Category / Comics

by Edward Champion

EC Comics

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To my great surprise, Gemstone Publishing sent me two volumes of their EC Archives reprint series.

First off, a few words about EC Comics: I came of age decades after their inception and, as a great fan of William Gaines’ work on MAD, I was very curious about them as a young lad. Much like video games and industrial music were the MacGuffins for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s murderous rampage in Littleton, EC Comics, thanks in part to persnickety psychologists, had been declared the cause of juvenile delinquency, leaving Gaines to find creative ways to bypass the Comics Code Authority’s often draconian demands.

I spent many years trying to track these mythical comics down and, at first, had very little success. But I did manage to track down a few reprints, inexplicably available at my public library, and began to see why Stephen King was inspired by them for Creepshow. The stories were unapologetically lurid, punchy, and featured all manner of colorful violence. They were often absurd, but they certainly grabbed your attention.

Years later, now that I have a more trained narrative eye, the stories are no less ridiculous; perhaps they are even more so. In the first story contained within Weird Science, Volume 1, a scientist is accidentally sprayed by an atomizer and begins to shrink in size. But this is no mere Richard Matheson ripoff. Each atom is actually a world, which in turn is composed of atoms, and, as the scientist continues to shrink, he encounters all manner of new civilizations. That all this is contained within an eight page story is fascinating enough. And it’s safe to say that this premise is hardly scientific. But in playing fast and loose with the rules of reality and keeping the pace swift, there’s still something oddly compelling about the scientist’s plight.

Of course, women regrettably come second in the EC Comics universe. I find myself troubled that they are reduced to being mere providers, often serving as trophies that men display to other men. (“Beautiful wife” is a recurrent appellation.) There is, in addition, a tendency for older men to call their younger apprentices “boy,” leaving me to ponder hypothetical homoerotic undercurrents.

At the same time, where else are you going to find such crazy dialogue like “Come one step closer boy, and I’ll knock you flat with this T-square?” or a monster remarking to surprised humans, “You see, I’m quite friendly! Come here!”

More than twenty years after I experienced EC Comics for the first time, Gemstone offers another chance to experience the strangely entertaining parameters of the EC Comics universe. I’m struck by the attention to unusually tight panels for dramatic emphasis and the eye-popping characters. (It is almost as if every character has their pupils permanently dilated.) But even with often bizarre and unjustified premises (such as a house that inexplicably shifts at various points in time without explanation), you have to admire EC’s narrative audacity, even if it remains permanently rooted in a decidedly 1950s style of subversiveness. And there’s the added bonus of seeing how such artists as Harvey Kurtzman and Al Feldstein fared when they weren’t inking satirical stuff for MAD.

by Edward Champion

Tony Long: Chickenhead of the Month

I’m a little late on this, but I think it can be said with almost complete certainty that Tony Long is a moron. It’s bad enough that Long has diminished local illustrator Gene Leun Yang’s accomplishments by claiming that his book American Born Chinese should be ineligible for the National Book Award because it is composed of pictures, but Tony Long, a superlative skybald content to toss around his uninformed opinions the way culinary naïfs want to take you to Domino’s for “really good pizza,” hasn’t even read the book in question. Like a hayseed fundamentalist who will always be right, even when having nothing more than a cursory understanding of what he’s talking about, Long is content to remark upon a work that he hasn’t even bothered to crack open.

Long claims that his essay is “not about denigrating the comic book, or graphic novel” and then proceeds to belittle Yang’s work by declaring, “I’ll bet for what it is, it’s pretty good,” as if “what it is” is not only as different as “apples and oranges,” but somehow lesser.

In bashing the book, Long notes that he is “familiar with the genre,” as if this generalized pronouncement of casual expertise, presumably originating from the deity now occupying Long’s head, justifies his capacity to remark upon a book that he is ignorant about by his own admission. Well, I’m “familiar” with the work of April Flowers, but I’m not going to comment upon WMB: Weapons of Masturbation until I’ve seen the film.

For a guy who seems to be “familiar” with comic books, Long can’t even get his terminology right. Like a milliner trying to sell you an asshat, Long refers to Yang’s work falls into interchangeably as “graphic novels,” “illustrated stories,” “comic books,” when these are entirely different forms. A graphic novel, for example, may be a collection of previously published comic books. You can call many children’s books or even some postmodern literary experiments “illustrated stories.” But if graphic novels “don’t belong” even in a juvenile literature class, then how are we to categorize the quest for meaning contained within Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or the shifting perceptions of lust within Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls? Surely, these are books. These works, among many, chronicle the human condition. They are laced with plots, characters, narratives, subtext, and visual and verbal language just as intricate in their creation and execution as blueblood word-centric novels. And yet we continue to throw them in a separate section in the bookstore and deny these books their credentials, imputing by taxonomy that they will never drink from the whites only drinking fountain occupied by FICTION.

The Tony Longs of the universe, who regale us with their callow and deliberately ignorant banter, will continue to offer the hard line that these are lesser works without proof. They will continue to comment upon subjects without studying what they purportedly examine or providing us with specific examples. It’s sadly telling that a publication like Wired, which reports on advances technology and is thus progressive in some sense, would employ an atavistic microbe to mold up the boss stone.