The EC Archives: Two-Fisted Tales Volume 2 (EC ARCHIVES TWO FISTED TALES HC) Hardcover – August 8, 2007

My man loved this

Good old fashioned "Two Fisted" tales. Still fun after all these years.

Great had more fun reading this than I did when I was a kid!!! Book printing excellent Would buy more if available.

Read Two-fisted Tales as a youngster and loved them. Great to be able to revisit those days and the great stories.

In his forward, Rocco Versaci makes the claim that “the entire body of the EC war comics stands as the most sophisticated, complete, and daring representation of war that has ever appeared in any medium.” I’m not in a position to judge this claim. I haven’t even read All Quiet on the Western Front or watched Ken Burns' The Civil War. Could all the great books, movies and paintings of war, in some sense, be upstaged by 10c comics which sold on U.S. newsstands in the early 1950s? I don’t know. But there is no doubt that Harvey Kurtzman, who wrote all of these stories and illustrated some of them, along with his fellow artists, achieved something truly remarkable within the comic book form.While most of the stories look at war from the perspective of the soldiers, the larger context is established by stories like Rubble!, in which a Korean farmer slowly and laboriously builds a house for his family, an effort and a dream which will all go to waste with the arrival of war. And in Hungnam! the destruction of that city is presented from the perspective of a stray dog, an embodiment of life’s intrinsic sanity silenced by the madness of war. As for the soldiers, we have a cross-section of the human condition - the brave, the defeated, the vengeful, the fear-driven and the fool-hardy, in conflicts which range from the American Revolution and Custer’s Last Stand up until the Korean War. The latter is the setting for the majority of the stories. It was being fought at the time they were being written.A highlight of this volume is issue No. 26, - March/April 1952 which presents an account of the retreat from the Changjin Reservoir over a series of four stories, each presented from a different perspective. The last story here is the one of the lost dog in Hungnam. This issue really highlights Kurtzmann’s dedication to accuracy, to using the comic book form to inform as well as entertain. And from time to time, if he did get some small detail wrong, men who actually fought in those battles would point out the error on the letters page.I was led to the EC war comics via my love of their horror and science fiction titles, I was surprised to find that I love them just as much as those more fanciful creations. If you love comics but generally don’t read war comics, or you are fascinated by war but don’t generally read comics at all, you won’t regret dipping into the work of Kurtzmann et al.

Well done archive of great comics.

Hardback reprints in colour excellent clear quality Book in mint condition

O livro é óptimo, um bom exemplo do que estava a ser feito no início dos anos 1950 pela EC. Wallace Wood, John Severin, Jack Davis e Harvey Kutzman são os nomes envolvidos nestas histórias. Infelizmente, o livro demorou a chegar, por conta da Paack, que me colocou ao barulho como se estivesse envolvido no atraso. A Amazon pouco fez e o serviço de resposta a e-mails não funciona, já que tende a ignorá-los. Ainda estou à espera do telefonema do apoio ao cliente para avaliar a entrega atrasadíssima! Enfim....

War comics for the war comic fan. You got to know what your getting into when you read this stuff, its an action packed, gut wrenching ride through war - when you consider that these stories were aimed at a male, teenage audience of the 1950's the work and depicted morality is pretty impressive

Pure nostalgia. Love it