It's alive! EC Comics returns

EC Comics, which specialized in horror, crime and suspense stories and closed during the 'moral panic' of the 1950s, is making a comeback.

Oni Press will publish two new anthology series under the EC Comics banner. The first, Epitaphs From the Abyss, out in July, will focus on horror; Cruel Universe, the second, arrives in August and will tell science fiction stories.

Hunter Gorinson, the president and publisher of Oni Press, said the new stories will interpret today's world, just as EC Comics explored the American psyche of the 1950s. The cover designs will feel familiar to EC Comics fans: a label runs across the top left indicating the type of story – “Terror” or “Horror” or “Science-Fiction” – and the logo is reminiscent of the bold colors and fonts of past series as “Tales From the Crypt” and “The Vault of Horror.”

The series is a collaboration between Oni and the family of William M. Gaines, the original publisher of EC Comics, who died in 1992. Gary Groth, the editor of The Comics Journal, told The New York Times in 2013 that EC Comics “ perhaps the best commercial comics company in the history of the medium.

Cathy Gaines Mifsud, a daughter of William M. Gaines, who is also president of the family business, William M. Gaines Agent, said, “We're very excited to have it come back for a whole new generation.” The new stories will be written by comic stars such as Jason Aaron, Rodney Barnes, Cecil Castellucci and Matt Kindt.

EC's original subversive content brought it to the attention of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954 and its hearings on whether comics were linked to moral decay.

Gaines testified, “The truth is that crime is the product of the real environment in which the child lives and not of the fiction he reads.” The hearings resulted in comic book publishers creating the Comics Code Authority, to impose standards on themselves for what comics could depict. Gaines soon closed EC and shifted his focus to his humor publication Mad.

EC is still highly revered and collected editions of his stories have been sold by various publishers over the years. The original art for an EC story, “Master Race,” about a postwar encounter between a Nazi war criminal and a Holocaust survivor, sold for $600,000 at Heritage Auctions in 2018.

In addition to the best writers, the artists of the new stories include Peter Krause, Malachi Ward and Dustin Weaver. Covers will be drawn by Lee Bermejo, Greg Smallwood, JH Williams III, among others.