Foul Play and Other Stories -- Jack Davis

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 <em>Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, Crime SuspenStories</em>, and <em>Shock SuspenStories</em> -- 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. <p>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!".</p><p>We round out this volume with all three of Davis's EC science-fiction adventu