Late last year when I made my wish list for 2015 here on
Psychobabble, the first and most far-fetched entry on the list was for IDW to
take “The E.C. Archives” out of Dark Horse’s hands and begin reprinting
authentically colored and textured collections of Tales from the Crypt, The
Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of
Horror. This was far-fetched because Dark Horse clearly had no plans of
relinquishing such a valuable catalog and already had additional editions of
“The E.C. Archives” scheduled for the coming year. Sigh.
That being said, IDW’s Wally
Wood’s E.C. Stories Artisan Edition ain’t a bad consolation prize, even
though it is merely a soft-cover edition of a book already published back in
2012 and it lacks any of Wood’s horror stories. However, as far as texture and
authenticity go, it can’t be beat. This collection of Wood’s sci-fi, war, and
two-fisted tales is very different from those garishly colorful, completely
digitized books Dark Horse has been trotting out. The Artisan Edition series presents classic comics in the raw, before they
were colored or cleared of pencil notes and pasted-in edits. This kind of book
is definitely geared toward a very particular reader with an interest in the
process before the final product. Fortunately, Wood’s intricate, lovingly
rendered artwork translates quite well to black and white. The pieces in this
book demand to be studied deeply to be fully absorbed. It’s the kind of book
that rewards repeat perusals.
It would have been nice if editor Scott Dunbier had tossed
in a horror story or two. Wood was never super prolific in E.C.’s horror
titles, though he did create at least one true classic, “Judy, You’re Not
Yourself Today” for Crypt (he also
wrote one of the entire E.C. line’s very best stories, “Drawn and Quartered!”;
Jack Davis delivered the art). Perhaps the availability of original artwork was
a reason Wood’s horror work got shut out.
Still, there is certainly a lot of horror in Wood’s stories,
which often veer toward the apocalyptic and depressing. A little boy gets his
wish to have his workaholic astronaut dad return home for good in the
melodramatic yet devastating “Home to Stay”. “Down to Earth” is a litany of
airline disasters. In the poetic “My World”, Wood lays out his cynical world
view explicitly with a dash of hope only evident in “The Children”, the only
one of his stories in which love trounces cynicism. “Project... Survival!” is
inadvertently scary due to its disconcerting distrust of science in all forms,
though the fact that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings preceded these stories by
just a few years makes that extreme stance somewhat more understandable. Wood powerfully
illustrates an account of that particular historical horror story in a devastating
piece penned by Harvey Kurtzman, though the fact that Wood didn’t write most of
the war and thriller stories means they’re generally less grim and pulpier than
the sci-fi ones.
