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| Left A page from the Taschen history of EC comics |
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| Left A page from the Taschen EC comics history |
For those of you who have the massive Taschen title The history of EC comics (ISBN 978-3836549769) comes an equally huge book (just over twenty-two inches deep) from IDW Publishing and shows the EC covers the same size as the fifteen artists who drew them. Johnny Craig with twenty-three has the most and you can study his two infamous covers for Crime suspense stories twenty and twenty-two. Jack Davis, my favorite, has twenty-one covers and his incredibly detailed art for the second issue of Mad is here. I also like Wally Wood, mainly because, like Davis, he packs so much detail into his art and does a nice line in space monsters.
Unfortunately, some artists only get one cover: Bill Elder; Frank Frazetta; Bernie Krigstein; Shelly Moldoff; John Severin and the amazing Basil Wolverton whose Mad cover that looked like Life magazine must have taken a few hours to complete with all that hatching.
The book is so huge because that was the size of the boards that comics were drawn on. Inside pages could have several panels and the artists needed space to illustrate the story. The covers in this book are printed in four-color black to reveal all the bits and pieces in the board's margin's that the readers wouldn't see, like register marks and scribbles for the editorial and printer staff.
This artist's edition is probably the only time you'll ever see this art life-size.
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