What do you think?
Rate this book
The Complete Tales from the Crypt
The Complete run of the EC comic book TALES FROM THE CRYPT (including THE CRYPT OF TERROR) reprinted from the original artwork in glorious b&w (with full cover glossy cover inserts) along with all related ads, letters page, text pieces, etc. into five hardcover volumes stored in a handsome slipcover. The stories and stark black-and-white artwork by Johnny Craig, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Al Felstein, et. al. are superb. They date from 1950 to 1955.
960 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1979
3 people are currently reading
237 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 27, 2022
I decided to read a whole slew of my horror comic collections over the next few years, and figured that starting with the grand progenitor made perfect sense.
In the early 1980s, I saved up a bunch of birthday money and bought myself a present I'd had my eye on for some time - this, a beautiful slipcase box containing 5 hardcover volumes reproducing, in glorious black & white (with glossy color cover inserts), the entire run of EC Comics seminal horror comic, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, which ran from 1950 to 1955 (each volume covers one year's worth of the bi-monthly title). It's a gorgeous artifact (and extremely heavy) that looks great on the shelf. The b&w, while troublesome to some, is the perfect choice for me. As I mentioned in discussing DC Comics SHOWCASE reprints (Showcase Presents: The House of Mystery, Vol. 1, Showcase Presents: The House of Secrets, Vol. 1, Showcase Presents: The Witching Hour, Vol. 1) - I'd rather pay a lower price point and have a clear view of the original artwork than pay a higher price point and get recolored "exact" copies on white, glossy paper which makes the color too bright and doesn't actually recreate the way it looked on newsprint anyway. As a youth, I was originally exposed to the idea of the notorious EC horror comics in an essay in the 1979 OVERSTREET COMIC BOOK PRICE GUIDE and I have a distinct memory of my 12-year-old self examining each postage-stamp sized reprinted panel, looking for the horror that scared a nation and the United States Government...
TALES FROM THE CRYPT (along with sister titles THE HAUNT OF FEAR and THE VAULT OF HORROR) are famous, to those in the comic know, as the horror comics that went "too far" and thus earned the wrath of the U.S. Senate. Inspired by Dr. Fredric Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth, the Government investigated the causes of growing juvenile delinquency with an eye towards blaming comic books for their lurid, pervasive and corrosive "junk aesthetic" that was supposedly destroying America's culture and moral fiber. You can read more about the events here and here, but the eventual outcome was the cancellation of most of EC's line and the neutering of American comics in general with the creation of the industry's self-censoring Comics Code Authority ("the word 'zombie' shall be forbidden from all publications...") (as a side note - EC got its revenge by unleashing MAD MAGAZINE on American Youth instead - a title much more subversive than any horror comic had ever been and inspiration to generations of blooming satirists and wiseacres - viva revenge!).
Of course, to the general public TALES FROM THE CRYPT means the black-humored, extra-gory anthology TV show that ran on HBO, hosted by a cackling puppet. I was never a big fan of the HBO show (I much preferred the two British EC adaptation films from the 70s, and the full on homage to the EC vibe that was CREEPSHOW) but the HBO incarnation had its moments, I'll grant.
Now, if the EC horror comics had just been exploitative hackwork, executed (heh, heh, heh) without any skill, well, for starters they probably would never have been popular enough to have gotten anyone's attention in the first place. But EC put out quality product, whether horror, action, crime, war or science fiction comics. William M. Gaines and Al Feldstein were excellent editors who nurtured great talent and knew how to best deploy these artists in their line of titles. Yes, the horror stories eventually devolve into a formula and, yes, they eventually (arguably) do go "too far" smashing the boundaries of good taste - but I'm still of the solid belief that EC thought that the majority of their audience were adults, G.I.s who had come back from WWII with the comic book habit (comics were widely read at the battlefront - being cheap, disposable and more image-based than the pulps). But, yes, being that there was no distribution system for adult comics back then, no doubt children could buy them and often did. When the EC comics were good, they were very good indeed, as evidenced by their lasting cultural impact.
I figured I wouldn't review every issue so much as each book, noting things that jumped out at me. Volume 1 starts out with THE CRYPT OF TERROR #17 because, prior to that, the title was CRIME PATROL (before that it was INTERNATIONAL CRIME PATROL and before *that* it was INTERNATIONAL COMICS, whew!, and three issues later it would become TALES FROM THE CRYPT, proper - although with "Tales" emphasized larger than "Crypt" in the title). The Crypt Keeper had opened his doors in the previous few issues of CRIME PATROL, telling one horror story in the last slot behind mostly crime stories, but these got such a positive reaction that Gaines knew he was on to something. Sadly, those one-offs are not printed here.
A word about the three EC horror hosts, those lithe and loathable Ghoulunatics: The Crypt Keeper, The Vault Keeper and The Old Witch. William Gaines, as much as he was a fan of horror fiction (as we shall see in a moment) was equally a fan of the horror radio shows he grew up with (LIGHTS OUT, et. al.) and so the morbid, sardonic, wisecracking host of radio's INNER SANCTUM, Raymond, was reborn in the Ghoulunatics (well, technically, The Old Witch of HAUNT OF FEAR was probably an homage of Old Nancy, the titular host of THE WITCH'S TALE radio show - see The Witch's Tale: Stories of Gothic Horror from the Golden Age of Radio for some info on that interesting show). In truth, the Crypt and Vault Keepers were kind of interchangeable, personality wise (but don't tell them I said that, please! They may want to "axe" me questions about it later, heh heh heh). After some initial shuffling, all three hosts told stories in each other's mags - which makes perfect sense if you realize that it freed the editors up to be flexible and shuffle stories according to "dead"-lines (heh heh heh) (okay, I'll stop now, I promise).
What you're going to get in any random of TALES FROM THE CRYPT issue is excellent artwork and good (if predictable)-to-sometimes-very good stories (especially when compared to their competitors and what had come before). Revenge from the grave/revenants and conte cruels with O. Henry/ironic endings were the eventual fare of most of the CRYPT issues, but initially that formula wasn't set in stone and it never became *everything* that they did - there are monster stories and ghost stories and mad scientists and psychopaths as well, just for starters. Denied and betrayed loves (and cuckolded husbands) are a constant motivator for homicide ("All's fair in love and war" is heard quite a bit, usually from someone doomed to die in a page or so). There are still a few crime stories to burn off early on, and even an odd science-fiction tale or two ("Cave Man", with Johnny Craig artwork, is not horrifying in any way, but nicely poignant). The comics are reprinted here as they originally appeared, minus color, so you also get the letter's page, a single page short fiction tale (what we would nowadays call "flash" fiction - these are almost uniformly forgettable/awful) and one page of ads (Gaines was always proud that EC took very little ads - later, MAD MAGAZINE had none for decades because, as he pointed out, how could you be free to satirize everything, then?). The letters pages, in particular, are fascinating cultural documents, illustrating not only how the "house tone" was created and maintained, but what the audience was like (one can see the growth of the "Monster Kid" generation beginning, primed for the "Shock Theater" Universal Horror Films package just a few years away, and the invention of the television Horror Host). Plus, the editor's answers to requests for scary reading lists give us some idea what Gaines was reading in 1950.
That last point allows for this tidbit - Gaines had to fill 3 magazine every 2 months with horror stories, and so he read widely and "borrowed" (or "used as springboards") the plots from various short stories for scripts (as well as being inspired by the Universal horror films of the 1930s and 1940s), usually stripping out all the extraneous plot details (you know, the actual "story") and just using the gimmick. Thanks to my reading of Jan Harold Brunvand texts, I also recognize urban legends that were extant at the time told in two stories - "House Of Horror" and "Death Suited Him!" - ("the fraternity prank" and "the corpse's suit", although the former, oddly, keeps the framing sequence placing the story in the past, but never uses it as the actual urban legend does - for a jump scare. Not enough pages, I guess). More on this below.
It's amazing to see the variety of skilled artwork on offer here. Johnny Craig has a wonderful, clean line and draws sexy woman particularly well (he seems to get a lot of the crime tales, as his work is not very moody, like Ingels, or grotty, like Jack Davis). His "Curse of the Full Moon" in the first issue here is an exception (although interestingly, the werewolf is only seen in flashbacks - albeit, in a cinch-belt trench-coat - and the ending of that tale implies much more of a "psychopath" angle). Al Feldstein, along with editor duties, did some wondrous artwork and covers. His art style has this great "European woodcut" quality and makes me think he must have been an influence on Charles Burns of Black Hole fame. "Ghastly" Graham Ingels does the moody, Gothic stories and his shadowy style is superbly atmospheric (I see some influence on Bernie Wrightson and maybe even Gene Colan there). Daniel Clowes' early work in his premier LLOYD LLEWELLYN title (The Manly World of Lloyd Llewellyn) is heavily influenced by Harvey Kurtzman's work, which can be seen here in "House of Horror".
Volume One: Presenting the first year of CRYPT's production - the first volume offers up many interesting items. As I said, some stories still had to be burned off (crime/murder mysteries and the odd sci-fi tale), but early on the book seems dedicated to offering a variety of styles of horror. The very first story, "Death Must Come!" (which I'm told is a lift of the plot from the movie THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET - I've never seen the film), despite the great Feldstein art, is a real clunker, with a medical twist ending that can't be shown (because if we were shown it, we wouldn't even know what we were looking at) so it has to be explained to us by the Crypt Keeper in his sign off.
Other adapted classics in this volume include "The Maestro's Hand" (issue 18) which is W.F. Harvey's "The Beast with Five Fingers" (kind of), "The Thing from the Sea" (issue 20) which is F. Marion Crawford's "The Upper Berth" (totally), "Impending Doom!" (issue 20) which is W.F. Harvey's "August Heat" (kind of), "Rx Death" (issue 20) - which is Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder" (or the basic plot of it, with all the detail stripped out).
The cover of Issue #21 (illustrating the story "A Shocking Way To Die!") is a hilariously masterful example of the "entire story summed up in a cover" concept: a newspaper gives you the entire set-up, including photos of the characters for reference.
Issue 22's "The Thing From The Grave!" is kind of the EC revenant ur-text - someone is killed and the body rises from the grave to exact revenge (in this case, dragging the murderer back into the grave with him). The bones (heh heh heh) of this story would be told another thousand times or so in all the EC horror titles. That OVERSTREET PRICE GUIDE article I mentioned earlier really made quite an impression on me at 12 years old and I specifically remember the author (I don't have it at hand -- or don't have it all, perhaps) making an argument that the "revenge from the dead" motif in the EC horror comics could be considered the last blossoming of the Romantic world view (in the literary sense), as it implies that "murder will out" and the guilty will be punished, even if it takes a rotting corpse (instead of God or Justice) dragged from the grave to exact it!
Interestingly, in this first year there's still a hesitancy to be *too* gruesome. Issue #21's "Terror Ride!" (artwork by Wally Wood) - which reminds me strongly of an old INNER SANCTUM or LIGHTS OUT episode I can't place, although the basic plot was also used for an episode ("Funhouse") of the early 80's OTR radio horror series DARKNESS - has a couple trapped by a madman in a carnival dark ride during the off-season (he's incorporated his victims into the ride's spook tableaux). While these sights, we are assured by the couple's reactions, are horrifying and grotesque, we never actually *see* them, just hints. This would change as 1952 really got underway...
Volume Two: Covering the second year of TFTC's existence, this volume sees the magazine's popularity growing in leaps and bounds (and EC's line of titles expanding) even as Gaines and Feldstein try out a few new artists: Jack Kamen, Jack Davis & Joe Orlando would become mainstays of the horror titles (Wally Wood & George Roussos would find a better fit in EC's other mags).
The "revenge of the murdered from beyond the grave" (think the "Father's Day" segment from CREEPSHOW - which is a nice cinematic homage to EC) has already become a standard go-to to fill a story slot (8 variants in this volume alone - really, it comes down to who the artist on the story is and how well they can depict a rotting corpse that walks - for example, Graham Ingels is great on the Gothic, atmospheric stuff but for some reason he gives us no clear "money shot" of the sea-rotted revenant in "Political Pull!"), although it's still mostly rotting corpses dragging people to their death and hasn't fully evolved into the "ironic comeuppance" yet (although a man is turned into a candle by wax figures for murdering his wife in "The Works... In Wax!", a superior Graham Ingels story in which the main character looks like Vincent Price 10 years before he would become famous in such roles). Reading these, I began to wonder if you could make an argument that DC Comic's THE SPECTRE, especially as written by Michael Fleisher (see Showcase Presents: The Spectre, Vol. 1) can be seen as a superhero comic influenced by EC's ironic death stories, what with turning criminals into glass and then shattering them, etc. etc.?
There are lots of other stories of all types: "Reflection of Death!" (with excellent Feldstein art) is a fun little experiment (adapted as one of the segments of the 1972 British Amicus TALES FROM THE CRYPT film and also shamelessly ripped off in story reprinted in the shlock horror comic collection Zombie Factory: 27 Tales Of Bizarre Comix Madness From Beyond The Tomb) in which the survivor of a late night car crash wakes up on the roadside (the story is told completely from his POV) and wanders home, wondering why everyone flees in terror from him.
Voodoo shows up in 3 stories: "Voodoo Death" with art by Johnny Craig (a strangely extended tale of a voodoo curse with an oddly effective, atypical ending), "Drawn & Quartered" with great Jack Davis art (a painter uses voodoo magic to exact revenge until chance rubs him out of the picture - this was adapted in the Amicus VAULT OF HORROR movie from 1973 with "Dr. Who" himself, Tom Baker, in the lead role) and the bizarre "A-Corny Story" (an arrogant young man is cursed to age backwards).
Another odd experiment is "Return" (Kamen really gets to show off his sexy good girl art here) which could almost have run in a romance comic... if you ignored the implication at the climax that the wife has been impregnated by the ghost of her newlywed husband making one last visit to prove his love! (CONTINUED IN FIRST COMMENT)
In the early 1980s, I saved up a bunch of birthday money and bought myself a present I'd had my eye on for some time - this, a beautiful slipcase box containing 5 hardcover volumes reproducing, in glorious black & white (with glossy color cover inserts), the entire run of EC Comics seminal horror comic, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, which ran from 1950 to 1955 (each volume covers one year's worth of the bi-monthly title). It's a gorgeous artifact (and extremely heavy) that looks great on the shelf. The b&w, while troublesome to some, is the perfect choice for me. As I mentioned in discussing DC Comics SHOWCASE reprints (Showcase Presents: The House of Mystery, Vol. 1, Showcase Presents: The House of Secrets, Vol. 1, Showcase Presents: The Witching Hour, Vol. 1) - I'd rather pay a lower price point and have a clear view of the original artwork than pay a higher price point and get recolored "exact" copies on white, glossy paper which makes the color too bright and doesn't actually recreate the way it looked on newsprint anyway. As a youth, I was originally exposed to the idea of the notorious EC horror comics in an essay in the 1979 OVERSTREET COMIC BOOK PRICE GUIDE and I have a distinct memory of my 12-year-old self examining each postage-stamp sized reprinted panel, looking for the horror that scared a nation and the United States Government...
TALES FROM THE CRYPT (along with sister titles THE HAUNT OF FEAR and THE VAULT OF HORROR) are famous, to those in the comic know, as the horror comics that went "too far" and thus earned the wrath of the U.S. Senate. Inspired by Dr. Fredric Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth, the Government investigated the causes of growing juvenile delinquency with an eye towards blaming comic books for their lurid, pervasive and corrosive "junk aesthetic" that was supposedly destroying America's culture and moral fiber. You can read more about the events here and here, but the eventual outcome was the cancellation of most of EC's line and the neutering of American comics in general with the creation of the industry's self-censoring Comics Code Authority ("the word 'zombie' shall be forbidden from all publications...") (as a side note - EC got its revenge by unleashing MAD MAGAZINE on American Youth instead - a title much more subversive than any horror comic had ever been and inspiration to generations of blooming satirists and wiseacres - viva revenge!).
Of course, to the general public TALES FROM THE CRYPT means the black-humored, extra-gory anthology TV show that ran on HBO, hosted by a cackling puppet. I was never a big fan of the HBO show (I much preferred the two British EC adaptation films from the 70s, and the full on homage to the EC vibe that was CREEPSHOW) but the HBO incarnation had its moments, I'll grant.
Now, if the EC horror comics had just been exploitative hackwork, executed (heh, heh, heh) without any skill, well, for starters they probably would never have been popular enough to have gotten anyone's attention in the first place. But EC put out quality product, whether horror, action, crime, war or science fiction comics. William M. Gaines and Al Feldstein were excellent editors who nurtured great talent and knew how to best deploy these artists in their line of titles. Yes, the horror stories eventually devolve into a formula and, yes, they eventually (arguably) do go "too far" smashing the boundaries of good taste - but I'm still of the solid belief that EC thought that the majority of their audience were adults, G.I.s who had come back from WWII with the comic book habit (comics were widely read at the battlefront - being cheap, disposable and more image-based than the pulps). But, yes, being that there was no distribution system for adult comics back then, no doubt children could buy them and often did. When the EC comics were good, they were very good indeed, as evidenced by their lasting cultural impact.
I figured I wouldn't review every issue so much as each book, noting things that jumped out at me. Volume 1 starts out with THE CRYPT OF TERROR #17 because, prior to that, the title was CRIME PATROL (before that it was INTERNATIONAL CRIME PATROL and before *that* it was INTERNATIONAL COMICS, whew!, and three issues later it would become TALES FROM THE CRYPT, proper - although with "Tales" emphasized larger than "Crypt" in the title). The Crypt Keeper had opened his doors in the previous few issues of CRIME PATROL, telling one horror story in the last slot behind mostly crime stories, but these got such a positive reaction that Gaines knew he was on to something. Sadly, those one-offs are not printed here.
A word about the three EC horror hosts, those lithe and loathable Ghoulunatics: The Crypt Keeper, The Vault Keeper and The Old Witch. William Gaines, as much as he was a fan of horror fiction (as we shall see in a moment) was equally a fan of the horror radio shows he grew up with (LIGHTS OUT, et. al.) and so the morbid, sardonic, wisecracking host of radio's INNER SANCTUM, Raymond, was reborn in the Ghoulunatics (well, technically, The Old Witch of HAUNT OF FEAR was probably an homage of Old Nancy, the titular host of THE WITCH'S TALE radio show - see The Witch's Tale: Stories of Gothic Horror from the Golden Age of Radio for some info on that interesting show). In truth, the Crypt and Vault Keepers were kind of interchangeable, personality wise (but don't tell them I said that, please! They may want to "axe" me questions about it later, heh heh heh). After some initial shuffling, all three hosts told stories in each other's mags - which makes perfect sense if you realize that it freed the editors up to be flexible and shuffle stories according to "dead"-lines (heh heh heh) (okay, I'll stop now, I promise).
What you're going to get in any random of TALES FROM THE CRYPT issue is excellent artwork and good (if predictable)-to-sometimes-very good stories (especially when compared to their competitors and what had come before). Revenge from the grave/revenants and conte cruels with O. Henry/ironic endings were the eventual fare of most of the CRYPT issues, but initially that formula wasn't set in stone and it never became *everything* that they did - there are monster stories and ghost stories and mad scientists and psychopaths as well, just for starters. Denied and betrayed loves (and cuckolded husbands) are a constant motivator for homicide ("All's fair in love and war" is heard quite a bit, usually from someone doomed to die in a page or so). There are still a few crime stories to burn off early on, and even an odd science-fiction tale or two ("Cave Man", with Johnny Craig artwork, is not horrifying in any way, but nicely poignant). The comics are reprinted here as they originally appeared, minus color, so you also get the letter's page, a single page short fiction tale (what we would nowadays call "flash" fiction - these are almost uniformly forgettable/awful) and one page of ads (Gaines was always proud that EC took very little ads - later, MAD MAGAZINE had none for decades because, as he pointed out, how could you be free to satirize everything, then?). The letters pages, in particular, are fascinating cultural documents, illustrating not only how the "house tone" was created and maintained, but what the audience was like (one can see the growth of the "Monster Kid" generation beginning, primed for the "Shock Theater" Universal Horror Films package just a few years away, and the invention of the television Horror Host). Plus, the editor's answers to requests for scary reading lists give us some idea what Gaines was reading in 1950.
That last point allows for this tidbit - Gaines had to fill 3 magazine every 2 months with horror stories, and so he read widely and "borrowed" (or "used as springboards") the plots from various short stories for scripts (as well as being inspired by the Universal horror films of the 1930s and 1940s), usually stripping out all the extraneous plot details (you know, the actual "story") and just using the gimmick. Thanks to my reading of Jan Harold Brunvand texts, I also recognize urban legends that were extant at the time told in two stories - "House Of Horror" and "Death Suited Him!" - ("the fraternity prank" and "the corpse's suit", although the former, oddly, keeps the framing sequence placing the story in the past, but never uses it as the actual urban legend does - for a jump scare. Not enough pages, I guess). More on this below.
It's amazing to see the variety of skilled artwork on offer here. Johnny Craig has a wonderful, clean line and draws sexy woman particularly well (he seems to get a lot of the crime tales, as his work is not very moody, like Ingels, or grotty, like Jack Davis). His "Curse of the Full Moon" in the first issue here is an exception (although interestingly, the werewolf is only seen in flashbacks - albeit, in a cinch-belt trench-coat - and the ending of that tale implies much more of a "psychopath" angle). Al Feldstein, along with editor duties, did some wondrous artwork and covers. His art style has this great "European woodcut" quality and makes me think he must have been an influence on Charles Burns of Black Hole fame. "Ghastly" Graham Ingels does the moody, Gothic stories and his shadowy style is superbly atmospheric (I see some influence on Bernie Wrightson and maybe even Gene Colan there). Daniel Clowes' early work in his premier LLOYD LLEWELLYN title (The Manly World of Lloyd Llewellyn) is heavily influenced by Harvey Kurtzman's work, which can be seen here in "House of Horror".
Volume One: Presenting the first year of CRYPT's production - the first volume offers up many interesting items. As I said, some stories still had to be burned off (crime/murder mysteries and the odd sci-fi tale), but early on the book seems dedicated to offering a variety of styles of horror. The very first story, "Death Must Come!" (which I'm told is a lift of the plot from the movie THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET - I've never seen the film), despite the great Feldstein art, is a real clunker, with a medical twist ending that can't be shown (because if we were shown it, we wouldn't even know what we were looking at) so it has to be explained to us by the Crypt Keeper in his sign off.
Other adapted classics in this volume include "The Maestro's Hand" (issue 18) which is W.F. Harvey's "The Beast with Five Fingers" (kind of), "The Thing from the Sea" (issue 20) which is F. Marion Crawford's "The Upper Berth" (totally), "Impending Doom!" (issue 20) which is W.F. Harvey's "August Heat" (kind of), "Rx Death" (issue 20) - which is Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder" (or the basic plot of it, with all the detail stripped out).
The cover of Issue #21 (illustrating the story "A Shocking Way To Die!") is a hilariously masterful example of the "entire story summed up in a cover" concept: a newspaper gives you the entire set-up, including photos of the characters for reference.
Issue 22's "The Thing From The Grave!" is kind of the EC revenant ur-text - someone is killed and the body rises from the grave to exact revenge (in this case, dragging the murderer back into the grave with him). The bones (heh heh heh) of this story would be told another thousand times or so in all the EC horror titles. That OVERSTREET PRICE GUIDE article I mentioned earlier really made quite an impression on me at 12 years old and I specifically remember the author (I don't have it at hand -- or don't have it all, perhaps) making an argument that the "revenge from the dead" motif in the EC horror comics could be considered the last blossoming of the Romantic world view (in the literary sense), as it implies that "murder will out" and the guilty will be punished, even if it takes a rotting corpse (instead of God or Justice) dragged from the grave to exact it!
Interestingly, in this first year there's still a hesitancy to be *too* gruesome. Issue #21's "Terror Ride!" (artwork by Wally Wood) - which reminds me strongly of an old INNER SANCTUM or LIGHTS OUT episode I can't place, although the basic plot was also used for an episode ("Funhouse") of the early 80's OTR radio horror series DARKNESS - has a couple trapped by a madman in a carnival dark ride during the off-season (he's incorporated his victims into the ride's spook tableaux). While these sights, we are assured by the couple's reactions, are horrifying and grotesque, we never actually *see* them, just hints. This would change as 1952 really got underway...
Volume Two: Covering the second year of TFTC's existence, this volume sees the magazine's popularity growing in leaps and bounds (and EC's line of titles expanding) even as Gaines and Feldstein try out a few new artists: Jack Kamen, Jack Davis & Joe Orlando would become mainstays of the horror titles (Wally Wood & George Roussos would find a better fit in EC's other mags).
The "revenge of the murdered from beyond the grave" (think the "Father's Day" segment from CREEPSHOW - which is a nice cinematic homage to EC) has already become a standard go-to to fill a story slot (8 variants in this volume alone - really, it comes down to who the artist on the story is and how well they can depict a rotting corpse that walks - for example, Graham Ingels is great on the Gothic, atmospheric stuff but for some reason he gives us no clear "money shot" of the sea-rotted revenant in "Political Pull!"), although it's still mostly rotting corpses dragging people to their death and hasn't fully evolved into the "ironic comeuppance" yet (although a man is turned into a candle by wax figures for murdering his wife in "The Works... In Wax!", a superior Graham Ingels story in which the main character looks like Vincent Price 10 years before he would become famous in such roles). Reading these, I began to wonder if you could make an argument that DC Comic's THE SPECTRE, especially as written by Michael Fleisher (see Showcase Presents: The Spectre, Vol. 1) can be seen as a superhero comic influenced by EC's ironic death stories, what with turning criminals into glass and then shattering them, etc. etc.?
There are lots of other stories of all types: "Reflection of Death!" (with excellent Feldstein art) is a fun little experiment (adapted as one of the segments of the 1972 British Amicus TALES FROM THE CRYPT film and also shamelessly ripped off in story reprinted in the shlock horror comic collection Zombie Factory: 27 Tales Of Bizarre Comix Madness From Beyond The Tomb) in which the survivor of a late night car crash wakes up on the roadside (the story is told completely from his POV) and wanders home, wondering why everyone flees in terror from him.
Voodoo shows up in 3 stories: "Voodoo Death" with art by Johnny Craig (a strangely extended tale of a voodoo curse with an oddly effective, atypical ending), "Drawn & Quartered" with great Jack Davis art (a painter uses voodoo magic to exact revenge until chance rubs him out of the picture - this was adapted in the Amicus VAULT OF HORROR movie from 1973 with "Dr. Who" himself, Tom Baker, in the lead role) and the bizarre "A-Corny Story" (an arrogant young man is cursed to age backwards).
Another odd experiment is "Return" (Kamen really gets to show off his sexy good girl art here) which could almost have run in a romance comic... if you ignored the implication at the climax that the wife has been impregnated by the ghost of her newlywed husband making one last visit to prove his love! (CONTINUED IN FIRST COMMENT)
March 16, 2017
A few years back I found the HBO show and immediately fell in love. The snarky and (literally) rotten Crypt Keeper introducing and concluding every episode, the gruesome twists of the stories, the unashamedly uncensored content, all the familiar names that were involved either behind or in front of the camera etc. How about an episode directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Friedkin, or John Frankenheimer? Or seeing Judd Nelson giving a dubious steak recipe to Christopher Reeve (co-starring who else but Meat Loaf)? Or watching how Roger Daltrey plots to kill Steve Buscemi (this particular episode has an amazing body horror moment, by the way)? There are so many great and surreal episodes, though, that I've already forgotten half of them and it would be exhausting to list all of them here. Fortunately the whole show is available in Youtube, so go check it out!
Anyway, when I familiarized myself with comics and 1950s horror comics in particular, I started to contemplate whether I should see if the comic version would be as fun as the show. In a lot of ways it is. People seem to resort to killing pretty easily to get rid of unwanted individuals, and obviously that creates all kinds of situations, where often the bad guys end up dying in various gruesome ways.
There are many similar elements, like the Crypt Keeper (according to the show, the lovely spawn of a two-faced sideshow freak and a 4000-year-old mummy) referring to the readers as "kiddies", the lame but fun puns (a dead guy who narrates the tale is a "ghost writer", a woman who rots at the end "would have been a rotten actress anyway" etc.), and the twists at the end of the stories. The different point of views work great in a comic format, for example in the story where we see everything from a man's point of view who seems to scare everyone he comes to contact with, and at the end we see why.
The differences in the comic aren't negative, though. The voice-overs of the hosts wouldn't work in the show, but here they move the story smoothly forward, giving an atmosphere of a bedtime story of sorts. There are gruesome moments but the violence usually happens off stage. We see the minced meat, but not the actual grinding. It adds more drama and tension when the reader waits for the revelation. The only things I didn't care for, though, were the Crypt Keeper's appearance (an old man looking like an aged rocker instead of a skeletal corpse) and the guest hosts. Those are just minor quibbles, though, so I can get over them.
The stories might occasionally be a little clichéd and the 1950s mindset is guaranteed to cause some giggles, but that's part of the fun. Tales from the Crypt doesn't quite fall to the "so bad that it's good" category, because this is a genuinely good series, but there is a quirky tone throughout that can only be found from the older horror comics. The formula of each tale (introduction, story begins, story ends with a twist, conclusion) might be boring after a while, but these are so addictive that once you get absorbed in the world, you can't get enough. The anthology format also allows you to have a bit of a nibble every now and then, if you don't feel like reading that much at one time. The artwork is mostly great as well, especially when the colouring is spot on.
Anyway, when I familiarized myself with comics and 1950s horror comics in particular, I started to contemplate whether I should see if the comic version would be as fun as the show. In a lot of ways it is. People seem to resort to killing pretty easily to get rid of unwanted individuals, and obviously that creates all kinds of situations, where often the bad guys end up dying in various gruesome ways.
There are many similar elements, like the Crypt Keeper (according to the show, the lovely spawn of a two-faced sideshow freak and a 4000-year-old mummy) referring to the readers as "kiddies", the lame but fun puns (a dead guy who narrates the tale is a "ghost writer", a woman who rots at the end "would have been a rotten actress anyway" etc.), and the twists at the end of the stories. The different point of views work great in a comic format, for example in the story where we see everything from a man's point of view who seems to scare everyone he comes to contact with, and at the end we see why.
The differences in the comic aren't negative, though. The voice-overs of the hosts wouldn't work in the show, but here they move the story smoothly forward, giving an atmosphere of a bedtime story of sorts. There are gruesome moments but the violence usually happens off stage. We see the minced meat, but not the actual grinding. It adds more drama and tension when the reader waits for the revelation. The only things I didn't care for, though, were the Crypt Keeper's appearance (an old man looking like an aged rocker instead of a skeletal corpse) and the guest hosts. Those are just minor quibbles, though, so I can get over them.
The stories might occasionally be a little clichéd and the 1950s mindset is guaranteed to cause some giggles, but that's part of the fun. Tales from the Crypt doesn't quite fall to the "so bad that it's good" category, because this is a genuinely good series, but there is a quirky tone throughout that can only be found from the older horror comics. The formula of each tale (introduction, story begins, story ends with a twist, conclusion) might be boring after a while, but these are so addictive that once you get absorbed in the world, you can't get enough. The anthology format also allows you to have a bit of a nibble every now and then, if you don't feel like reading that much at one time. The artwork is mostly great as well, especially when the colouring is spot on.
September 20, 2025
4 stars might be a little high (due to repetitive nature of storylines) but a fun read!
April 7, 2015
I read all of the EC horror comics (Tales From the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror) in order of publication over a course of about two years. It took a while because it's about 90 issues, and I'm not always in the mood for comics. However, these were consistently great fun, generally well-written and the art was great to superb. "Ghastly" Graham Ingels being my favorite artist here.
I'm such a sucker for this kind of stuff, but I never had access to it until recently. And I never read a SINGLE comic book until I was about 32 (around 2011). When I was a kid comic books were just super hero sagas, and those never interested me. Still don't, no offense.
I typed out a quick review and plot summary for each issue (I can't read anything without making some kind of notes) but of course that's far more than I can post here. I mostly did it so I could later search for stories I recalled, perhaps wanting to revisit.
I will say that these old stories aren't perfect. The characters are pretty cardboard usually, motivated by basic desires that make them pretty predictable overall.
What was most disappointing to me, especially in later issues, were stories where the first 6 pages were a slow build-up of inter-personal drama, followed by one page with actual horror in it that was in the form of a gory, ironic/revenge twist ending. I prefer stories that start and stay in a creepy atmosphere. Marvel's horror comics (Astonishing, Marvel Tales, Uncanny Tales, etc) aren't as good as EC's for example, but they're more likely to spend time in graveyards, old dark mansions, etc. In other words, you get a macabre feel consistently throughout the whole story, here (particularly in later issues) that's not always the case.
I've got a lot of good memories of reading these on hot summer nights on the front porch, with the crickets chirping... I could even see re-reading these eventually, but there's so much other stuff I haven't even read once!
I'm such a sucker for this kind of stuff, but I never had access to it until recently. And I never read a SINGLE comic book until I was about 32 (around 2011). When I was a kid comic books were just super hero sagas, and those never interested me. Still don't, no offense.
I typed out a quick review and plot summary for each issue (I can't read anything without making some kind of notes) but of course that's far more than I can post here. I mostly did it so I could later search for stories I recalled, perhaps wanting to revisit.
I will say that these old stories aren't perfect. The characters are pretty cardboard usually, motivated by basic desires that make them pretty predictable overall.
What was most disappointing to me, especially in later issues, were stories where the first 6 pages were a slow build-up of inter-personal drama, followed by one page with actual horror in it that was in the form of a gory, ironic/revenge twist ending. I prefer stories that start and stay in a creepy atmosphere. Marvel's horror comics (Astonishing, Marvel Tales, Uncanny Tales, etc) aren't as good as EC's for example, but they're more likely to spend time in graveyards, old dark mansions, etc. In other words, you get a macabre feel consistently throughout the whole story, here (particularly in later issues) that's not always the case.
I've got a lot of good memories of reading these on hot summer nights on the front porch, with the crickets chirping... I could even see re-reading these eventually, but there's so much other stuff I haven't even read once!
May 15, 2013
An invaluable piece of American comic book history. My only complaint is that the pages aren't in their original color, but it's something that I can definitely live with in order to be able to read sixty year old comics.
June 4, 2018
Awesome collection including all 27 issues of Tales From The Crypt and the 3 issues of Crypt of Terror comics that spawned several movies and a seven year TV series. Spine tingling stories, some by Ray Bradbury, that deal with all aspects of horror from vampires and werewolves to ghouls and zombies, all illustrated by the talented Al Feldstein, Johnny Craig, Graham "Ghastly" Ingels, and others. These horror comic stories still stand strong after all these years. I highly recommend this iconic collection.
January 10, 2018
The plot twists are really predictable most of the times and when they are not, they are usually too cringy, as if the creator is just trying to find a twist that nobody would expect and ends up with something outrageously silly. Maybe it was something during the 50s but it feels too outdated today.
June 3, 2020
I bought this on ebay. NEVER BUY FROM A HOME THAT HAS SMOKERS!!! I read all of them, but could not get the tobacco smell out of the book or my home for two weeks. The stories are great, the drawings are clear and I really enjoyed the book, but it sits in my garage since it stinks so much.
Read
June 18, 2013good
May 17, 2016
One of the best of its kind!!
temporarily-shelved
November 16, 2021Read Book 1, 2
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews