Thursday 16 December 2010

My Favourite Ever EC Christmas Story

I know, I know - I ran this thing last Christmas but it is just so exquisite as well as being a really nostalgic and admittedly self indulgent trip down memory lane. The first time I encountered Johnny Craig's "...And All Through The House" was in a scruffy copy of the Bantam paperback collection of EC reprints under the title Tales From The Crypt, complete with Frazetta cover.

All eight of the stories were cut up so that each tier appeared sideways on necessitating the reader to rotate the book 90' to the left. But the format worked and the stories were printed in black and white, no distraction with the color pulling your attention away from Johnny Craig's rendering and as in this story extensive use of zipatone.

So as I ran this story last year in color here it is again, but this time in black and white all the better for you to soak up all the nuances of Craig's brilliant pacing of this tale. He doesn't hit a wrong note at all in this superbly constructed story. He may have been the slowest EC artist working on the horror titles but for me at least, he was by far the greatest story teller.








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