Foul Play
Posted on | May 2, 2005 | 2 Comments
Foul Play: The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E.C. Comics by Grant Geissman. Published by Harper Collins.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
I’ve always been fascinated by E.C. Comics and the creation of the comics code. I think it was the first case of censorship that really resonated with me when I learned about it at an early age, I thought it was so interesting that at one point in history, people were having hearings about comic books destroying our nation’s youth. If you were to come visit me in my office cubicle, you’d be greeted with some leftover items from a banned books display that I organized last year, like this cover of a woman being strangled, or this one of a hanged man or a matador of death. I like to maintain a welcoming atmosphere at the office 
I’ve read a few books about E.C. comics, but most of my previous reading has centered around the publishing history of E.C. or Dr. Wertham’s crusade. Even though there are a couple anthologies of E.C. reprints out there, I’ve only read a few E.C. comics before when I’ve run across them in a more general comics anthology. Foul Play focuses on the artists who created the comics. Each chapter is a biography of an artist, explaining how he ended up in the comics business and also provides details about his previous work. The text is surrounded with small reproductions of photos, comics panels, covers, cartoons, and other illustration work. A full-size story from an E.C. comic is reprinted in every chapter, showcasing the work of each artist, and the comics selected match up with each artist’s specialty – crime, horror, war, or science fiction.
A couple nitpicks, the first is that as a manga fan I roll my eyes whenever I encounter a sentence like “… the more recent Japanese comic-book style known as Manga, with its provacatively rendered women, erotic content, and often-violent storylines.” Geissman was trying to ask which are the best comics created, listing publishers like DC and Marvel, the Underground Comix movement, manga, and E.C comics. But with such a totally clueless sentence coming in the first paragraph of the book (for one thing it ignores all the provocatively rendered men in manga, stories with no erotic content whatsoever, and Osamu Tezuka was doing manga in the 1940s and 1950s which isn’t so recent) it threw me off a bit. I also wish that Marie Severin had been given her own chapter instead of being lumped in with a catch-all “best of the rest” section with short biographical sketches.
I really like the attention to detail in the design of the book, for example the artists’ signatures are reproduced as headings for each chapter. I found the chapter collecting the Christmas Party art hilarious, especially the parody comic cover sketches, such as a cover for “Dr. Wertham Comics.” The book concludes with a never before published story that was slated to be published in Crime Illustrated #3.
Foul Play functions well as an introduction to the lives of many influential comic artists and it also serves as an E.C. reprint anthology. I’d recommend it if you are interested in comic book history, and I’m sure it would be great fun for any E.C. comics fans to read.
Comments
2 Responses to “Foul Play”
Leave a Reply
May 6th, 2005 @ 11:07 pm
Hm, does the book cover some of EC’s more off-beat offerings? I’ve been fascinated by their experements like Psychotherapy in the past. This might be something to watch for.
May 7th, 2005 @ 7:07 am
It is more of a general overview, they mention some of the stuff like Psychotherapy but the stories that are reprinted are more typical E.C.
The story reprinted in the back was a never before published “picto fiction” story, which was basically a comic with captions, no speech balloons.