Tags
coffin, Death, EC Comics, EC Comics reprints, halloween, Haunt of Fear, horror, Ray Bradbury, wake for the living
‘Tis the season to be spooky, so let’s enjoy a horrifying tale.
Back in October 2012, I celebrated the monstrous month of morbidity by sharing with you all the scans I could find of Ray Bradbury stories that had been adapted by EC Comics. You can access them all by clicking this link to my tagged archives. Since then, some delightfully obsessed readers contacted me to fill in gaps in my research and share additional scans. And, oddly enough, several institutions of higher learning now include a few of my Bradbury blog posts in their literary curricula for students.
No, that isn’t the horrifying tale. Use your head!
The horrifying tale for today is called The Coffin. It appeared in Haunt of Fear #16 in 1952, written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Jack Davis, and was reprinted in 1996 by Gemstone, who made so many great EC Comics available and affordable for a new generation. I believe this version also appeared in a rare collection called The Autumn People.
Bradbury’s original version appeared in his first published book Dark Carnival in 1947, and is sometimes called Wake for the Living. If you want a copy of that vintage tome, you will need around $1000. But The Coffin was reprinted in 1980 in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, which you can currently get on Kindle for $12, and affordable print copies still exist. Finally, The Coffin was adapted for television as part of Ray Bradbury Theater in the mid-1980s. You can see that episode in the video at the end of this post.
So, without further ado, here is a gallery of this slice of spooky weirdness from EC Comics.
Mars Will Send No More 