624 TALES FROM THE CRYPT
subcommittee held in April and June 1954, Gaines said (in the 1988 documentary fi lm
Comic Book Confi dential) of his comics output and its most famous detractor:
Some may not like them. Th at is a matter of personal taste. It would be just as dif-
fi cult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would
be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.... What are we afraid of?
Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and
entitled to select what to read or do? We think our children are so evil, simple
minded, that it takes a story of murder to set them to murder, a story of robbery
to set them to robbery?
It would be unfortunate, however, if the moral panic of the 1950s would overshadow
how visually and stylistically progressive Tales from the Crypt was. Described by art-
ist and writer Al Feldstein (EC Comics 1948–53, Mad Magazine 1956–84) as “new
icing on old cakes,” the comic was inspired by such popular culture staples of the 1950s
as horror and science fi ction B-movies, and such writers Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Love-
craft, and Ray Bradbury, some of
whose stories were adapted di-
rectly by the comic. Gaines and
Feldstein had a shared love of
such stories, and Gaines would
come up with one-line plots or
“springboards” that Feldstein and
others would fl esh out into twist-
in-the-tale stories with often
gruesome moral retribution for
adulterers and murders. American
literature from Ambrose Bierce to
O. Henry to Damon Runyon has
long had a love of quirky short
stories with twist endings. In Ron
Mann’s 1988 documentary, Comic
Book Confi dential, Feldstein com-
ments that what he and Gaines
did was much like what televi-
sion series such as Th e Twilight
Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Pres-
ents did subsequently. Th e graphic
design and dynamic cover art of
Tales from the Crypt have also be-
come iconic. Th e cover to issue
#28 featured a cutaway of a char-
acter being buried alive while theA three-dimensional issue of Tales from the Crypt of Terror
(1953). Photofest