EC Comics and The Horror Boom
Horror comics briefly flourished from this point until the industry's self-imposed censorship board, the Comics Code Authority, was instituted in late 1954.
The most influential and enduring horror-comics anthologies of this period, beginning 1950, were the 91 issues of EC Comics' three series: The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror and Crypt of Terror, renamed Tales from the Crypt. In 1947, publisher William Gaines had inherited what was then Educational Comics upon the death of his father, Maxwell Gaines. Three years later, Gaines and editor Al Feldstein introduced horror in two of the company's crime comics to test the waters. Finding them successful, the publisher quickly turned them and a Western series into EC's triumvirate of horror. Additionally, the superhero comic Moon Girl, which had become the romance comic A Moon ... a Girl ... A Romance, became the primarily science fiction anthology Weird Fantasy. For the next four years, sardonic horror hosts the Old Witch, the Vault Keeper and the Crypt Keeper introduced stories drawn by such top artists and soon-to-be-famous newcomers as Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels (who signed his work "Ghastly"), Jack Kamen, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, and Wally Wood. Feldstein did most of the early scripting, writing a story a day with twist endings and poetic justice taken to absurd extremes.
EC's success immediately spawned a host of imitators, such as Ziff-Davis' and P.L. Publishing's Weird Adventures, St. John Publications' Weird Horrors, Key Publications' Weird Chills, Weird Mysteries and Weird Tales of the Future, Comic Media's Weird Terror, Ziff-Davis' Weird Thrillers, Atlas Comics' Adventures into Weird Worlds, and Star Publications' Ghostly Weird Stories. Others included Quality Comics' Web of Evil, Ace Comics' Web of Mystery, Premier Magazines' Horror from the Tomb Harvey Comics' Tomb of Terror and Witches Tales, Avon Comics', Witchcraft, Ajax-Farrell Publications' Fantastic Fears, Fawcett Comics' Worlds of Fear, Charlton Comics' The Thing, and a slew from Atlas Comics, including Adventures into Terror, Menace, Journey into Mystery, and Strange Tales.
From 1949 through comics cover-dated March 1955, Atlas Comics]released 399 issues of 18 horror titles, AGC released 123 issues of five horror titles, and Ace Comics, 98 issues of five titles — each more than EC's output.
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Famous quotes containing the words horror and/or boom:
“One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses and oppresses.”
—Robin Wood (b. 1931)
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)