The comic art of Al Williamson

Between April 1950 and February 1955, Entertaining Comics rocked a small corner of the world. Instead of superheroes and funny animals, EC delivered horror (Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear), crime (Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories), science-fiction (Weird Science, Weird Fantasy) war (Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales) and satiric humor (Mad, Panic), which provided its pre-teen, almost entirely male readership, of which I was one, with kickass art, gut-gripping prose, and"“ let's admit it"“ sex and violence to a degree that our dimes could not otherwise provide.

Unfortunately these rotting corpses and voluptuous bosoms drew not only wide-eyed pubescent readers like me but also the interest of the U.S. Senate.

Comic books were the video games of our day. Overheated parent-teacher associations, over-amped journalists, over-caffeinated sociologists, publicity-hungry psychiatrists and opportunistic politicians put two ("juveniles") and two ("comics") together and got... five ("juvenile delinquency").

It didn't help the legislative pursuit of truth when EC's publisher, William Gaines, defended the "good taste" of one of his covers— a depiction of an axe murderer holding aloft the severed head of his victim by her hair— on the grounds that it didn't show any blood streaming forth.

No more vampires

The result was a Comic Book Code, under which content was circumscribed (no vampires or lust, no zombies or depravity), language was policed (even the words "crime" and "horror" couldn't appear on covers), attitudes were adjusted (parents, the police and government must be respected; good taste and decency must shine.)

Comics became as kiddie-safe as Gerber's peas, and possessed as much kick. EC ceased publishing everything but Mad, now re-cast as a 25- cent "magazine." My peers and I turned to Mickey Spillane and Playboy. No decline in juvenile delinquency was noted, by the way.

Scholars have since come to recognize EC as a high-water mark in comic book history. Many of the underground cartoonists of the late 1960s who restored "adult" content to comics"“ boy, did they ever! "“ were EC fans. So were George Romero and Stephen King, Paul Krassner and Gahan Wilson. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead owned a complete collection.

Revival in Seattle

This regard has spurred a revival. EC stories have surfaced in paperback collections, special edition comics and hardcover anthologies. They have mutated into TV shows and feature films. Complete runs of each title were issued in multi-volume, nine-by-12-inch boxed sets, each cover in color and all interior pages in black-and-white. But these have long been out of print.

Now Fantagraphics, a Seattle-based company that has championed comics as a serious art form for decades, is reviving EC for a new generation with an intriguing new focus. Since 2012 Fanta has published a half dozen seven-by-ten-inch hardcovers, each with more than 200 pages of black and white stories, accompanied by biographical and critical texts. (Another is scheduled to appear this year; two are on tap for 2014; and more are promised.)

What makes the effort unique is that each volume focuses on a particular EC artist. The honorees so far have been Johnny Craig, Jack Davis, Al Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Williamson and Wally Wood, all members of the Comic Book Hall of Fame. This approach enables readers to observe each artist's development over time and, in some cases, see how he applied his skills to widely varying subject matter.

Meeting artists in a typical comic anthology is like visiting rooms of the Philadelphia Art Museum, where paintings by those who worked in the same period share walls. Fantagraphics' approach is more like visiting the Duchamp wing.

They signed their names

Comic books of the 1950s were usually produced in an assembly-line process. An editor, who may also have been a cartoonist, wrote the story. (At EC, Kurtzman wrote Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales and Mad, Craig wrote Vault of Horror, and Feldstein wrote the rest.) The editor might sketch out the panels or leave this task to the artist (or "penciller"), who drew and lettered them. He might ink his panels or pass them to an "inker." (At EC, most artists did their own inking.) Then a colorist applied the finishing touches.

(All EC's artists were men; the colorist, Marie Severin— also a Hall of Famer "“ was the sister of one of them.)

Generally, a comic contained four stories, each covering six to eight pages. No artist contributed more than one story to an individual issue. The same four artists tended to contribute to each issue of the particular title. Some worked across all genres; others specialized.

EC treated its artists with uncommon respect. Since its books couldn't hook readers through recurring characters, Gaines, in effect, made his artists into characters. Instead of cloaking his artists in anonymity (as most publishers did), he allowed them to sign their stories. Their caricatures often appeared in EC's ads. Many were profiled on inside front covers. A few made surprise appearances within the stories themselves. One— Bill Elder— even had an issue of Mad devoted to his mock biography.

EC's editors consciously wrote and assigned stories to suit an artist's strengths and interests. And Gaines— again an exception to the rule— did not trash his artists' pages but archived them. Decades later, when they became valuable and he sold them, Gaines gave each artist a percentage of the proceeds.

Words vs. pictures

So Fantagraphics' artist-centric approach seems apt. After all, it was the pictures, not the words, that set the parents' and teacher's teeth on edge back in the day. Reading a book about an interplanetary explorer whose spaceship came equipped with 50 beautiful women in a state of frozen animation, to be defrosted at leisure for the explorer's pleasure, took your imagination only so far. But to see these curvaceous blondes, brunettes and redheads laid out like popsicles... well!

And to read about a female ranch owner who retaliates against her two-timing boyfriend by socking him in the face with a branding iron was one thing. But to see his blistered kisser in close-up!

Both of those scenes were rendered by Al Williamson, whose work is memorialized in "'50 Girls 50' and Other Stories.

'Aha!' moment

Williamson (1931-2010) was several years younger than EC's other principal artists, and the only one not to have served in World War II. He had spent ten years of his childhood on his father's coffee plantation in Colombia. The jungles there influenced his art to some extent, but Williamson's real awakening came when he saw Flash Gordon at age ten. For the rest of his life, the drawing of intrepid space explorers, beautiful women and exotic worlds inhabited by exotic creatures was what Williamson did best.

His EC debut didn't occur until 1952, but by then Williamson had already been drawing professionally for four years. He contributed about three dozen stories to EC, of which 33 are reproduced here (two horror, five crime, and the rest sci-fi). His delicate line, intricately constructed panels and gossamer-like space-station cities and landscapes are fully on display in this book.

Williamson subsequently came to disdain his work at EC, where he felt he had betrayed his talent by putting it in service of the unheroic and immoral. But for me, that's where his appeal lies.

Spotting Alan Ladd

Williamson's "heroic" work strikes me as a bore. His heroic male figures rarely register interesting emotions or depth. Even those who've been imprisoned or isolated for years appear as trim and well groomed as a leading man in a B-movie. (This isn't surprising, since Williamson relied on Hollywood stills as reference material. One writer spotted Stewart Granger on his page; I saw Alan Ladd.) When Williamson was called upon to render a deformed swamp monster, the result seemed to have stepped out of a Bow-flex informational.

But when Williamson's heroes are run through Feldstein's twisted scripts, they resound. Seeing figures as square-jawed and broad-shouldered as Flash or Roy Rogers or G.I. Joe gripped by lust or greed or stupidity, which will condemn them to the grisly "snap" ending that was Feldstein's specialty, served us young readers well as we grew up amidst other imposing authority figures, whose stature and bearing implied, "Trust us."

Feldstein also put Williamson's touch to good use in reinforcing his own surprising-for-comics lib/rad sensibility. Williamson's art could infuse aliens and monsters, no matter how hideous, with sympathetic personalities that reinforced Feldstein's feelings about brotherhood and tolerance. And Williamson's skill at constructing alluring, futuristic cities amplified Feldstein's warnings against the danger of man's destroying his own through nuclear war.

Move over, Anna Karenina

Finally, Williamson's women were terrific"“ not because he probed their souls and psyches more deeply than he did men's, but because of his ability to present them, when called for by the text, as irresistible objects of desire. Through the tilt of their heads, the sideways glances of their languid eyes, the inviting way they leaned against doorways"“ through the breasts that blossomed beneath sweaters or above negligees or bikini tops— his women tapped impulses within us that we couldn't fully identify but also couldn't fail to notice. We might not have known what sex was"“ or the grim fate that awaited those driven by its desire"“ but the power of Williamson's images persuaded us that it was worth the risk.

I can still see those 50 bodies waiting for the explorer's next choice. (I can also see the ranch hand's blistered mug.) The novelist Nicholson Baker has bemoaned the effect of "the deep corrosive oceans" of the mind upon great literature, confessing to recalling nothing of Anna Karenina but a picnic basket and honey jar. I, similarly, recall little with specificity from Ulysses or Light in August, but I've never forgotten those 50 women whom I first met when I was 11.

So who was the greater artist? James Joyce? Faulkner? Or Al Williamson?