Birthday greetings to a comics legend
Davis, in fact, drew perhaps the most notorious tale in EC's history. "Foul Play," like many of the stories that appeared in such EC titles as Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, and Vault of Horror, was a revenge tale, this time centered around the game of baseball. In a series of panels that Dr. Fredric Wertham highlighted in his anti-comics screed Seduction of the Innocent, and that Senator Estes Kefauver would put on trial as examples of the imagery comics were using to pervert the minds of American youth, Davis depicted the zombified victims of a villainous ballplayer dissecting him and using his body parts as baseball equipment: His limbs became bats; his intestines, baselines; his heart, home plate; his head, the ball.
Gruesome stuff, to be sure, and probably in that instance edging beyond the boundaries of good taste, at least for the 1950s. But ironically, the same Jack Davis who so vividly portrayed such frightful sights later became universally renowned as a humor cartoonist. He received the Rueben Award as Cartoonist of the Year in 2000.
There's a great bio of Jack Davis at Bud Plant's Comic Art site, if you'd like more insight into the career of this enormously talented artist.
Best wishes, Mr. Davis.
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