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Longing for horrid days of EC Comics Tom Mooney Remember when

Sunday July 05, 2009 | 01:00 AM

Mention the 1950s to almost anyone from middle-age on down and you’re likely to get a smirky “Wasn’t that when everybody watched ‘Ozzie and Harriet’?”

I have to confess that I did see that show now and then. But it didn’t ruin my mind. I’d already fortified myself with years of grisly murders, disembowelings, bloodcurdling giant insects and zombie-like creatures who just loved to sink their teeth into a screaming human being.

In five words: I had read EC Comics.

Why at a distance of 55 years since the last EC title vanished from the store comic book racks of America do I bring up this piece of cultural history? Mainly it’s because the start of summer inevitably stirs memories of the days when most of the good radio shows went into hibernation (no TV in Wyoming Valley yet) and the colorful magazines became a kid’s lifeline to the world of adventure and imagination.

EC’s horror line had wonderfully scary titles: “Tales from the Crypt,” “The Vault of Horror,” “The Haunt of Fear.” Really, how could you resist a cover featuring a young woman frantically fleeing a rotting monstrosity that had just crawled out of the grave?

What lifted EC’s products above the competition’s was their premise that we lived in an orderly universe. In these pages the people who suffered managed to bring their suffering on themselves so much that you started thinking you’d better not do anything so dumb as to try to raid a tomb.

I remember one story about a cocky champion bowler who, as punishment for his vanity was forced to bowl with ghouls and ended up being turned into a game himself. The last panel of the story showed the vainglorious man’s head being tossed down an alley toward a set of pins formed by his body parts. EC also published a couple of war comic books, which I enjoyed but don’t remember much about. I think they also had a crime comic.

“Weird Science” and “Weird Fantasy” were my true favorites, though. They didn’t just explore space, as most other “sci-fi” comics did. Their stories got inside our collective heads as a culture and gave us ideas to think about. In one, an alien space ship that’s about to be welcomed by earthlings reports that it’s crashed into some kind of yellow ocean. It then gets fatally crunched by a general who finds the half-inch-long rocket in the mustard on his hot dog at the welcoming party. If that’s not a cautionary tale about the foolishness of human expectations, I don’t know what is.

My favorite, though, was about a futuristic society on the first day after all human beings have been killed by atomic warfare. Household gizmos turn themselves on and off and security systems frantically call warnings that will never be heard. When the rain falls, it becomes clear that we aren’t necessary to creation and, stupidly, we have turned ourselves into a footnote.

EC met its doom at the hands of the reformist Comics Code Authority and its mid-1950s crackdown on comic violence. True, you can buy anthologies of the original EC stories. But there’s no substitute for being 12 years old and finding yourself actually thinking about human mortality.

EC and its founders and staff, I’m hereby paying my respects. If I ever wanted to see anything climb out of a tomb, you’re it.