Alan David Doane responds to my dismissal of EC comics:
My thought is that yes, the writing in most of the EC horror and SF stories was rote hackwork, but Kurtzman’s Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, as well as Krigstein’s “Master Race” are without question among the best comics ever created, words and pictures both. Not only are they not, as Wisse asserts, examples of comics where “the story doesn’t matter,” but rather, they represent absolute perfection in their melding of image with text, something Kurtzman and Krigstein (geniuses both) were obsessed with. I don’t care if I never read a Jack Kamen cuckolded husband story again, but the thought of not being able to pull out Master Race or a Kurtzman war comic from time to time, to remind myself how good comics can be, fills me with despair. Krigstein and Kurtzman alone make EC a line worth the respect and awe it generates in informed comics readers.
Obviously he’s right to question my blanket dismissal; there was good stuff being done by EC, comics that combined excellent art with good writing. Most of them were written by Kurtzman, who was indeed a genius and a cartoonist, not just a writer, which shows in every script he had his hand in. The same goes for Krigstein and “Master Race” is indeed a great short story.
Yet Master Race‘s genius lies in pictures, not the story itself. Without the artistic choices Krigstein made as a cartoonist, it would only be just another surprise twist ending story. A man goes to take the subway, sees a stranger he recognises from his days in a nazi death camp, he flashes back to his time there and at the end of it it’s revealed he was the camp commander, not a victim (du-duh-duuuh!) and he’s so agitated he flees away from his silent accuser, slips and falls down the platform in front of an oncoming train.
What gives that story its real punch is the art, Krigstein’s figures, his layout. Those narrowing panels at the top right, the cutting between the oncoming train coming closer and the protagonist slipping, the sheer visual overload of the metro moving past the platform contrasted with the static pose of the man in black, the way the man moves back from the light of the platform into the darkness, turning away from the scene, the way it all fits together on the page. It’s brilliantly done and it’s been rarely equalled.
That’s the genius of comics; this is more than a story being gussied up with pretty art, this is where a so-so story is transformed through the choices the cartoonist made to tell the story. Which is different from the vast majority of EC comics, even those drawn by people like Wally Wood or All Williamson or John Severin, where those sort of choices where not made.
I was a bit trollish in my earlier post (no, really? — Ed.) and I never meant all EC stories were bad, just that there is a case to be made that EC as a whole is overrated, partially because we’ve always been more focused on the visual than the textual as comics readers, partially because earlier generations of fans and comics historians have made so much of them, while we’ve missed the context in which they were published, all the other good comics that came out in the fifties from other publishers who didn’t have these sort of cheerleaders.
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