Shock Illustrated #1 - EC

It's great to be back!

Thanks to everyone who checked out All In Black & White For 75 Cents Mk.1 and let me know they enjoy the blog. The two weeks (sort of)off helped me recharge my batteries and find some more of the wide variety of comic magazines there have been. For the next two weeks or so I plan to talk about nothing but magazines I've never covered before, and most of those being the very first issue! But don't worry--classics of the format like Creepy, Eerie, and Savage Sword of Conan won't be gone for long!

I wanted something really special to talk about for my first day back, and I think this qualifies--Shock Illustrated #1, one of EC Comics' very unusual(and doomed) Picto-Fiction line!

These magazines were EC's attempt to escape the death grip that was the Comics Code Authority. After their "New Direction" line(Piracy, Valor, Extra, Psychoanalysis, etc.) tanked, William M. Gaines and Al Feldstein came up with a hybrid, which they called "Picto-Fiction"(there's a great site just about the "Picto-Fiction" line, check it out), consisting of text stories accompanied by illustrations.

All the "Picto-Fiction" magazines(Tales of Terror, Confessions Illustrated, Shock Illustrated, Crime Illustrated) were a financial bust, as well, and soon EC reverted to "just" being the publisher of the smash hit Mad. To that end, any of the "Picto-Fiction" magazines are very tough to find, and even when you can, they go for astronomical prices.

So when I came across a copy of SI #1 for something a little less than a mortgage payment I picked it up, I was so curious to finally get my hands on one of these.

There are three stories in this issue, "The Needle", "Switch Party", and "The Jacket", all with illustrations by EC mainstay Jack Kamen. "The Needle" is about a sixteen-year-old girl who gets addicted to drugs:
The story is written by Kris Daniels, and runs twenty pages. Young Peggy reveals, through psychoanalysis, that she started trying drugs to keep the attention of Joey, a boy she fell for but barely gave her the time of day.

The next tale is "Switch Party", written by Robert Bernstein(who went on to write many Aquaman stories for Adventure Comics!), about, if you can believe it, the practice of sexual promiscuity among married couples:
...this one runs fourteen pages, and has a similar storyline: one of the participants of these parties, young Jim Denbow, consults a psychiatrist(the same one from "The Needle"!) to figure out why he's doing what he's doing.

The final story, by Daniel Keyes, is "The Jacket", a twenty-page tale of young juvenile delinquent, Frankie Norton, who after an attempted suicide, consults a psychiatrist(guess who?) for help:
Kamen's art is of course top-notch, and there's a lot more of it than I would've suspected--these are basically comic books without word balloons.

Like a lot of kids at the time, I found the stories a little(ok, a lot) dull and pro-establishment, two things you wouldn't normally associate with EC.

Sure, the subject matter is mature, even a little shocking(sex parties?!?), but the approach is so dry and didactic that they don't read like any of the great comics EC made its bones(pun intended) with.

Though I admit, of the four "Picto-Fiction" titles, I picked the one most likely to be on the dull side, so I'm still interested in reading issues of the other series, if I can ever afford them.

It's funny to think about that Jim Warren would try the exact same experiment--more adult comics in a magazine format to avoid the Comics Code--just nine years later, using a lot of the same artists EC did in a very deliberate attempt to emulate the best things about those books.

But the world had changed dramatically in those nine years, and Jim Warren was a huge success where Gaines was not.

Tomorrow: another first issue!