Foul Play And Other Stories

When Jack Davis took up his pen for EC Comics, what made his innocent victims more eye-poppingly terrified, his ax-murderers more gleefully gruesome, and his revenge-seeking corpses more morbidly motivated was the playful sense of (gallows) humor that he brought to them all. These horror and suspense tales — from the pages of Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, Crime SuspenStories, and Shock SuspenStories — include frightful fare such as “Hyde and Go Shriek!”, “Tombs-Day!”, “Witch Witch’s Witch!”, “Head-Room!”, “Chop Talk!”, “Coffin Spell!”, and more, all leavened with the cackling, pun-laced humor of scripter Al Feldstein and illuminated as only the virtuoso brushwork of Jack Davis can present them.

But the standout story has to be “Foul Play,” the most infamous of all EC horror stories, in which a baseball team takes revenge on a murderous rival player by, um (spoiler alert), “repurposing” various parts of his anatomy for one final blood-spattered, organ-scattered inning. You’ll never look at a baseball — or a baseball infield — the same way again. And as gruesome as that sounds (and is!), Davis deftly pulls it off with aplomb and a mordant sense of absurd humor that will have you cringing and laughing at the same time. Plus, not one, not two, but three Davis-driven adaptations of haunting short stories by Ray Bradbury: “The Coffin!”, “Let’s Play Poison!”, and “The Black Ferris!”.

We round out this volume with all three of Davis’s EC science-fiction adventures, and all five of his aerial war stories from the legendary EC title, Aces High. 40 stories in all, most scripted by EC legend Al Feldstein, plus in-depth commentary by EC experts Thommy Burns and Grant Geissman.