FOUL PLAY AND OTHER STORIES HC (MR) (18 Sep Release)

When Jack Davis took up his pen for EC Comics¸ he imbued his stories with a playful sense of (gallows) humor that made his innocent victims more eye-poppingly terrified¸ his ax-murders more gleefully gruesome¸ and his revenge-seeking corpses more morbidly motivated than any other EC artist. These horror and suspense tales — from the pages of Vault of Horror¸ Haunt of Fear¸ Crime SuspenStories¸ and Shock SuspenStories — include frightful fare such as “Hyde and Go Shriek!”¸ “Tombs-Day!”¸ “Witch Witch’s Witch!”¸ “Head-Room!”¸ “Chop Talk!”¸ “Coffin Spell!”¸ and more¸ all leavened with the cackling¸ pun-laced wit of scripter Al Feldstein and illuminated as only the virtuoso brushwork of Jack Davis could present them.But the standout story has to be “Foul Play¸” the most infamous of all EC horror stories¸ in which a baseball team takes revenge on a murderous rival player by¸ um (spoiler alert)¸ “repurposing” various parts of his anatomy for one final blood-spattered¸ organ-scattered inning. You’ll never see a baseball game the same way again. And as gruesome as that sounds (and is!)¸ Davis deftly pulls it off with aplomb and a mordant sense of absurd humor that will have you cringing and laughing at the same time. Plus¸ not one¸ not two¸ but three Davis-driven adaptations of haunting short stories by Ray Bradbury: “The Coffin!”¸ “Let's Play Poison!”¸ and “The Black Ferris!”.We round out this volume with all three of Davis’s EC science-fiction adventures¸ and all five of his aerial war stories from the legendary EC title¸ Aces High. 40 stories in all¸ most scripted by EC legend Al Feldstein¸ plus in-depth commentary by EC experts Thommy Burns and Grant Geissman.