 VAULT OF HORROR #30 May 1953 Johnny Craig original artist |
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Of all the renowned artists in the EC Comics stable in the early fifties, Johnny Craig probably had the cleanest, most traditionally commercial-friendly style of that entire immensely talented group. Which somehow makes it all the more amusing when one thinks back on the most infamous of the EC horror and crime covers--the ones that clearly, even defiantly, went TOO far-- because a majority of them were by Craig! |
| There's the fellow with the pistol to his
head, trigger pulled, brains a-splattering--all
reflected in a mirror over his shoulder,
the better to double your fun, double your
pleasure, no doubt! Or that nifty close-up
of the hanging victim, eyes rolled back,
swollen tongue protruding from his lifeless
mouth. And let's not overlook those pair
of point of view illos with A.) the wild
eyed maniac about to slash your throat with
a gleaming razor blade, and B.) the clearly
insane assemblage gleefully about to bury
you alive in a custom made coffin! But it
would unforgivably remiss to forget about
the duo of covers that publisher Bill Gaines
himself felt the need to self-censor: the
zombie at the door whose meat cleaver accessory
was belatedly disposed of by the EC production
department before reaching the nation's newsstands;
and of course, the justly infamous drawing
of the gent holding his ex's head in one
hand and the axe he used to sever it from
her body-- plainly lying there on the floor--in
the other. You all know what was censored
in that case, right? The art was--you should
pardon the expression--cut off at the bottom,
cropped as it were, so as not to show the
oozing entrails and the gore dripping out
of our unfortunate damsel's neck, thus rendering
it, as Gaines would so memorably go on to
tell his pals in Congress, a "tasteful"
cover!?! Gang, if you've seen any or all
of those covers, chances quite good that
you'd remember them. And guess what? They're
all by Craig. The one we have represented here today isn't QUITE in the same class as those aforementioned classics. For one thing, you might even consider this cover to be FUNNY! Okay, okay, funny in a sick way, true, but compared to that dude with the noose around his neck, this here is a million laughs, believe me! Even Craig seemed to sense the inherent humor of the situation, as he plastered his subway car interior with ads that very pointedly inquire, "Stomach Upset?" Well, yeah, Johnny, as a matter of fact... I guess it came down to the fact that while you might've expected this sort of excess from a Graham Ingels--whose every drawing seemed to focus on something in an advanced state of decrepit decay, with all sorts of disgusting pustules oozing out of every available orifice on the bodies of his unfortunate characters--it had far more of an impact on me coming from a man who could just as easily have been drawing an Arrow Shirt ad as one of his own, highly taut horror scripts. Johnny Craig has been, almost from the time I first discovered EC Comics through a series of mid-sixties paperback reprint collections, my favorite creator associated with that legendary publishing house, and as much for his writing as for his art. All kudos to runners-ups Wood, Kurtzman, Davis, and the rest, but Craig's ability to harness his deceptively normal style and repeatedly send it slowly but irrevocably off into the most blood-curdling of pananoic scenarios--well, that beats a (yawn) fetid Ghastly Ingels corpse clawing it's way out of a freshly filled grave every time, y'know? But, hey, that's just me... So I think it's time we show a little bit of appreciation for the woefully underrated Johnny Craig, don't you? This may not be one of his stone-cold greatest moments, but I still think the man deserves a round of applause for his work on the piece. So how about it folks? Let's give the EC stalwart a hand!! After all, as you can plainly see, he gave US one!?!... (...insert Crypt Keeper-like cackle here...) |
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