Howard Nostrand brought artistry to non-E.C. horror comics
like Chamber of Chills and Witches Tales by consciously copying
E.C.’s greatest artist, Jack Davis. The approach was contrived, but it worked
because Nostrand’s stories were utterly bizarre in ways that E.C.’s often-formulaic
morality and thing-rises-from-the-grave tales rarely were. There is a child’s
rambling logic to things like “Zodiac”, in which a pair of astrologers conjure
zodiac icons to do their evil bidding, “Search for Evil”, in which a Crypt
Keeper lookalike brings a mad scientist’s “see no evil, hear no evil” monkey
statues to life to procure victims for his experiments, and “TerrorVision”, in
which a space octopus forces some dudes to build a TV. In pieces such as the corpse-narrated
“The Lonely” he approached E.C.’s yucky gruesomeness and did the same for its intelligence
and humor with the vampire-narrated “I, Vampire” (while also using vamps as
metaphors for prejudice half-a-century before “True Blood”).
And as much as artists Sid Jacobson and Craig Yoe underline
Davis’s influence in their introductory essays to the new anthology Howard Nostrand’s Nightmares, Nostrand
had an eye for detail that was all his own. Marvel at the intricacy of the
opening splash panel of “The Rift of the Maggis” before guffawing at the
gleeful nastiness of the story that follows. And when Nostrand out-and-out rips
off E.C., as he does when employing that comics’ trademark first-person pov device
or redrawing its most famous character in “Zodiac”, you at least have to admit
that the guy was smart enough to steal from the very best.
