‘Tales From the Crypt’ Volume 1 The early days of the horror icon crawl back from the grave
Few comics sit at the intersection of “fan beloved,” “industry defining,” and “absolutely impossible to acquire” the way the EC Comics library does. For a while they almost felt like Comics’ very own Holy Grail. On one hand, you’ve got the Tales From The Crypt brand itself, which has left an indelible mark on pop culture with films, cable TV series, Saturday morning cartoons, and a line of revival graphic novels from Papercutz — a proud legacy, to be sure. But on the other hand, you enter into the more nebulous region of pop cultural osmosis, and it’s there that the legend of Bill Gaines’ little comic line that could grows to gargantuan levels. The baby boomers that ate his ghoulish “mags” up in the early ‘50s eventually grew into the genre fiction movers and shakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s — from cult directors like George Romero and Joe Dante, to lit legends like Stephen King, to blockbuster cinema wunderkinds like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Carpenter (Carpenter actually provides a disappointingly brief intro to this volume). You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone whose imagination hasn’t been touched either directly or indirectly by the macabre yarns from the Crypt-Keeper, the Vault-Keeper, and the Old Witch. With all that and their notorious place at the forefront of the Seduction of the Innocent controversy that practically sent the comics industry into the Dark Ages, you’d think the existence of a prestige line of EC Comics trade collections would seem like a given, right?
