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The EC Archives
The EC Archives: The Vault of Horror Volume 3
The Vault of Horror Volume 3 now comes to you courtesy of Dark Horse Books! Featuring a foreword by Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson, this collection presents twenty-four terrifying tales illustrated by timeless talents - Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, and George Evans - with digitally remastered colors, based on the originals by Marie Severin. Collects The Vault of Horror issues #24-29 in full color.
216 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
25 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
About the author
Al Feldstein
368 books48 followersAlbert Bernard Feldstein was an American writer, editor, and artist, best known for his work at EC Comics and, from 1956 to 1985, as the editor of the satirical magazine Mad. After retiring from Mad, Feldstein concentrated on American paintings of Western wildlife.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 23, 2020
No matter what EC did they did it with style & professionalism. You never got a slapped together bunch of art or story. Always a joy to experience these comics from long ago. Recommended
October 26, 2023
While I abhor coloring that is unfaithful to the original color palette there are a handful of times when the modern renderings do look mighty impressive. Even so, it is like watching the Special Edition versions of the original Star Wars Trilogy in my mind. It will never be real, which is why I am dumping (have dumped by the time that you read this) all of my EC Archives on eBay. I will keep my beloved EC Annuals, which boast the original color palette coupled with the clarity of then-modern '90s printing. No line bleed or off register printing, which makes them superior to even the original issues in terms of print quality.
Coloring issues aside, these remain fantastic reads on the reread. I can't wait for the day when someone, anyone, produces EC Comics Archives in full color with the original color palette, including the original cover color palette.
As for the stories? It's EC. Top shelf, gold standard Pre-Code Horror.
Coloring issues aside, these remain fantastic reads on the reread. I can't wait for the day when someone, anyone, produces EC Comics Archives in full color with the original color palette, including the original cover color palette.
As for the stories? It's EC. Top shelf, gold standard Pre-Code Horror.
August 7, 2023
Long before the "Tales from the Crypt" movies, long before the HBO series "Tales from the Crypt" appeared on HBO in 1989, and long before the Amicus productions of "Tales (1972) and "Vault of Horror" (1973).....there were the comics.
And what comics....."Tales from the Crypt", "Vault of Horror", and "The Haunt of Fear" (yes, I know that EC Comics also published "Frontline Comics", "Weird Science", and "Weird Fantasy" among others...).
EC introduced us to the Cryptkeeper, the Old Witch, and the Vault Keeper.....macabre hosts who narrated stories of vampires and werewolves, murderers and adulterers, and ghouls, to name but a few. EC Comics served as morality plays - where the guilty were frequently punished....even if it was by a shambling corpse.
Pick up a copy of these reprints...you'll be glad you did.
Jeff McIntosh
And what comics....."Tales from the Crypt", "Vault of Horror", and "The Haunt of Fear" (yes, I know that EC Comics also published "Frontline Comics", "Weird Science", and "Weird Fantasy" among others...).
EC introduced us to the Cryptkeeper, the Old Witch, and the Vault Keeper.....macabre hosts who narrated stories of vampires and werewolves, murderers and adulterers, and ghouls, to name but a few. EC Comics served as morality plays - where the guilty were frequently punished....even if it was by a shambling corpse.
Pick up a copy of these reprints...you'll be glad you did.
Jeff McIntosh
November 3, 2018
Still enjoy the stories this far into to the series. But a pattern is beginning to emerge. They were already starting to run some of the same concepts over and again. You could play a drinking game: take one shot for every story you read that has zombies mysteriously returning from the grave to kill their malefactors at the end. You're going to get drunk unless you're a slow reader. Also, this is the first volume I have read that was published by Dark Horse. I really like the way they put it all together.
February 3, 2024
The Vault of Horror comics were not quite as good as some of the other lines such as Tales from the Crypt or the , although there were a lot of the same artists and writers.
January 22, 2025
La estupenda calidad media de los dibujantes compensa el declive de los guiones, algo repetitivos en su inclinación hacia lo morboso y (sin buscarlo acaso) aleccionador. Con todo, mucho más interesante que la mitad de lo impreso actualmente en la historieta estadounidense.
October 16, 2019
Beautifully drawn lovely creepy comics.
Currently reading
December 17, 2025A bloody undertaking 🌟
Impressed by a nightmare🌟
Seance
With all the trappings
The death wagon
Impressed by a nightmare🌟
Seance
With all the trappings
The death wagon
June 3, 2014
While Tales from the Crypt will likely remain the flagship title of EC's New Trend titles (especially in retrospect, with the HBO show and such cementing it), the dirty secret of the horrible trinity—Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, and Haunt of Fear—is that Vault and Haunt were willing to take a few risks that Tales wasn't. You just have to look at volumes like this one to see that a few narrative bumps help stir the pot.
From the gruesomely handled reveal of a rotted face being freed from its silvery grave ("Silver Threads the Mold")*, to a chilling subtle background detail of a single panel of a Bradbury adaptation ("Let's Play Poison"), to the Grim Fairy Tales (first one is contained here, as "A Grim Fairy Tale!"), to the comic relief of four men crushed by a steam-roller ("Graft in Concrete!"), to the over-the-top moment of a human body being cut to 3/16" slices ("Chips Are Down"): you can almost forgive the fact that these are largely the same A-wrongs-B-and-B-comes-back-from-grave plot over and over. Little things, like the resolution of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" which takes it from a long lingering story going very slowly to a spine tickling bit of gore, help you to nearly forget about the unsubtle continuous moralizing. You can even almost forgive the weird insistence of setting a couple of the stories in Haiti, and then given the natives either East African dress and/or having them use Swahili phrases (by appearances, either the writers simply used Haiti as a generalized African stand-in, or they started with Africa and had it changed for some reason).
Stand out stories include one about the revenge of a man killed in a train accident, though his hands nor feet nor head were found at the site [which is interesting in that it somewhat inverts the pattern of the traditional EC revenge story] ("We Ain't Got No Body"), and a story about a man with cancer who wishes to never die ("Strictly from Hunger"), a fine body-horror story with amazing pacing and details.
The downside is that a few of these stories obviously needed another page to get told, occasionally just jumping to the final act after a little bit of build up. The one with the steam-roller, for instance, feels like it is simply missing a page. Others are less abrupt, but still are lessened. Most are fine, at least. Some readers have also complained about Dark Horse's handling of the re-coloring. I personally don't mind. A few of the panels have some odd choices of contrast, but nothing that smashed me out of the story.
A generally very solid release, with maybe only about three or four truly throwaway pieces (heck, even the text-stories are occasionally readable, and it has my favorite: "The Joker"). Probably not a bad place to start if you haven't given the EC New Trend titles a try, yet.
* There is a potential feminist reading of this story, a reaction to one of EC's biggest jilted-lover cliches, in which a woman "wrongs" an artist by not falling for his heavy handed advances and sort-of unsolicited gifts. Though the story plays at painting her as a bitch for not bedding the artist for his good-guy routine, it is hard to imagine most modern readers not seeing that she is being constantly hit on by her boss and expected to bed a man who simply shows her attention, and it swings sympathy back around before the end. The comeuppance plot is back-seated to the tragedy, leading the reader to feeling less than empathic to the killer, despite him being the sort that would have been made the protagonist in other EC stories.
From the gruesomely handled reveal of a rotted face being freed from its silvery grave ("Silver Threads the Mold")*, to a chilling subtle background detail of a single panel of a Bradbury adaptation ("Let's Play Poison"), to the Grim Fairy Tales (first one is contained here, as "A Grim Fairy Tale!"), to the comic relief of four men crushed by a steam-roller ("Graft in Concrete!"), to the over-the-top moment of a human body being cut to 3/16" slices ("Chips Are Down"): you can almost forgive the fact that these are largely the same A-wrongs-B-and-B-comes-back-from-grave plot over and over. Little things, like the resolution of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" which takes it from a long lingering story going very slowly to a spine tickling bit of gore, help you to nearly forget about the unsubtle continuous moralizing. You can even almost forgive the weird insistence of setting a couple of the stories in Haiti, and then given the natives either East African dress and/or having them use Swahili phrases (by appearances, either the writers simply used Haiti as a generalized African stand-in, or they started with Africa and had it changed for some reason).
Stand out stories include one about the revenge of a man killed in a train accident, though his hands nor feet nor head were found at the site [which is interesting in that it somewhat inverts the pattern of the traditional EC revenge story] ("We Ain't Got No Body"), and a story about a man with cancer who wishes to never die ("Strictly from Hunger"), a fine body-horror story with amazing pacing and details.
The downside is that a few of these stories obviously needed another page to get told, occasionally just jumping to the final act after a little bit of build up. The one with the steam-roller, for instance, feels like it is simply missing a page. Others are less abrupt, but still are lessened. Most are fine, at least. Some readers have also complained about Dark Horse's handling of the re-coloring. I personally don't mind. A few of the panels have some odd choices of contrast, but nothing that smashed me out of the story.
A generally very solid release, with maybe only about three or four truly throwaway pieces (heck, even the text-stories are occasionally readable, and it has my favorite: "The Joker"). Probably not a bad place to start if you haven't given the EC New Trend titles a try, yet.
* There is a potential feminist reading of this story, a reaction to one of EC's biggest jilted-lover cliches, in which a woman "wrongs" an artist by not falling for his heavy handed advances and sort-of unsolicited gifts. Though the story plays at painting her as a bitch for not bedding the artist for his good-guy routine, it is hard to imagine most modern readers not seeing that she is being constantly hit on by her boss and expected to bed a man who simply shows her attention, and it swings sympathy back around before the end. The comeuppance plot is back-seated to the tragedy, leading the reader to feeling less than empathic to the killer, despite him being the sort that would have been made the protagonist in other EC stories.
July 24, 2023
Ghastly! Like a corpse rising through the earth, so do the horror titles of EC's New Trend march to their deadly end!
Graham Ingels, for sure, is the standout of this book, and how much you like it depends largely on how you feel about him. "With All the Trappings", "Hook, Line and Stinker", "We Ain't Got No Body", and especially "A Grim Fairy Tale" are all among his best work, and this volume is one of the most consistent two or three galleries of his (Haunt 2 and 5 being the others).
Jack Davis is just okay here. He was doing his best horror work ever in the volume 3's of the other two horror titles, so what we get here is sorta leftovers, but still well drawn (although I will say that his Bradbury adaptations leave me strangely cold). "Chips are Down" is his best one.
Johnny Craig rises above a couple times, with "Till Death" being one of his best zombie stories, and "Two of a Kind" serving a doomed romance with the distinctive visual pleasure of Craig rendering a female in a full dress on a full satin covered mattress. Some of his others are meh.
And then, apropos of nothing, a freakish shot of body horror from Georg Evans gives us juicy dive into a Cronenbergian nightmare that begins to look like something out of "Akira", if it were staged like "The Crazies". Whatever, it's nothing like that, but it's called "Strictly From Hunger" and it's the other standout.
This is maybe the low point of the Vault, yet it remains worthier than all but a scant row of horror books before or since. Feast, ye ghoul, on the delectable rotting guts of EC!
Graham Ingels, for sure, is the standout of this book, and how much you like it depends largely on how you feel about him. "With All the Trappings", "Hook, Line and Stinker", "We Ain't Got No Body", and especially "A Grim Fairy Tale" are all among his best work, and this volume is one of the most consistent two or three galleries of his (Haunt 2 and 5 being the others).
Jack Davis is just okay here. He was doing his best horror work ever in the volume 3's of the other two horror titles, so what we get here is sorta leftovers, but still well drawn (although I will say that his Bradbury adaptations leave me strangely cold). "Chips are Down" is his best one.
Johnny Craig rises above a couple times, with "Till Death" being one of his best zombie stories, and "Two of a Kind" serving a doomed romance with the distinctive visual pleasure of Craig rendering a female in a full dress on a full satin covered mattress. Some of his others are meh.
And then, apropos of nothing, a freakish shot of body horror from Georg Evans gives us juicy dive into a Cronenbergian nightmare that begins to look like something out of "Akira", if it were staged like "The Crazies". Whatever, it's nothing like that, but it's called "Strictly From Hunger" and it's the other standout.
This is maybe the low point of the Vault, yet it remains worthier than all but a scant row of horror books before or since. Feast, ye ghoul, on the delectable rotting guts of EC!
November 26, 2014
The stories themselves were mostly pretty good; but I'm not a fan of the characters (The Vault-Keeper, The Old Witch, and The Crypt-Keeper) that introduce each story. The introductions aren't so bad, but in most of the stories the 'host' also interrupts the story at least once...
March 25, 2024
I love that EC had the courage to just be a creepy and brutal as possible with these stories.
My favorite is the bad king and queen who let rats overrun their subjects and the subjects revolt and stuff a hungry rat in their moth and sew their mouths shut. WHO EVEN THINKS OF THAT?!
My favorite is the bad king and queen who let rats overrun their subjects and the subjects revolt and stuff a hungry rat in their moth and sew their mouths shut. WHO EVEN THINKS OF THAT?!
July 9, 2014
More great art, more terrific stories. EC lives up to its reputation, and Dark Horse does a fine job with the reproduction of these classics.
April 7, 2015
Another great, strong volume of the series. They were firing on all cylinders at this point, and Johnny Craig in particular stands out in these issues.
September 28, 2015
I love the Grim fairy tales in this volume but other than that the stories were again, quite repetitive. The Ray Bradbury adaptation was quite nice though.
May 16, 2016
OK collection. Not as good (writing or artwork) as some earlier issues. Did not finish. (DNF)
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews