EC Covers Artist's Edition (Artist Edition) Hardcover – 31 Aug. 2021

For those of you who have the massive Taschen title 'The history of EC comics' (ISBN 978-3836549769) comes an equally huge book (just over twenty-two inches deep) from IDW Publishing and shows the EC covers the same size as the fifteen artists who drew them. Johnny Craig with twenty-three has the most and you can study his two infamous covers for Crime suspense stories twenty and twenty-two. Jack Davis, my favorite, has twenty-one covers and his incredibly detailed art for the second issue of 'Mad' is here. I also like Wally Wood, mainly because, like Davis, he packs so much detail into his art and does a nice line in space monsters.Unfortunately, some artists only get one cover: Bill Elder; Frank Frazetta; Bernie Krigstein; Shelly Moldoff; John Severin and the amazing Basil Wolverton whose 'Mad' cover that looked like 'Life' magazine must have taken a few hours to complete with all that hatching.The book is so huge because that was the size of the boards that comics were drawn on. Inside pages could have several panels and the artists needed space to illustrate the story. The covers in this book are printed in four-color black to reveal all the bits and pieces in the board's margin's that the readers wouldn't see, like register marks and scribbles for the editorial and printer staff.This artist's edition is probably the only time you'll ever see this art life-size.

This book is amazing, truly a masterpiece with so many classic covers from EC covering their SF, Horror, Piracy, Moon Girl, Westerns, MD etc and includes wonderful works by Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta, Bernie Krigstein, Al Feldstein and many others. This is a must have and probably the best IDW Artist's edition yet