EC Additions

After the comic book red-scare frenzy of the middle 1950s, the Comics Code Authority was put in place and this pulled the teeth from a large portion of creativity in the comics industry. The Code was promoted most loudly and most diligently by John L. Goldwater, the owner of Archie Comics. It was a personal mission of this right wing bastard, and his way of doing his best to put EC Comics out of business. He never forgave them for the "Starchie" parody that Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder produced for an early issue of MAD.

The limitations of the Code seemed obviously worded to shut down EC, which was easily the finest producer of comics the industry has ever seen. No more horror. No more ground-breaking science-fiction stories. No more violence. No more sex. No more bad guys getting away with their crimes. These were the things that had made EC popular with the readers, and without the ability to speak freely and illustrate freely, the company was likely doomed.

William Gaines, the owner, had two choices. Adapt, or perish. He chose initially to try to steer the company in a tamer lane with his "New Direction" line of comics. The artists were largely the same. Gaines paid the highest rates in the industry for story and art, and he only employed the greatest comics artists who were available. The New Direction titles continued this tradition of excellence.

But...the edge was gone. There was no danger to the stories. No bite. The things that the fan base had come to expect from EC were missing, and they failed to support the company's new titles.

The best selling title Gaines had was MAD. He chose to transform that one into a magazine to escape the Comics Code (a brilliant move). That saved that one title and eventually made Gaines the highest paid publisher on Earth. But he was forced to kill off all of the New Direction books, and thus died the finest comics company that ever saw the light of print.

I picked up a couple of New Direction books this week (PIRACY). Gorgeous artwork. The stories are good, but nothing like the yarns from the days before the hated Comics Code. Alas.

A work of brilliance from Bernie Krigstein. Krigstein was one of the best artists ever to turn his hand to comic books and sequential art. He is  also arguably the closest the industry ever got to fine art. At one point he tried to unionize comic book artists and writers, but failed. Eventually, he was forced from the comics industry.

The last issue of PIRACY. Cover by George Evans.

Sincerest

Flattery be damned. In 1954-55, the hottest comic on the newsstands was MAD, from EC Comics. Almost everyone publishing comics books wanted to imitate it. And the ones who didn't want to imitate it, wanted to kill it off.

But I'm not here to talk about any of the villains who wanted to destroy MAD. I want to mention what EC Comics did to protect their extremely profitable spot on those newsstands. Since almost every publisher was trying like mad to imitate MAD, Bill Gaines and company just decided that the best thing to do was...imitate MAD!

If someone was going to steal some of their sales numbers, it might as well be themselves.

So what they did was create a companion book called PANIC. It had the same writers, the same artists, the same publisher, the same Jewish sense of humor. How could it miss? And the thing was, of course, to kill off the weakest of the imitators by causing the fans to buy PANIC instead of CRAZY or GET LOST! or FLIP or CRACKED or MADHOUSE or WHACK or EH! or...you get the picture. The imitators were out there in droves. Some of them were pretty good, too.

I haven't been concentrating on completing a set of PANIC, but I pick up copies when I see them at a good price. Despite the fact that they are, in essence, exactly the same thing as MAD from exactly the same creators at exactly the same publishing house, you can get these books for a LOT less than you can issues of MAD from the same period.

The last copy I picked up was #7. Sometimes the covers of both MAD and PANIC were kind of bland or uninspiring to me. Such is the case with this issue. But there was something about these special joke covers that seem bland to look upon that inspired the kids of the day to buy the darned things. I reckon they knew what they were doing.

Some day I need to write an essay of how Harvey Kurtzman was fucked out of his position at MAD. It was his baby all the way, and it ended up making the publisher, Bill Gaines, one of the richest men in comics. But for now I'll leave that where it is and save it for another time.

PANIC #7

An ad for MAD from Kurtzman and Elder.

Just as with MAD, much of the humor in PANIC was topical. Most people today have absolutely no idea who Joe Palooka was. Palooka is just a word they heard in PULP FICTION. But it was prime material for parody in 1955.

Jack Davis, one of the most popular comedy artists at EC.

THEM was a hot commodity and still new to the screens. Wally Wood has a go at it.

Wally Wood was a great caricaturist and nobody did women like Woody.

Everyone thinks Marvel was the first publisher to connect with the fans. How wrong those people are! EC was adept at making (and keeping) a connection with its fans. The editors printed fan mail, and they bragged about the men who were writing and illustrating the stories that the fans kept coming back to read.

The average American is introduced to Jewish and Yiddish humor. Nobody did that better than the guys writing MAD and PANIC.

Adventures on Ebay

I landed a copy of Panic #10 via Ebay. This was the first comic I purchased since a crooked dealer tried to rip me off there. I had bought three copies of Panic from a fellow I will leave unnamed for now. The books had been graded at "VG", which means very good. When the books arrived they were flaking, coming apart, two of them had detached covers, and the one that still had its cover attached was because the spine was heavily taped. I, of course, immediately demanded a refund which he did not want to grant. Hilarity ensued.


I have to say that Ebay was really good during this minor tussle. They demanded that the dealer in question refund my money and they even took a portion of it from him and added it back to my Paypal account, the remainder to be refunded as soon as I returned the worthless books, which I did.


This latest issue I got (from a more reputable dealer) is classic Harvey Kurtzman material. I will assume that he did the layouts. Much of the material seems to have his hand in evidence. But the bulk of the book was illustrated by Will Elder and Jack Davis, both of whom did their usual exceptional work. Davis, in particular shows his talent, but I have to think that Elder was filing off the edges of his art here--I think that while Kurtzman and Gaines intended Panic to be pretty much a carbon-copy of Mad, they were making some minor moves to tone down the harsher aspects of the humor of Mad in favor of appealing to a wider audience...or at least a slightly different audience. Unlike Mad, the last few issues of Panic received the Comics Code Authority approval. But obviously the sales were not up to Mad's level and the title was snuffed out.

PANIC #10.