THE EC ARCHIVES Shock Illustrated

Enjoy the complete run of Shock Illustrated, an innovative "Picto-Fiction" magazine containing illustrated prose stories of wife swapping, drugs, prostitution, thrill killers, and more of society's dark underbelly -- written by Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon), and drawn by Jack Kamen, Reed Crandall, Graham Ingels, Angelo Torres, George Evans and Al Williamson! Painted covers. Includes the rare 3rd issue, only 100 ever distributed, plus the never-published lost fourth issue, with pencils from Frank Frazetta! And...scripts for issue 5! With the advent of the Comics Code, EC decided to attempt a bold new experiment. Just like they took Mad into a magazine format, to get around the code, they kicked off new titles as magazines, with sophisticated, longer stories and in a prose-and-art format, a hybrid rarely attempted before in comics. And the artists gave it their best, as you will see here. Brilliant work, but sadly, the public wasn't ready for comics in a magazine format, aimed at a mature audience. But soon they would be. Not ten years later, Warren would start an empire doing the same thing, with Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. And he used the same EC artists and the same horror and crime themes. This is how it all began. Brilliant work, not to be missed.