Beschreibung:

HAUNT OF FEAR No. 19 Author: Place: Publisher: Date: Description: EC. May-June, 1953. CGC certified: Fine- (5.5). Cream to off-white pages. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein stories. Jack Kamen Jack Davis George Evans art. Graham Ingels cover and art. Used in Seduction of the Innocent: "A comic-book baseball game. Notice the chest protector and other details in the text and pictures." A Comic Book Atrocity from "The Underworld of Publishing" Robert Warshow, a critic for Commentary magazine, wrote what is probably the most perceptive contemporary article on EC comics. His son Paul was an EC fan, and Warshow tried to discourage his son from reading the grisly, disreputable mags. Paul convinced his dad to give EC a try, so Warshow read a sampling of ECs and did his best to keep an open mind. At first, Warshaw seems surprised by the level of quality that he finds: "It should be said that the EC comics do in fact display a certain imaginative flair." But then he gets to "Foul Play." "There is a picture of a baseball game in which the ball is a man's head with one eye dangling from its socket, the bat is a severed leg, the catcher wears a dismembered human torso as a chest protector, the baselines are marked with stretched-out intestines, the bases are marked with the lungs, liver and heart, the resin-bag is the dead man's stomach, and the umpire dusts off home plate with the scalp." Al Feldstein later tried to explain: "You get into a certain frame of mind when you're close to something over a period of time. You're having a tongue-in-cheek approach to horror and you don't realize you're getting more and more numb to what you're being tongue-in-cheek about. The baseball story, to me, was absurd in terms of reality.... But when you step away and become a non-involved individual reading it for the first time, it's an atrocity." -Al Feldstein interviewed by Bill Spicer, The Complete Haunt of Fear. By the end of his essay, Warshow admits that EC comics are unlikely to damage his son, but he still wishes they'd go away. The lingering impression of "Foul Play" continues to haunt him like a bad dream: "We are left also with the underworld of publishing which produced that baseball game, which I don't suppose I shall easily forget." -Robert Warshow, "Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham," The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture. A limited edition of 100 softcover and 15 hardcover catalogues are available. Over 200 pages, fully illustrated. Fun reference, great keepsake. Softcovers $40, dust-jacketed hardcover with limitation plate $200. To order, contact ivan@pbagalleries.com or visit: https://www.pbagalleries.com/content/comics/. R. Crumb says, "I found [PBA's catalogue] so interesting that I am saving it for the texts that accompany the comics which were put up for auction. This is some of the best commentary I’ve yet seen on the quality of the content of comic books. I especially enjoyed the reviews of the post-war horror comics. Great. Priceless." Consignments welcome for PBA's Spring 2021 Comic Book sale. Pre-Code Horror, Golden Age and Silver Age comics, original art and ephemera sought. Send inquiries to ivan@pbagalleries.com. Lot Amendments Condition: Item number: 324235