Oh my goodness! What have I been thinking all these years avoiding reading these incredible comics?
All I can think is that I somehow needed to be in this particular place in my life in order to appreciate them fully (not sure what that means, but let's run with it).
These are gorgeous, amazing, thrilling stories. They raise genuine goose flesh occasionally, they entertain, every story, to a fault. The draughtsmanship from Feldstein, Kamen, Kurtzman, and Wood (primarily) is simply wonderful, in all it's catastrophic detail (that cover up there isn't the only story in the book in which the Earth gets destroyed. But it is the best one!)
I have had a few reprint comics in my collection for a while now, though some are mysteriously missing at the moment, but I've not really given them much thought. As I noted in my last look at a graphic novel, the Harvey Horrors book, I've quite taken to these pre-Code stories. The writers are telling really, really interesting tales. Though they may seem like run-of-the-mill twist-ending tales (and let's not forget that these were the comics that popularised that narrative structure), the endings are always either really well renedered, so as to be truly shocking, or are completely not what you expected, which I find is rare in a comic.
(And I'm having deja vu right now about having typed that sentence before.)
I've picked up a couple more of these reprint collections, so I'll make my way through them for a bit. But I definitely think that one of the expensive comics I'm going to have to put on the "One Day" list is an old, pre-Code EC horror comic. That would be a very cool thing to own.
Onward...
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