purposes or any other type of dismemberment is common practice and par for the course. Make no mistake, you will find plenty of that in “Foul Play”“, a story by Al Feldstein and Jack Davis which offers a macabre twist at the end, when members of a baseball team are seen playing a match using the body parts of a player from the opposing team who they“ve just murdered. America“s favorite pastime, indeed. Or if this isn“t nauseating enough for you and you like your scares a bit more humorless and disgusting, sophistications of the fouler variation still could be found in “Horror We? How“s Bayou?”“, a story about mutilation that not only came with a most ghoulish cover by its artist Graham Ingels but was selected as the winner of best art at the EC Fan-Addict Convention in 1972. However, both stories didn“t appear in Tales from the Crypt, but in The Haunt of Fear, No. 19 and 17 respectively. Though when it comes to this particular line of comics, which came out somewhere from around 1950, with the publication of the first issue of Crypt of Terror (the original name for Tales from the Crypt) and ”˜56, the year that saw “An Eye for an Eye”“ by Jack Oleck and Angelo Torres getting barred from inclusion in Incredible Science Fiction No. 33 since it was considered too violent by the new comics“ czar of censorship, Tales from the Crypt is the title which is most remembered and a catch-all-phrase at the same time. Most certainly, the HBO TV series of the same name, which began to air in June 1989 helped to make Tales from the Crypt a name that stuck in the cultural zeitgeist to this day. But likewise, naming the show after this particular series is a testament to its place in the history of comic books. But surely, EC Comics was not only about horror and the things that go bump in the night. The other aspect that is foremost on the mind of fans is clearly the art of the covers and in the stories, which came in genre titles such as The Vault of Horror, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and Shock SuspenStories. Art, that was as ground-breaking as it was taboo-breaking. And while most casual fans might be hard-pressed to name a writer beyond Feldstein who worked on these tales, and there were a few writers who did an outstanding job with their stories, Otto Binder and Jack Oleck included, even the most casual reader will find it easy to name many of the artists who worked on these titles during the short time when EC Comics was at their best. And for sure, these were some big names. Maybe not when these stories first appeared in the first part of the 1950s, but most of these men (and the one woman, Marie Severin) went on to have stellar careers and are widely considered true legends in the field of cartooning and sequential art. Like King Henry, who called those “lucky few”“, who did not move from his side before the decisive battle of Agincourt, by their given name, while at the same time Harry of Monmouth did throw shade at the men who later wished they were with him on St. Crispin“s Day in this muddy field, made even muddier from the heavy boots of his infantry and his archers whose aim would be true on that day of victory, chances are, you can shout those glorious names in your sleep: “Wood! Williamson! Ingels! Craig and Kamen! Feldstein himself, in the earliest days. Even Frazetta who did contribute so little and still so much. And Kurtzman, of course, who brought the War titles and who created MAD Magazine. They all were at the ready and put their shoulders to the wheel and stood their ground, each and every single one of them in his own way. And some of them, like Joe Orlando, whose name comes perhaps fourth or fifth, in the order how you remember them, would go from one highlight in his career to the next, not always with the pencil and the brush as his weapon. Others, like the master of hyper-realism, Wally Wood, would find a tragic end while his art touched so many lives and careers. But then, there are a few names, you do not recall or connect with EC Comics, and not for their output or a lack in quality, far from it. Among them, with artists like George Evans and Bill Elder, and if it wasn“t for his standout story “Master Race”“, Bernie Krigstein, too, there is the artist who found his most tragic end, a last and final call for a decades-long career which once had begun with much promise and talent on display that he was rewarded with exclusive contracts long before the term and the concept behind such a thing existed in the comic book industry. And even more astonishingly, this came about at a time when a few clever artists were running their own studios to sell complete comic books, which had many more pages than a regular comic today, to any publisher who didn“t want to set up his own bullpen of talented craftsmen. And in these artists shops, that were not unlike the sweat shops of the burgeoning textile industry, most artists were nameless and faceless as they toiled over pages that needed penciling or inking and went through many hands without any ownership ever had or retained. Stranger still, the one artist who drew rings around most of them, would not be made immortal for any of the books that passed before his already very advanced skills, or for any of the stories to which he contributed his art during his time at EC, but for a character in a hugely successful Pulitzer Prize winning novel naming him “the top artist of his era”“, a character who was an accomplished artist himself in the world of this book.
So, where does one begin a hymn to the fallen? Perhaps, with life handing him such a raw deal once his later years set in, after he had stood at the top very early on in his career, his audition piece at EC seems most appropriate, not that he would have needed it for Gaines, but for readers who by the time he did begin to work for the publisher had no idea who he was. Back in those days, readers stayed on only for a couple of years until they changed to a new hobby and they discovered that girls existed, and by that time, a new generation was reading EC Comics. But with just one story, and also most fittingly, a story that revealed life“s cruelest and most vicious aspects in the most naturalistic and dramatic fashion, they knew his name. And in order for the artist to present and shock new comic readers with such a tableau of nail-biting intensity and a display of raw flesh, Feldstein wrote a script that was his best Hemingway. If you consider who illustrated this tale, it certainly isn“t without irony, with so many human frailties of the flesh on display and this much humanity of hopelessness beyond despair, that the illustrator chosen by Feldstein saw his own rise when the superheroes took flight, and more so, his powerful drawings of these new heroes with extraordinary powers and exceptional courage had made him a superstar. There is nothing heroic in this story and it isn“t a tale about valiant warriors of ancient times or modern day. It wasn“t a tale about superheroes, but about humans locked in an age-old struggle, the fight for survival on this mortal coil, a struggle that knew one outcome. It goes to the artist“s credit, that he wasn“t only able to adapt his well-honed skills and his well-crafted style, developed over more than a decade in this business, to pare down the excess of muscles and nobility his characters were wont to display, but that he managed to deliver one of EC Comics“ most horrid tales as a result, and to make it look this effortless. No, there was nothing heroic in this world Al Feldstein created with his words, and for a reason. These comics were designed for the Children of the Atomic Age, the baby boomer generation. They didn“t live in run-down tenements with their rooftop water towers and their metal fire-escapes or on an old farm in Kansas or Nebraska. These kids had no use for the optimistic superhero with his bulging six-pack and his bright smile and with either a teen sidekick or a good-girl to have his back. While these new readers, who knew neither poverty or war, enjoyed the pleasantries of growing up in the new suburbia and the freedoms their fathers“ car provided, they preferred for their fantasy comic characters to take residence on desolation row. Their heroes were free thinkers who violated the norms of their everyday lives. Their make-believe world was akin to the broken scenery of a Jim Thompson novel. Superman never stood a chance in a world that was this well-kept on the outside like the gardens of all these new model houses. But there was something unspoken, something going on underneath, and with all this prettiness which existed in their neighborhoods, something had to give. Al Feldstein, like every successful chronologist of society and pop culture before and after him, had the finger on the zeitgeist. When the baby boomers were much younger, like eight or nine, he had given them horror stories that were often fairy tales but in a distinctly urban setting. When they were more sophisticated with their ten years of age, he let them know that there were people who looked like their moms and dads who betrayed each other and would hack each other into pieces and to bury the body parts in their gardens instead of getting a divorce. He let them in on a secret these kids already knew deep down and instinctively. And with these kids reading their books under their blankets by the light of a flashlight, it became their secret. EC Comics was about the forbidden things that were concealed by the ordinariness of everyday life. You only needed to keep both eyes open. A costumed character would have felt even more like the outsider he or she truly was. This was why most of the superheroes had died, superheroes who most of Gaines and Feldstein“s young artists only recalled from looking at one of those extra-thick comic books from a decade before or even earlier. These new craftsmen, who were in their early twenties, were the superstars now with artwork that made them distinct from one another. And Bill Gaines and Feldstein made darn sure readers knew who they were. Every so often there would be the “Artist of the Month”“ page on the inside cover of an EC Comic that featured a short biography and a black and white portrait photography with most of the men seen at their drawing table, laboring over the creation of one of these stories they illustrated. Still, if a eleven-year-old reader did not know the name of a particular artist, though judging from the letters pages most did, they could identify their art. Case in point, Shock SuspenStories No. 9 (June-July 1953) featured the work of three of EC Comics“ best artists: Jack Kamen, Wally Wood and Joe Orlando. Though Orlando“s story is nothing special, the other two stories are among those you could put on any list that ranked the twenty most memorable EC yarns: Kamen“s “October Game”“ (based on a short story by Ray Bradbury) and “Came the Down”“, one of Wally Wood“s most famous stories. How striking still, that it was the fourth tale (also placed fourth, right before an ad with many actual photos that offered not one but five free courses that told you how to become an “All-Around, All-American He-Man”“) which would have everyone and their younger sister buzzing like the birds which descended to seal the fate of a man.
With all those injuries to the human body which proliferated in the pages of EC Comics and in the horror tales from many other publishers during the early 1950s, in an effort to keep upping the ante in such a crowded market place in which you had to compete for the attention and eyeballs of readers once Tales from the Crypt hadn“t only become a smash success but also found many lesser imitators, the surprising thing was, as it often is, that less was more. Sure, there could be an axe-wielding killer ready to unleash some mass murder while dressed up as Santa Claus like some cosplayer from hell, or a cover for a series called The Black Cat (one of the very few titles that once featured a superheroine now quickly converted into one more horror book on the newsstands) might show you the gory truth of what radioactivity was really about (your face would get melted off) with as much detail as artist Lee Elias could fit in. But that was all a bit too over the top and too removed from personal reality to make any emotional impression that went beyond an initial, surface-level vibe of shock, especially when compared to the real, palpable horror you could very well encounter and experience if you found yourself in the desert after a car crash and you were handcuffed to a dead body. “Carrion Death”“, the first EC Comics story illustrated by Reed Crandall, the artist who was one of the most revered artistic talents during the height of the superhero-craze but a decade earlier, is an extremely effective story, not only as a horror tale about terrors as they existed in our world, but because it was a display of how ill-suited we humans are despite our advances in technology, once we were out by ourselves and facing off against whatever nature herself was ready to throw back at us. What makes this seven-pager such a lean and mean machine that will grip readers by the throat from the first panel to never let go until the shocking moment in which the story fell shut, isn“t only Feldstein“s tight plot with nearly every word perfectly placed for maximum effectiveness, and it isn“t Crandall“s art which balances an almost impressionistic approach with true-to-life of naturalism by itself either or in combination with Al Feldstein“s script which is tremendously bleak. “Carrion Death”“ works as a testament to Crandall“s many years of experience as a storyteller in the medium of sequential art. Whereas many of his much younger colleagues, who had joined EC“s bullpen of artists three or four years earlier, were still in the midst of developing their own voices, often preferring the bombastic as a means to conceal their lack of training, and in moments that would have benefitted greatly from a much more subtle hand, Crandall already knew how to conduct each and every instrument in an orchestra of visual storytelling. When the story starts, after the opening splash panel to set the mood, we glimpse a car which drives extremely fast and is large in the foreground, but a bit to one side to create the false impression of movement. The car is being chased across a barren desert terrain by a lone State Trooper on a motorbike. The next panels push closer on the driver who seems confined in the small space which is afforded to him by the vehicle“s crammed interior, while at the same time, with his emotions running the gamut of triumph and anxiety, he closely monitors the progress of his pursuer. With the driver this prominently displayed, he seemed dominant. For good reason, perhaps. Wasn“t he the hero of his own story? He was behind the wheel and he was in control. However, the panel borders themselves seemed less inclined to yield additional space to his frame. He demanded his escape. But as every reader quickly understood, he was no hero at all who summoned all his strengths while howling at the stars and at the old gods alike as he braced for battle. Far from it. He was a common criminal and a murderer. Not only had he held up a bank for thirty thousand dollars, but he“d killed a guard during his daring escape. When seeing this, long-term readers, meaning those who were still around from four years earlier, simply had to be reminded of those comics the publisher had been putting out when Gaines was still chasing every trend. What occurred at the opening of this tale in Shock SuspenStories and which indeed felt like some throwback, was highly reminiscent of titles such as Crime Patrol, one of the series Gaines had conceived in order to cash in on crime comics, a market in which Crime Does not Pay from publisher Lev Gleason led the charge, a title which saw its inception in ”˜42 and was still being published in the early 1950. But Gaines and Al Feldstein had long since converted this series into The Crypt of Terror and then into Tales from the Crypt after an initial try-out horror story written and drawn by Feldstein and slipped into what would be the last issue of Crime Patrol, had taken off. EC Comics were in the horror business now, and right with his first horror story out the gate, called “The Spectre in the Castle”“, Feldstein had introduced the now famous and infamous horror host The Crypt Keeper. Instead of imitating other existing comic book series to then emulate their formula as best as possible, Al Feldstein had set a trend, a new trend, and now other publisher looked at them for what to do. But back in the crime comics days, after Gaines had inherited the failing company from his father Max, the young publisher only had a very limited staff to tell stories about cops and gangsters. There were holdovers like Gardner Fox, a pulp author who was in the midst of making the transition from writing pulps to comic book writer, who would only a decade later become instrumental in DC Comics“ rebirth of the superheroes, and Johnny Craig, a new artist who had worked as an office boy for Max. Other than his latest recruit Al Feldstein, who Gaines had initially brought on board when he wanted to follow the teen romance trend in comics, there was artist Sheldon Moldoff, who was highly talented, but felt a bit old-fashioned. Moldoff had worked for Max not only at EC Comics when EC still stood for Educational Comics, but when Max Gaines was the co-founder of the highly successful All-American Comics where the young artist had worked on such characters as Green Lantern and Hawkman. The work he did eight years later for Bill looked exactly like that. It was slick and it was competent, but it wasn“t exactly awe inspiring. With artists like Feldstein, Wally Wood (back then with his drawing partner Harry Harrison), Graham Ingels and Harvey Kurtzman coming in, Moldoff, who could not or would not adapt to this somewhat rougher, highly stylized, but always innovative way with which the younger artists attacked their art assignments, began to work for Bob Kane as another of his many ghost artists on Batman, who by 1953 had morphed into a good-natured, cartoony character who suited Moldoff“s sensibilities, though Moldoff would become the co-creator of the original Batwoman.
Though Moldoff and Crandall had both worked in superhero comics during the first boom cycle of this very young industry, the latter, who was actually three years older than the former, managed to change his art style completely to perfectly suit Feldstein“s scripts. By 1953 Feldstein was an experienced writer and it seems next to impossible that Moldoff“s glammed-up artwork could have worked on such a story, the irony being of course that Crandall was a master at this type of art as well. But for “Carrion Death”“ he did forgo his patented approach completely. The protagonist and the cop chasing him looked real, and their ordinariness made them beautiful in a true-to-life kinda way, especially with the camera close on the criminal“s face. But when his plan to ram the motorcycle cop backfires, the wild road battle ends with the fugitive“s vehicle getting destroyed. The cop not only pulls him from the wreckage, but he ties one of his wrists around a pair of handcuffs. With the other end of the cuffs around his own wrist, they are now linked together and there is no chance for escape. This is when killer regains his consciousness. The camera is still very close on the criminal and the officer who are now interlinked in a fierce struggle for survival in this barren landscape we are told about through the use of captions. Backgrounds, except for the burning car, don“t matter much or are even widely non-existent. With the trooper distracted by the radio call he places to his station to report the arrest he has just made and to let the guys know that the money stolen got burned, making the stick-up at the bank completely futile, the protagonist seizes the opportunity. And when it is man against man, his hands now in a vice-like grip around the trooper“s throat, the criminal comes out on top. He holds on even when the face of the officer turns from red to purple with all life leaving his body. Frantically, the killer searches the man for the key to the handcuffs, but in vain. It is then that he remembers that when he overheard the trooper while he was making his call on the two-way radio with his back turned towards the criminal, that he did mention not having his keys on him. Once again, the camera is close on the man“s face when the realization dawns on him that he is now handcuffed to a dead officer. Still, his presence was commanding, with the trooper who he“d just strangled to death lying at his feet, when he focuses his eyes on the stretch of the road he“d already travelled. Soon the colleagues of the dead man would arrive. He could well imagine seeing their patrol cars appearing further down the long, dusty desert road and on the horizon. Since using the cop“s bike wasn“t an option, he slings the lifeless body over his shoulders and starts to run into the bad lands. He knows he has to make it to the rocks that he could see, because the open landscape, which now began to fill the panels he had commanded so far, offered next to no protection from prying eyes. He manages to make it to the rocky area of the desert. Once more, he is in the foreground and bigger again, but now the rocks demand as much space as he does. And then there was the discovery that the cop had cleaned out his pockets when he was out of it. His knife is gone and with it any hope of cutting himself free from this dead weight. He knows he must continue his trek across the mountainous terrain if there could be any chance for escape. Even during the night, he continues, but when the morning begins to announce itself in the desert, he is not only dead tired, but badly in need of moisture. There is no way he can ever make it across the baked sand in the glaring heat of the new day with being chained to the cop. He tries to use the badge of the trooper as a make-shift knife once he has sharpened it on the rocks, but his one chance literally slips from his fingers. Then he notices the birds in the sky that have begun to circle him and his fellow traveler. Not only is he exposed to the desert heat, but the vultures fly lower with every pass they make. Al Feldstein words are in a perfect synthesis with Crandall“s images which become even more haunting once Reed moves the camera high up. Together with the camera, from our comfortable, elevated position we look down on the fugitive who was a murderer twice over. He“d run and then he“d run some more and now he couldn“t run any further. He was on his knees, with these winged scavengers looming large in the shot and above his head: “I kept going until I couldn“t go on any further, my wrists bled where the handcuffs had torn the flesh. Everything started spinning. I slipped to the ground. And as the blackness closed in, the screams seemed to come out of the hot air down toward me.”“ When he loses consciousness again and then makes it back from the depth of sleep, it“s night again in the desert. But thinks are not quiet. The carrion birds have descended on the dead cop, noisily gnawing off his flesh which is rend from his face and his soft body alike by their sharp talons. In panic, with the trooper slung over his shoulders once more, the man flees until the next day breaks. But this time he cannot go much further. He is almost delirious from exhaustion by now, and from thirst. This is when he comes up with a mad idea that is born from pain and hoplessness: “The buzzards! They could save me. They don“t eat live flesh. Only dead. They could free me.”“ The criminal lies down on the ground and closes his eyes: “I do not move. I do not dare.”“ This is when the scavenger birds begin to blacken the killer“s face with the shadows created by their eager wings. Then, while they gorged on the feast laid out for them, the birds with their bloody, pointy beaks began to dominate the panels. As threatening close as they were to the eye of the artist“s camera and the readers alike, the effective size of their streamlined, feathered torsos was hopelessly mismatched for such narrow confinements as comic panels will present once the pages were already ruled by an editor-writer who was wont to place the copy directly on the artboard before the artist had even begun their work. And with the birds now having stripped clean one body, the killer soon feels their shadows falling over his chest. With the last two panels Feldstein drives home the idea of nature versus man. In the penultimate panel the birds are large once again as they now begin to tear off the flesh of the protagonist: “And I feel no pain as the vice-like jaws of the raw-necked vultures close upon my flesh and peel it from my bones. I cannot move. I cannot stop them.”“ For the next panel, Reed Crandall switches to a close-up of the man“s face once again, but unlike when the story began, he is not dominant and full of swagger, but at his most vulnerable and helpless, and he is now missing one of his eyes: “I can only watch in silent horror as they feed upon me. I can watch only until one of them plucks my eyeballs from my skull”¦”“ But with this last panel, there came also release, for the protagonist as for the readers as well. The man who was as nameless as the State Trooper he had killed, was already dead.
It is not without irony, even though it is unclear if Feldstein had intended this, that “Carrion Death”“ was Reed Crandall“s first story for EC Comics. A month after this story hit newsstands, the last issue Crandall had done for Quality Comics appeared (Blackhawk No. 67), featuring his signature character Blackhawk. The series about the Polish aviator and wartime flying ace Blackhawk and his team of crack pilots which was named after himself, constitutes the greatest highlight of the first phase of Crandall“s career as an illustrator. Crandall“s clean art style accompanied the pilot“s adventures across various iterations. First in Military Comics when Crandall took over the art duties in ”˜42, then in Blackhawk and Modern Comics. When people talk about how Jack Kirby drew his characters, discussions will turn to the kinetic energy with which the King of Comics imbued his heroes or how dynamic his battle scenes were. With Crandall, there were heroes who looked their most heroic and handsome, as evidenced by the superheroes Reed worked on long before he joined EC Comics, especially in the Blackhawk titles he made his own. Crandall was born in 1917 which makes him a decade younger than artists like Wally Wood and Steve Ditko. He attended the Cleveland School of Art on a scholarship for four years, though Reed left the school a few months into his freshman year to return home when his father died. By that time, the family had moved from Indiana to Kansas and when the student returned to Cleveland, his mother and sister followed. In need of a job once he couldn“t support his mother and sister on a scholarship beyond his graduation in 1939, he was hired as a sign-painter for store windows. Soon Crandall worked on maps and geographical material while he fantasized about becoming a full-time illustrator for slick magazines. Upon receiving an offer from a publisher of children“s books who was looking for an illustrator, Reed moved his family to New York City. Unfortunately, the promised deal never materialized but for a try-out cover. Lacking the funds needed to move his family back to Cleveland or Kansas altogether, and since New York offered better opportunities, he stayed around. Since he could not land a job in the magazine business, Crandell took a gamble and inquired about work within the field of comic books, a new medium that was about to take off with the arrival of first Superman and then Batman. And there was also Captain Marvel from publisher Fawcett Comics. As young as this fledgling industry was, there was already a structure well in place, however. As far as writers were concerned, those mostly came from the pulp magazines that saw a dramatic decrease in sales, or from fans of those publications turned professionals. And with not that many publishers having adapted to this new trend (perceived by some as a golden opportunity to clean up their act after local law-makers had begun to crack down on their more lurid, well-nigh pornographic pulp output or simply as a tax-saving incentive) as there would be only two or three years later, Crandall learned that it was difficult to get work in this field. Publishers used in-house staffs they had assembled or who came with the characters they bought the rights to, or they hired shops who put together entire books for them. Fawcett did both. They had their star artists, chief among them C.C. Beck the co-creator of the run-away hit Captain Marvel, but they also contracted the outside studio Jack Binder was building up. And like in every other business, it all depended on who you knew to get a foot in the door. Binder turned his older brother Otto on to comics who was losing writing assignments in the shrinking market for prose genre fiction. Otto, once one part of the writing duo Eando Binder (together with yet another Binder brother, Earl, hence their penname), had struck out on his own only to see the demand go south. However, he would become the most prolific writer on Captain Marvel and the co-creator of many of the characters that soon began to populate the series, some of which were spun-off into their own solo titles. As for Reed, he eventually landed on the radar of Will Eisner. The creator of the hugely successful syndicated newspaper strip The Spirit, which began to appear in 1940, had just broken off his business partnership with Jerry Iger with whom he had operated a studio that delivered pre-packaged books on demand. With Eisner in the midst of getting The Spirit underway and setting up a new shop for clients he had retained with the split from Iger, he needed new artists badly. He hired Reed Crandall for inking. But after just a few months on the job, Eisner promoted him to the role of inker and penciler and gave him the Doll Man strip to draw which ran in a series Eisner put together for Quality Comics. Everett M. Arnold, Quality“s publisher, nicknamed “Busy”“ for a hands-on-mentality and his constant meddling with the way his contracted studio managed the books, requested two new books from Eisner, one of which was Military Comics. This came at a time when kids (and pretty soon young soldiers) wanted their brave heroes to be clad in capes and tights, and before America“s involvement in the war. Unsurprisingly, the title did sell less than half of its print run. While this would become almost standard practice during the early 1960s, with books being fully returnable, publishers were left holding the bag when stores ordered too many books, during what was shaping up to be the boom years for comics, a sell-through of 130,000 units from 275,000 books printed was not an encouraging sign. But Arnold was not called “Busy”“ for no reason. He kept the faith, especially with a new lead character he liked. Blackhawk was created by Will Eisner and Dick Powell, but mostly the series came from the mind of artist Chuck Cuidera. Once he was paired with writer Dick French, who was already working on some titles for Eisner and Arnold, the sales numbers began to improve. However, when Cuidera received his draft notice in 1942, the series needed a new artist. It was Arnold who made the call. He had taken note of Crandall“s work on Doll Man and a few other superheroes in the Quality stable. At Arnold“s request, Reed started with Military Comics No. 12, an issue that was already mostly laid out by the leaving Cuidera, who had this to say about Crandall in an interview he gave in 1982: “I used to jump around from panel to panel and in no particular order, when I penciled this stuff. Reed was fastest penciler of any us guys in the shop. He could turn out three pages in the time it took me to do one. Amazing!”“ And Crandall was not only fast, but he was very good.
A point can be made that writer Michael Chabon was more than a little impressed with Reed Crandall“s art when he had Joe Kavalier refer to him as “the top artist of his era”“. Of course, Kavalier was not real, but lived in a novel called “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”“ (2000), a book which won its author the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. But still, in a way he existed beyond the written page. Like his fictional writing partner Sammy Clay, Kavalier was an amalgamation of the Jewish comic artists who either slaved away at the sweat shops run by Eisner and other entrepreneurial artists who had seen the writing on the wall and had quickly set up their own studios while pitching publishers with the idea of them simply ordering ready-to-go comic books which sometimes ran forty to sixty pages of original art. But in the world of Chabon“s novel, which was set during the boom and bust cycle of the first superhero craze of the 40s, there were also a few mega-stars. Writer Otto Binder would soon command an income of more than one hundred thousand dollars per year (in 1940s“ money) from Fawcett (while writing ten thousand words a day, mind you), and Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were lured from one publisher to the next, with Joe doing the deals and Jack bringing the ideas and his trademark art work. And soon there was Reed Crandall. Once he was fully ensconced on the character, he would be working on for the next eleven years, minus the two years he actually served in the Air Force, Crandall made the book his own and then some. Though he was technically not the writer, Reed soon made any writer who came on to one of the series which featured Blackhawk and his crew, more or less ride shotgun. The changes Reed made to the series were so sweeping that Busy Arnold quickly asked Eisner to give him a contract which would guarantee him Crandall“s services. Eventually Arnold grew tired of even this arrangement and he hired Crandall himself. Once Cuidera was off the book, Reed used the canvas that was Military Comics to the fullest. Reed made the main character as handsome as a matinee idol, but smart as a whip. Every team member was imbued with a distinct personality. Then there were the planes. Reed would draw a spread which displayed one hundred ten fighter planes, all realistically drawn. In the next issue, there“d be a page that featured forty-two planes that not only didn“t look static and weren“t just involved in air fights but showed off the skills of their respective pilots and the maneuverability of their machines. But of course, any hero is only as good as the villains he comes up against. With a war going on, surely any creative who worked in comic books did not have to look far. But when Crandall created “The Butcher”“ for his first solo issue with Military Comics No. 13 (1942), Reed and writer Bill Woolfolk (a close friend of Otto Binder“s), eerily predicted his first issue for EC Comics which came eleven years later. The villain, Baron Von Tepp, was actually the brother of the man who had killed the hero“s entire family during the first issue. The German had paid for this with his life naturally, but this only had put Blackhawk in the crosshairs of the sadistic Baron seeking revenge for his fallen sibling. Coming close to killing Blackhawk, the final confrontation left the Nazi stranded in the desert. With Von Tepp slowly dying of thirst, there is a murder of vultures circling overhead. With all these aspects quickly being integrated into the series, and Crandall“s attractive art to tie it all together, there was still one more secret ingredient which turned the book quickly into a success with readers, a secret Reed had learned from his erstwhile employer. In The Spirit strip the hero was constantly besieged by beautiful women who wanted to kiss the man with the domino mask and murder him at the same time, if not literally, but then at least figuratively. As any ten-year-old boy would attest, girls could take the fun out of everything, but they were surely very nice to look at. Though other artists populated their books with attractive females, not many had the talent Eisner brought to the table, or Crandall who hadn“t put in his four years of study at the Cleveland School of Art for nothing. During life drawing sessions, he drew nude models not only from one perspective to soak up what he needed to know about anatomy, but his comprehension and grasp of the female form soon allowed him to draw women from every angle he could think of, sans clothes naturally. Being able to draw gorgeous ladies with a sultry look on their face, a voluptuous body and smoldering hot attitude to go with their, well, assets certainly made some kids (and adults) do a double take. In issue No. 14 he and Woolfolk had Blackhawk and his team have a run in with the mysterious exotic beauty who called herself Tondeleyo. The cover by Crandall already perfectly set the stage. The beautiful black-haired girl was seen holding Blackhawk and another poor fellow in the palm of one hand. And most certainly, that was what she did throughout the story in which she infiltrated Blackhawk Island to manipulate every member of the team including Blackhawk himself. With the way Crandall had Tondeleyo prancing and cavorting among the men in her short, flower-print dress he not only pushed the envelope, but one can ask if a young Steve Englehart was not among the readers of this issue when many years later he created a very similar character with a like-minded spirit with the name Mantis who behaved very much like an early 1970s version of Tondeleyo with The Avengers taking The Blackhawks“ place. With Crandall, there could always be a surprise. The one he had for readers of issue No. 15 would once again see a very dark reflection in an EC Comics“ story many years down the road. Though “Men Who Never Came Back”“ had The Blackhawks go up against three witches called Trouble, Terror and Mystery, who unbeknownst to the heroes created all sorts of trouble and who did look like they had come right out of stage production of Macbeth, there was a twist. Mystery, who had kept her face hidden and who had secretly helped the beautiful hero cheat death on three occasions, revealed herself to the readers. And lo, indeed she was an incredibly beautiful Japanese woman who had betrayed her country and her race for the hero, a fact he would never know. She closed the issue with sadness: “East is East ”“ West is West. Oh, Blackhawk”¦”“
With Military Comics No. 12 (1942), which not only saw the departure of Chuck Cuidera, but which was writer Dick French“s last issue, already laid out by the former, Crandall inherited the villainous Nazi vixen Xanuhara who was certainly no pushover, but who used her body to such a degree that she might have tempted any guy to switch alliances. The statuesque blonde, who looked like fascist“s wet dream, didn“t have so much luck with Blackhawk, though. The hero slapped her right across the kisser for her audacity to proposition him in such a manner. Dick French concluded the issue with her apparent death. But she was too good a villainess, or at least too good-looking, to have simply died. Thus, she was brought back in issue No. 29 (1944). In issue No. 20 (1943), Bill Woolfolk and Crandall reprised the theme of a woman infiltrating Blackhawk Island, only this time she was a good girl, a stunning aviatrix who declared herself a member of the team and who the story“s title referred to as “The Blonde Bomber”“, naturally, but who called herself “Sugar”“, because apparently, she was hard to get. Even if this joke only might have worked during war times, and perhaps not with all readers, still every hot-blooded male, (and maybe some girls, too) who saw this long-legged girl pilot in the too tightly-fitting jodhpurs and her shiny knee-high boots in which Reed clad her, had to agree. She was trouble. And once on a mission in occupied France, with Sugar posing as a peasant girl, she cut loose to flirt with a Nazi commander the team needs to trick. But surely, once the two-fisted action starts, Sugar is kept to the sidelines, with Blackhawk sending her back to England in the end. As far as Michael Chabon“s novel is concerned, Woolfolk and Crandall did create another female character who might also have served as the inspiration for the novelist. When Kavalier, the artist behind the successful comic strip The Escapist is trying to come with a female companion for the hero he and his friend Sammie have created, he looks at his girlfriend naturally, but as for the girl“s superheroine identity he settles on the name Luna Moth, a name which is already very evocative, and matters are further aided when another character looks at his character concepts and remarks that the artist made the woman“s breasts as big as her head. Surely, this is meant as a play on the Fox Syndicate character Phantom Lady who found one of her most notorious covers snatched up Dr. Fredric Wertham for his sensationalistic book about the perceived ills infesting the comic book industry “Seduction of the Innocent”“ (1954). However, much of the character design for Luna Moth, albeit in a much tamer form, traces back to a character Woolfolk and Crandall called Madame Butterfly, named for the tragic heroine of Puccini“s opera. Her only appearance came in Modern Comics No. 78 (1948). This series was Military Comics by a new name. But Busy Arnold did more than re-brand the one series he had with Blackhawk when his star artist returned from his service in the Air Force. Once Crandall was back in the door, Busy quickly created a second series, called Blackhawk which ran concurrently, with Reed working on both. With Madame Butterfly he and Woolfolk harkened back to those exotic anti-heroines they had created during the war years, like the beautiful Tondeleyo. Albeit, everything felt a bit tuned down and far less urgent than when there was a war going on. With the war won and fascism thwarted, people began to settle into a more comfortable life in the newly created model homes of the suburbs, and naturally, the comics reflected this trend. But still, this way lay temptations. Though with making their gorgeous villain a Japanese woman, the creative duo certainly played on the fear of the foreign, ethnic stereotyping and xenophobia, which had not gone away with the end of the war. Having Blackhawk go up against such a beautiful woman did also feed into the anxiety a lot of young males felt towards the women they would encounter at their schools or workplaces, women who had become fiercely independent and who were well aware of the feelings and desires they created in men. It is no coincidence that Madame Butterfly dominates the cover for Modern Comics No. 78, with her wide stance and spread out arms demanding even more space than seems prudent. Her expression and body language speak of triumph, and there is a wicked smile on her lips. By comparison, the manly hero is small and in a crouching position and in bondage. And when you get to the splash page, there she is again in another full body shot. This time, she“s suspended in mid-air with her arms and the butterfly wings of her costume spread. Even airplanes look small next to her, and so does the hero once again who only manages to get a head-shot in, and it is with a look of concern that the handsome aviator informs readers: “We Blackhawks know the face of evil, and this time it“s the face of a woman! She calls herself Madame Butterfly. What her real name is, no one knows! But she is a menace unlike anything mortal man has ever met before!”“ But who was this new villainess? Initially she seems a mere pirate of the air, despite her colorful costume or because of it. She and her henchmen plunder the cargo from unsuspecting ships. But there is more to her. Woolfolk and Crandall combine two divergent aspects of the human existence and experience in her person, held together by the progression of change, of transformation, which lies between these different poles, an aspect that is beautifully captured with the motif of the butterfly. Though Michael Chabon“s Luna Moth has a distinctly, much more voluptuous body type, Madame Butterfly radiates sexuality and dominance. Together with the willingness to submit (without dominance cannot exist), we have the aspect of sexual intercourse which lead to birth. It is telling that when we first encounter her, she is seated on a throne. Her upper body is reclined comfortably and she has her long legs crossed at the knees. One of her knee-high, high-heeled boots points down towards the floor while demanding to be worshipped at the same time. One of her Asian henchmen is bowing in front of her, but so low, that his face well-nigh connects with her boot. Not until Julie Newmar“s Catwoman would young males see such an image of complete superiority in a woman in their popular fiction. In that Madame Butterfly is the mother who reprimands a wayward male child, she is a lover and a life-giver. But she is also death. Whenever she and her crew go out on their raids, they will leave no survivors. But she herself was also born from death. Before she became the “most dangerous woman in the east”“, she had been a regular woman and a lover. But her beloved had found his demise at the hands of a white man during the war. His death had not only made her transform and to take on a new identity and a deadly new life-style, but she had made an oath like any self-respecting superhero would, but only in reverse: “For his murder, all white devils shall pay with their lives!”“ Naturally, when the hero Blackhawk encounters the attractive villainess face to face, after he, she and her pilots had been doing battle in the air, he is on the floor and she is standing above him.
Once Blackhawk is in the clutches of the raven-haired villainess, she is in control. With her back turned to the readers, she mocks Blackhawk who staggers to his feet while one of her equally colorfully garbed henchman has an eye on him. The hero is transferred to a womb-like cave in which she plans to murder him with the use of rapidly growing fungus spores which are designed to suffocate him in “a cocoon of death.”“ Blackhawk manages to escape the death trap and makes good of his escape until he gets shot in the back by one of Madame Butterfly“s men. Again, he finds himself on the ground, with the villainess observing him while she stands over him, her back turned to the readers once again. In the end, like he was some damsel in distress, the hero gets rescued by his men who have no qualms about terminating Madame Butterfly“s men with extreme prejudice. In a shocking twist, the villainess killed herself rather than grant Blackhawk his victory over her by taking her prisoner. Reed“s art throughout his long tenure on this series (and on Blackhawk) remained the top selling point. Even though things felt a bit less kinky going forward, his scenes of air battle and fistfights on the ground find their rival only in work done by Jack Kirby. It is also interesting to note, that the back-up strip that run in Modern Comics from issue No. 53 until No. 102 was the series Torchy. Sold as “America“s Blonde Bombshell”“, the extreme long-legged and hyper-sexual ingenue Torchy was the creation of cartoonist Bill Ward. She had first appeared in an issue of Doll Man in 1946, a character Crandall had also worked on for Quality Comics. Ward, who also worked as fetish artist for men“s humor magazines, did not tone down the antics of his blonde heroine who had a propensity for showing her stockings and garters or for losing her tight tops by accident, and he most likely had Busy Arnold“s blessing. With the series lead ostensibly geared towards young readers who were males, Torchy was the icing on the cake after the highly engaging, beautifully choreographed sequences of men locked in physical confrontations Crandall provided. However, Ward was a “good girl artist”“, and this was how Al Feldstein had started out with books like Junior and Sunny which he“d done for Victor Fox. Gaines had hired him originally to do just these kinds of books at the end of the 40s, but things had turned out very differently. Now, in 1953, Feldstein had the artist of Blackhawk on his team. And he was certainly aware of Crandall“s stories and the role women played in them, something which played nicely into his own sensibilities and his special brand of storylines. However, Al Feldstein wasn“t the only writer-editor at EC Comics. Harvey Kurtzman who was responsible for a whole line of books as well, quickly made good use of Crandall“s meticulous art for tales in his war titles Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat and for stories set in Ancient Rome or during the Civil War, a field that had been artist John Severin“s domain up until then. And Reed definitely came through. Interestingly though, when the artist got a script from Kurtzman for a story which was set in the 18th century, a tale for which Crandall handed in some of his best artwork, with gorgeously rendered linework that was highly reminiscent of the quality of old wood etchings, the tale ended with a cynical twist that felt like it came right out of Al Feldstein“s playbook. In “The Killer”“, originally presented in Crime SuspenStories No. 19 (1953), readers encountered handsome Jonathan who flat out refused to follow into his father“s footsteps when it came to his career choice. Jonathan, who wanted to be an artist, had to change his tune once he met a young woman whom he intended to marry and settle down with. But without his father“s lack of membership in any trade guild, jobs were difficult to come by. Reluctantly, new family man Jonathan agreed to work in his father“s line of business, but he refused to tell his lovely wife about his profession. All of this was established through the use of a long flashback sequence. Kurtzman cleverly started his tale with a shot of Jonathan sitting in a jail cell all by himself. Then, in the flashbacks, we see Jonathan riding under the guise of the night from town to town and we see the terror on the faces of the people he meets. Again, masterfully penciled and inked by Crandall like these visages, contorted with fright and terror, were cut from wood. But tragedy strikes fast. When his job takes him away even with his wife about to give birth, she loses the child. The scene in which Jonathan fashions a little coffin in his tool shed is especially gut-wrenching. Naturally it seems, Elsie blames his absence and his job for her losing the baby. This is when her question of how long he will be gone takes on a whole new meaning, but Jonathan cannot tell. But a short while later, when he returns home, he finds their little house in complete disarray. Soon, guards show up who lead him to the prison of his hometown. This is when he (and the readers) learn that Elsie had been carrying on an affair behind his back. Now Elsie had murdered her lover in a heated argument. This was when the story returned to the present with Jonathan contemplating his life and his marriage from an empty prison cell. But Jonathan is no prisoner, he is there on business. And this was when Elsie finally learned about her husband“s job. Once he put the noose around her neck. He was the hangman.
Though Crandall worked in many different genres during his relatively short time at EC Comics, Feldstein always seemed to find a way to either build on what Crandall had done before or to subvert the heroes the artist was wont to depict. In Feldstein“s world, men were often hapless and caught up in situations they did not quite understand, and women were very beautiful but not trustworthy, and every so often, they were deadly as well. Though Feldstein also played on the trope of men losing interest in women, once they lost their attractive looks, something he and Reed Crandall did masterfully in the tale “In Each and Every Package”“, first published in Crime SuspenStories No. 22 (1954), Reed“s realistic art style gave Feldstein even more opportunities to unmask the lifestyle of the new American middle class and society at large. And though Crandall had joined up with EC Comics when Feldstein increasingly had freelancers write full scripts for EC (like Otto Binder and Carl Wessler), he and Crandall produced some of the best tales ever put out by EC. With their follow-up to “Carrion Death”“, Crandall“s first story for EC Comics for which Feldstein had even done the cover himself, they immediately began to dismantle the male hero. “Sweetie-Pie”“, published in Shock SuspenStories No. 10 (1953), another issue in which Crandall had to compete for the readers“ eyeballs once again with Kamen, Wood and Orlando, started with a car crash as well. This time, the splash panel showed a young couple crashing through a wood fence and off the road and into a deep ravine with their sports car. While the man, Philip, lies in the dark grass, the moon bright overhead, he remembers. He was a reporter for a metropolitan newspaper. When after a series of car accidents, which were very similar to the one he and his new wife Sally found themselves in now, bodies began to turn up, he had begun to investigate. These were some of the people whose wrecked cars the Highway Patrol had found, with the drivers missing. There was something these bodies, which were discovered days later and far away from the accident sites, had in common. Each of them showed two distinct puncture marks on their neck. Naturally, the reporter suspects the work of a vampire, but of course, nobody treats his suspicion seriously. The world that Reed Crandall laid out was our modern world. Vampires only existed in B movies as his editor informed Philip. Every road, all the houses, even the kitchens we visited while the ace reporter“s mind flashed back, had the gleam of everyday life. This wasn“t the kind of neighborhood in which the undead were real. Now he himself had lost control of his sleek convertible while the couple was on their way back from the church where they“d exchanged their vows. Within seconds Philip had been forced to make a quick swerve when he saw the glaring headlights from a vehicle that had been racing towards them in their lane. This was when his well-lit existence had taken on the blue hues of the night itself and of his nightmare. In this blue darkness, he could make out the silhouette of a man who was moving towards the wreckage of his car. A man who wore a hat with a wide brim and a long coat. Like she was a doll, this fiend lifted his wife up in his arms very easily and carried her away, to where, Philip couldn“t say. Then it was his turn. Like a piece of meat, he was shoved into a station wagon. When he came to again, he found himself on an operating table. When he looked around in the brightly lit room that returned the colors to his world, Philip discovered there were many others who shared his fate. But they were all naked, their nudity discreetly covered with white sheets. And with these people“s complexion of the same color as these sheets, he knew they were all dead. But Sally wasn“t among them. She had to be in the other room with this fiend who had tricked them off the road. Then the man came for him. He was an old guy with stringy white hair and a long nose. Still, Philip could not move. Perhaps he“d been injured in the car crash or he was paralyzed by fear. In any case, he was completely useless. There wasn“t anything he could do when this monster rolled the table with him into a laboratory. Once there, he saw his wife. She was naked as well. Her young body was covered with a sheet like the other bodies of those unfortunate souls who had been in one of the crashes and whose remains had not been dropped off at some random location. Sally was dead. This fiend started to force two needles into his throat, each of them connected to a thin rubber hose. He knew his blood was going to be pumped from his body, every drop of it like with Sally and the others. But the man who looked at him and down on him was not a vampire. They did not exist in this world. He was a ghoul. This was one nifty little horror story, made much more exiting by Crandall“s art which switched from the modern day look to the horrors at nighttime with ease. And then there was Al Feldstein“s script and his commentary. Here was an ace reporter, a staple of many pulp adventure yarns of the 1930s and early 1940s. Not only was he helpless and died in the end, but he failed with protecting his beautiful blonde wife from harm“s way. But there was more. When the reporter still couldn“t figure out why the man-eater had returned some of the bodies while he had kept others, the ghoul explained his motives: “Some people are sweet people, some are bitter. I only like sweet. The bitterness that people carry through life is often reflected in their physical make-up. High-school principals, librarians, bus drivers”¦ they are all bitter. Acid. I turn those back!… I can“t tell until I draw their blood!”“ There you had it. You better were a sweet one in life.
Then Feldstein took on the genre in which Crandall had left his mark. For there to be no doubt of what he was up to, he already put it in the title. “Plane Murder”“, which appeared in Crime SuspenStories No. 20 (1954), was another one of the writer-editor“s stories in the “The Postman Always Rings Twice”“ mold he“d made good use of so many times: the tale of a very attractive wife who was unhappy with her lot in life and her marriage and who seized the opportunity when a handsome young drifter appeared right on her doorstep. But this version came with several twists. First and foremost, this story gave Feldstein a chance to show what those flying aces of the war had become. Like the original cowboys were reduced to being mere farm hands or to attractions in some sideshow circus, pilots were now stunt performers who had to entertain the masses at some flight show. And since this was not exciting enough in a time when television was on the rise, they had to perform daring escapes as well. Like Phil who jumped out of a flying plane high in the air with his hands tied behind his back by a pair of handcuffs. But it was all a trick, of course. Mildred, his wife would hide a key for him in between the cushions of one of the seats of the plane before he made his jump with some important person like a mayor of the town checking his cuffs before he did so. There would always be time for him to pull the cord of his parachute before the ground came too close. And this time was no exception. Mildred was among the crowd who gasped with excitement and who secretly wished that this time things would be different. Like when they had those gladiators in Ancient Rome go up against a pride of hungry lions or like what happened yesterday. While Phil fell through the air as he gripped the secret key tightly, he could see the burned-out wreckage of a small plane that still stood at the end of one of the runways. It was one of his planes. It had belonged to his show act. In his mind he put it all together. There was his wife Mildred, a stunning redhead who had introduced Marty Madison as her cousin. Marty had been looking for a job after he was no longer in the Air Force. He was handsome, young and a hot shot pilot like he had once been before he got old. This much was true, all of it. Except for the fact that Marty was not his wife“s cousin. She had lied right from the start, not to raise his suspicion when he saw the two them spending time together. And that they did. He still had not got it then, it was too difficult to face up to the fact that such a beauty as his own wife would get tired of him eventually. Then he had seen them together in a passionate embrace. Naturally he got angry and he fired Marty from his show. It was his act he had built from scratch. This was when Mildred told him she“d be leaving him; she“d be leaving with Marty. But there was still a job for the two men to do on the next day. Little did Marty ever suspect that he switched the prop on the young man“s show plane. Marty never stood a chance. With Mary gone, he“d reunite with Mildred now. He could see her down in the bleachers among the throngs of spectators as he plunged towards them. Beautiful Mildred. What Phil could not see or know and would never know, was that she had overheard some of the mechanics talk after the accident Marty had with his plane. They had seen the wreckage. They knew that the prop was all wrong. This was when Mildred decided to give Phil the wrong key for the handcuffs that bound his wrists together. Phil was about to find out. But it was too late now. Though Mildred would not keep this stain on her soul, they one he and she had caused on the runway. Mildred walked up to a policeman, ready to confess. Though this was a simple tale, Crandall“s gritty realism and his experience with all sorts of airplanes and flying equipment made it a true standout. But Al Feldstein and his new artist were just getting started. And in the larger scope of things it turned out that Crandall had joined up with EC at the right moment after all. Whereas there“d been a cartoony flavor with some of the earlier stories, once 1953 rolled around, Feldstein and Kurtzman were all in favor of more realism.
Though Mildred had not planned the murder of her husband like it was so often the case in this type of stories and with Feldstein as a writer, he soon had two scripts for Crandall which further drove home the idea that you could not trust anyone in this new world, especially not a female with a beautiful face and a body to die for. And whereas a woman like Xanuhara had wanted to rule the entire world together with a virile stud of a man like Blackhawk at her side during the war times, the modern woman wanted very much to succeed in the corporate world, and if she had to stand on a weak male to do so, she had no compunctions about doing just that. It is also interesting that this fun story appeared in The Vault of Horror, in No. 34 (1953), but then what could be more horrific than the world of advertising and deadlier than a story about cigarettes? Both aspects perfectly rendered by Crandall. Hubert Tillings was exactly the kind of man who was already intimidated by the beautiful receptionist who managed the offices of the B.V.D and O. ad company (a clever play on the real agency BBDO), the advertising firm that handled the account for Llama Cigarettes (a popular stand-in for Camel). A small, middle-aged man with glasses and unfortunately already going bald, he was certainly not cut out to deal with so much beauty. He was now clutching his cheap briefcase a little tighter and grew even more uneasy when he was told that the manager who was responsible for the account was in fact a woman, which was a frightening prospect for Tillings. Al Feldstein really went all in with his prose not to have to spell out that Tillings was a virgin. And his fears for not unfounded. Lorna Jackson turned out as one beautiful woman, though she clearly was wont to downplay that aspect with her tailored business jacket and her pencil skirt. You see, Tillings had made in invention. A new type of spectacular billboard ideally suited to promote cigarettes. Lorna was indeed thinking on her feet. Having looked over his elaborate technical drawings, she flat out told him that her agency wouldn“t be interested in a gadget like this. She did however find him interesting. To his utter amazement it was she who asked him for a dinner date. This was where he told her that he hadn“t been lucky with selling any of his many inventions. But he“d had such high hopes for his “Smoke-Ring-Sign”“ which blew actual smoke rings from the advertisement poster. Lorna liked him, and she had an idea. Maybe she could tell her boss at the agency that the display was her idea, that would help him get the foot into the door. Mr. Tillings was clearly thrilled that an attractive woman like her was willing to go out on a limb for him. And to prove to him how noble her intentions were, she told him she would turn any profits over to him. Why naturally, he offered her some of that money. Then she even invited him into her tastefully decorated apartment which made his old suit look even cheaper. But Lorna didn“t seem to mind. Quite the opposite since now she really came on to him. Little did he suspect that on the next day not only did she impress her superiors with her idea, but she got a raise out of it. And soon the new display was being constructed. As for Mr. Tillings, she still kept seeing him, but with less fortunate news. She needed to work on her bosses a bit more for the two of them to see his display idea come to fruition. Feldstein“s script is extremely clever here when we see Lorna during the day at the site where the sign it being erected and later in the evening when she meets up with Mr. Tillings: “During the day, Lorna would visit the construction site”¦ and at night, the destruction site”¦”“ Finally, she lets him know that her bosses have accepted the idea, but unfortunately there will be no money, not yet. But unlucky for her, Mr. Tillings read the newspapers and thus he learned that there was a sign being built right on Times Square, one that sounded from the description like the one he had invented. With her soft voice she told him to meet her at the site at night. This was where Lorna let him have it: “Why do you think I dated you every night, you sucker? To keep you from nosing around down at the agency”¦ shooting off your mouth”¦ This is my show, little man, and I“m not going to share it with anyone.”“ And this was also where she killed the unfortunate Mr. Tillings who happened to have fallen for a woman who looked a lot like an updated version of Woolfolk and Crandall“s creation Tondeleyo. And fell he did, right into the “open steam chamber filled with bubbling, scalding water”“ which was needed to create the smoke. She had to die as well, in Feldstein“s world at least. In the end it was the sign itself that did Miss Jackson in.
Since Reed had already shown his talent with drawing women in various outlandish and exotic attires, his art style was perfect for the opportunities that came with science fiction and futuristic clothing. In Shock SuspenStories No. 11 (1953), Feldstein presented another variation of the “Postman”“ theme, but this time set in outer space (not the first time the writer had used that trick, though). In “Space Suitors”“ again we find an attractive dame who got tired of her older, wealthy husband when a young, virile male presented himself. This time he was not a drifter, but a space explorer. Don Conrad was hired by Milton, Wanda Griffith“s husband who wanted him to do prospecting in space. The tale starts with a cold open with three panels on the first page. On a barren planetoid in outer space we see three people who are clad in thick, gray spacesuits with bubble helmets with their rocket standing in the background awaiting their return. Immediately the dynamic between the players is revealed through the visuals. The young man and the young woman are both standing, they are right next to each other and exchange knowing glances. The older man is kneeling at their feet like Madame Butterfly“s henchman did. He is looking at a rock in his hand while making eye contact with the couple who looks taller than he and more superior. Still the older man has an air of authority about himself. We get that he is used to be in control and to calling the shots. But not this time it seems. The man hired by him to find valuable resources has tricked him into believing that this little celestial body is rich in uranium. Clearly, as Milt has quickly discovered, it isn“t. This is when the young man pulls a blaster on him. Yes, Donald had lured Milt on this planetoid under false pretenses. He and Wanda wanted to see him dead so they could be together. And with his wife inheriting his money, they“d have a very pleasant life. There is a grimy feel to these proceedings, a look that seems years ahead of its time, a fact that seems very appropriate for a science fiction yarn. It is a sordid tale after all, and Crandall“s art here lacks his light touch on purpose. The inks seem as heavy as the space suits the three characters are wearing. There is nothing attractive about them. And right on the next page we learn why. Not even Milton is innocent. Looking at the art, one cannot help but to think of the artwork of some of the underground comix that were more than a decade into the future. Crandall eschewed using his usual glamorous touch, and no other EC story, anything Graham Ingels did, notwithstanding clearly, conveyed so directly on its first page that we are in the presence of despicable people. Wanda had been two-timing Milton. Don had violated the trust of his employer on a personal and professional level, and as far as Milt was concerned, he had deceived both of them. Wanda tries to call his bluff with Milton laughing at her and at the trap they had sprung for him: “You“re wrong, Wanda! I knew I“d lost you! I knew it that day Don came to work for me, and I saw that hunger in your eyes”¦”“ This was when we switched into a flashback sequence seen through Wanda“s eyes. Now, Reed brought back the glamour as we got to see her romance with Don take shape while Don and Milton hatch their plans of exploring the universe. Wanda is seen throughout this part of the story in breathtaking outfits that consisted of short dresses in gold and silver with cut-away panels revealing more skin than people in the 50s were accustomed to, but there also were long, heavy capes and a futuristic architecture that was reminiscent of Alex Raymond“s work on Flash Gordon. Once we return to the present, the gloss is gone again, though Wanda takes on a stance that is very much like that of Madame Butterfly. This might be a bit of foreshadowing on Crandall“s part, since all three of them are about to die. Without Wanda, Milton is not interested in living any longer. He has rigged their rocket to fly off automatically if he pulls a switch on his suit. Wanda, who“d been living with him all these years, still thinks she has won, that he was simply bluffing. He wasn“t. And when Don shots him, the rocket starts its engines. The couple finally realizes that they are doomed, and they cannot even touch or kiss each other while they wait for their oxygen to run out. Having come from writing science fiction pulps, Otto Binder surely took note of the way Crandall designed the future. He and Reed created another beautiful sci-fi story for Weird Science Fantasy No. 27 (1955) which featured a gorgeous protagonist named Vida whom Crandall clad in some of the most incredible outfits, like one long silver dress and a white bodysuit, both with a one-shoulder strap, that were amazingly fashion-forward thinking. This was on purpose, clearly, since Binder wrote a powerful and touching tale about bigotry and racial stereotyping that told readers that it paid off if you looked beyond what was on the surface level, that if you looked deeper, beauty could be ugly and ugly could be most beautiful, but above all else, the person on the inside truly mattered. Feldstein, though, in his own unique way, had told a similar story with Reed on art more than a year earlier in Tales from the Crypt No. 38 (1953). True to form, it was one of his most cynical and gruesome stories, yet one can argue that it“s one of the two best stories he and the artist created together. It surely pulled no punches.
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.
