Splatter up! It’s midnight and the moon is high in the night sky. Most folks are sound asleep but not these Bush League Baseball players. Tonight they exact their revenge for a fallen team member taken out of the game by foul play. That’s also the title of Fantagraphics’s latest collection gathered from the archives of EC Comics, Foul Play and Other Stories, that feature the dark art of Jack Davis. Not only does this volume include stories from the usual suspects Al Feldstein, William M. Gains, and Otto Binder but it also contains three by the legendary Ray Bradbury.
Buy Foul Play and Other StoriesThe narratives presented here are pulled from the various comic book titles that EC turned out in their heyday such as Aces High and The Crypt of Terror. These tales aren’t all straight spooky, grim, and gory affairs. We get to see Jack Davis shine as he brings to life fighter pilots from both WWI (The New C.O., The Case of Champagne) and WWII (Iron Man) as well as space travelers and everyday ordinary people caught up in murder and mayhem. There are also some tales that have a film noir feel to them, the standout being the boxing themed Uppercut about a pugilist who gets revenge on a manager that complains his fighter has “no guts.”
There also seems to be a strong (and rather gory) food theme running through some of these stories. We have A Peach of a Plot, Who Doughnut, Cold Cuts, and one about a BBQ titled Garden Party but I assure you this party has nothing to do with the one Ricky Nelson sang about. The Bradbury stories (The Coffin, Let’s Play Poison, The Black Ferris) are superb and Davis’s artwork leaves us wanting more. The Black Ferris would eventually evolve into the outstanding Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Whether he’s illustrating war yarns, monster-driven adventure tales (Tombs Day), or sci-fi outings (Kaleidoscope), his characters are well drawn and convey the terror of the situation, though the titular Foul Play is where things get insane and out of hand. This tale of a championship baseball game gone bad was so alarming that it set in motion a fierce wave of comic book hate that helped hasten the downfall of EC Comics.
That twisted tale of the American pastime along with such offerings as Out of His Head were so disturbing that they directly led to the formation of the Comics Code Authority and would serve as prime examples in psychologist Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham claimed such comics were a leading cause of juvenile delinquency and the decline of western civilization (that last bit I added for flair). When one thinks of EC comics and Tales From the Crypt, those are the types of stories that usually come to mind first. Foul Play, though, is totally worthy of the legend that has built up around it and must be read and looked upon closely for one to absorb its full gory glory.
As always with these collections by Fantagraphics, there are great essays that give us wonderful insight about the artist’s and writers involved as well as providing some background on what was happening in the EC Comics universe. Foul Play and Other Stories is definitely another home run for Fantagraphics.
