There's excellent work here from Jack Davis especially, as well as Jack Kamen, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, and Wally Wood (though the colour seems least effective on the Wood, for some reason). As always with EC, the real highlight is the art, rather than the generally predictable and wordy stories. The first six issues, nicely reproduced in a good size in colour-and for once, the new computer colouring shows some respect for the original, making minimal use of the graded tones so currently popular yet so unfitting for meterial not designed for it it also avoids the muddiness of tone that curses so many computer colour jobs. Feldstein was always a bit wordy with his writing, but these artists created some of the most evocative images of all time.

The art by Jack Kamen, Joe Orlando, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, and Graham Ingels is some of the best in comics. Maybe this kind of anti-semitic activity doesn't happen any more, but I just know if it ever did, not quite like this. 'Hate!' is a little less jarring, and a little less realistic. With Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib fresh in our minds this story bites - in a good way. 'Confession' tackles police corruption and shows the brutality, the torture and force the cops can use to get that covetted confession. To have read this piece when it was published must have been quite a shock. The sheriff's men, so hateful, and the honest reporter so Atticus Finch like in his thick glasses and suit, make this story iconic. 'The Guilty!' deals with small town racism in a sort of abbreviated To Kill a Mockingbird way. You know the mentality, and it has existed in this country for some time now. Who's that commie without the flag lapel pin? Let's beat him up. 'The Patriot!' the first ever shock story, in issue 2 is a wonderfully ironic tale of patriotism that hits as hard today as it did in the 50s. All of that from a comic that was doomed to an early death at the hands of the US government - what a sad affair that all was. I guess I'll limit my little review to the shock stories herein, though the sole war story 'Yellow!' was one of my favorites, showing that EC was way ahead of Hollywood, lightyears ahead of television, and probably even tackling more important issues than mainstream fiction at the time. You've got your horror stories, your crime stories, your sci-fi stories, the occasional (but rare) war story, and then you've got your shock stories - a whole new phenonomenon for EC in this mag. Shock Suspenstories was a sampler comic that pulled stories from different genres into the same magazine. There are so many interesting stories in these pages, and I don't have the time, nor the energy to do each justice. It's hard to review a collection like this.

The EC Archives by Al Feldstein