The creation of picto-fiction was intertwined with the sad demise of EC comic book publishing. In a last ditch attempt to keep EC going, publisher William Gaines put out a line of magazines that were not quite comics and not quite short stories. Picto-fiction might have been comics without word balloons or perhaps prose with a heck of a lot of illustrations, but it was certainly a showcase of some of the most talented artists in comic book history. This web-site is dedicated to exposing to the world this bastard hybrid of words and pictures.

And now these works are fully available in a hardbound collection from the fine folks at Gemstone Publishing!!

And now a few words from Is This Tomorrow? creators Woody Compton and Kelly Shane…

Why the fascination with the Picto-Fiction titles from EC? Well, to many comic collectors who are big fans of the EC comics, they are the Great Unknown. Very few issues were printed in the first place, fewer survived, and they have yet to be reprinted.

By the time I was first exposed to EC's New Trend comics, reprints were already affordable and available. My first exposure to EC was in the Overstreet Price Guide that featured a cover story about the history of William Gaines' EC Comics and the ensuing backlash towards crime and horror comics. The art immediately grabbed me as it was clearly superior to the superhero illustration I had been exposed to at the time. I was also intrigued by The Seduction of the Innocent and how it brought an end to EC's horror comics. In that price guide, publisher Russ Cochran was already offering his hardbound reprints of the New Trend comics, and Eastern Comics reprints were available at most comic conventions at reasonable prices. As Russ Cochran continued to release his gorgeous hardbound volumes, all of the New Trend, all of the New Direction, and most of the important Pre-Trend comics were reprinted. The only unavailable EC comics of note were the 3-D issues and the Picto-Fiction.

The 3-D issues are of interest not only to 3-D enthusiasts, but EC fans as well due to the fact that the art from those stories is not available elsewhere as it had to be drawn specifically for the 3-D format. The stories were versions of earlier stories redrawn by a different artist and would certainly of interest to the EC completist.

The Picto-Fiction titles were something different entirely. In an attempt to avoid the restrictions imposed by the Comics Code Authority, Gaines went to a magazine format and had text stories with a number of accompanying illustrations. These magazines only lasted a few issues and were very poorly circulated. Mad magazine successfully made the transformation where the Picto-Fictions books did not. Mad received wider newsstand circulation and enjoyed greater popularity than the Picto-Fiction titles, and went on to be an icon of American culture.

These Picto-Fiction comics have never been reprinted, possibly because they aren't truly “comics”. It may also be that the page size doesn't fit the format of the other reprints-- I don't know the actual reason. I do know that these magazines are very hard to find. In fact, finding someone who has one is unusual. Therefore I assume most EC enthusiasts would enjoy seeing the contents of these magazines.

The purpose of this site is to make some of this content available to be read and enjoyed.

The EC picto-fiction magazines were an anomaly in the history of American publishing, part of a desperate attempt by comic book publisher William Gaines to keep his company going and his artists employed.

In the wake of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, and the creation of the Comic Code Authority, Gaines had to scrap the better part of his entire line of comic books. In 1955, he jettisoned the groundbreaking New Trend titles, such as Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror, that brought his company prosperity in the early 1950s.

Gaines had been proud of his publications, and justifiably so, as EC has assembled perhaps the greatest collection of comic book talent in the history of American comics.

He replaced books like Haunt of Fear, Crime Supenstories and Shock Supenstories with much tamer titles, such as Impact, Extra and Psychoanalysis. Though these EC comics carried the Comic Code stamp of approval, Gaines couldn't get them properly distributed. His comic books had been blackballed due to EC's name being associated, quite rightly, with the most gruesome and tasteless of horror comics.

By the end of 1955, this New Direction line of titles came to an end, as did EC's comic book publishing.

But there was one holdover from the New Trend period-- albeit in a mutated form. In 1955, EC converted the surprise-hit comic Mad into a magazine format, thus avoiding the wrath of anti-comic crusaders. Editor/creator Harvey Kurtzman redesigned and redefined Mad as something utilizing the strengths of comic book forms, but not a comic book. The rest of that story is history, with Mad magazine becoming perhaps the most influential publication of the latter 20th century, with Playboy as its only serious contender.

One suspects that the logic behind the creation of picto-fiction was this: If Mad could make the transition to magazine format, then why not other New Trend titles? Two of EC's picto-fiction titles, Shock Illustrated and Crime Illustrated, took their names directly from EC comic titles, and the EC horror annual Tales of Terror became the picto-fiction Adult Tales of Terror Illustrated. All three of these magazines included reworked New Trend comic book stories. The fourth magazine in the line, Confessions Illustrated, was a throwback to EC's pre-trend romance titles.

In reformatting Mad into a magazine, Kurtzman rebuilt the comic from ground up, keeping the same artists and the same sensibility, but using new forms and a very different approach. In comparison, the picto-fiction titles were essentially EC comics with fewer pictures and no word balloons. The EC style, set by editor/writer Al Feldstein, was always very text-heavy. If one took away the art, many EC stories would hold up as very short, if not overly descriptive, prose tales in a pulp magazine style.

Neither fish nor fowl, the picto-fiction format, reportedly created by artist Jack Kamen, looked like a halfway meeting place between the pulps and comic books. Unlike the reconstructed Mad, they were a direct link to EC's comic book past.

The commercial strengths or failings of this novel type of magazine, trumpeted on the covers as “a new form of adult entertainment,” are hard to judge, as Gaines again met with distribution difficulties. The four titles began in late 1955 and early 1956 with planned bi-monthly publishing schedules. By their second issues, they were listed as quarterlies, and only Shock Illustrated ever had a third issue published, though it was never distributed.

The magazine line's demise certainly wasn't due to a lack of talent, as the roster of artists included a bevy of EC greats; Gaines just couldn't get the books on the newsstands. Due to their failure, he could not offer any more work to most of these artists, thus dispersing the amazing pool of talent EC had acquired over the years.

The end of the picto-fiction magazines was the final post-script of the greatest era of EC's history, to many the greatest period in the history of comic books.