EC Comics: Crime Illustrated No.1

The first thing that you notice about this publication is how desperately they are trying to avoid the label of "comics". Comics at this point have apparently already become characterized as a childish pastime, to such a degree that this magazine would rather refer to itself as "PICTO-FICTION: a new form of Adult Entertainment!" This seems especially odd to me, as I don't normally think of mystery pulps as being a highly respectable literary form in their own right.

On the other hand, the stories themselves are in a different format than what we commonly think of as "comics" today. The text itself is in fact enough to tell the stories on their own, and were probably written that way before someone decided to commission some illustrations for them. In this way they more resemble an illustrated short story than a true comic. There are no word balloons, and dialogue is simply written in the body text and indicated with quotations. There are few, if any, examples of actions or story events that carry from panel to panel; that is to say, the pictures never really tell any part of the story that the words aren't. Seeing the expressions of characters can help to add emotional weight to the events, but they aren't adding anything new. So maybe the publishers simply decided not to call it a comic because they didn't think it was one.

While it is interesting to see this sort of "proto-comic", it sort of pains me to think what could have been done with a little more care for the possibilities that comics afford, especially in the case of the Murder Mystery story. Classic mystery stories are meant to engage the reader by providing a puzzle that the reader could potentially solve, even before the protagonist does, if they're observant. By adding illustrations, the artist could leave visually clues for the savvy reader to discover, that might not even be acknowledged in the text. Of course, this particular mystery story, "Fall Guy for Murder", isn't really meant to be read in that way anyway. But the point still stands. Even showing a silhouette of the figure behind the curtain before the final revelation could have added to the overall effect of the story.