Tommy van Hutton is your typical pre-teen loner. He spends time alone reading comic books and is ignored by everyone, even his own parents. Except for one little thing: Jack, Tommy’s pet rabbit, is a SERIAL KILLER. Jack wants to make Tommy a man, and he will do whatever it takes even if it means killing a few people.
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?
Popular in the 1960s and early 1970s with more rare appearances in the 1980s, 1990s and the 2000s, the anthology-style horror film has made a solid resurgence in recent years with such portmanteau releases as The ABCs of Death films and the V/H/S series. With Mexico Barbaro, Fear Paris and other projects in various stages …