Whisper House Press

Comic: EC Epitaphs From the Abyss Vol. 1 (collecting Epitaphs From the Abyss #1-4)

Creative Team: Oni press has a production team of dozens, and the collection features over forty contributing authors and artists… 

Publisher: Oni Press

Publication Date: May, 2025

Capone’s Rating: 5 of 5 ⭐s

You may have read my review of Fuck This Place from last month in which I mentioned I’ve been reading Epitaphs From the Abyss. Epitaphs was the main impetus for me picking up a bunch of other horror comics. I got lucky: Oni Press granted me a review copy of the new collection of four comics done in the style of the EC Comic series from over seventy years ago. Why this seventy-year radio silence? It’s interesting.

Here’s our backstory: Gritty comics (not comics about the popular mascot Gritty, but comics with an edge to them) were seen as a part of pro-communist, anti-American activities and contributing to a general moral rot destroying American values in the early 1950s. Sounds whacky, right? Here’s a bit more in the way of Cold War history as regards artists generally and, eventually, comic creators in particular:

In 1947, the Second Red Scare began for creatives with a public incident in which a group commonly dubbed the “Hollywood Ten”—a group of ten directors and screenwriters—refused to testify about their political beliefs. They’d been called to testify in front of HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee, tasked with investigating threats of subversion of the United States). These people went to prison and then were unofficially blacklisted (basically, no one would hire them) for the next decade (one of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, was hired in 1960 to direct Spartacus, and HUAC lost a lot of power after taking on the Army in `54 but held maintained through the decade). During those years of moral panic, many Americans were subpoenaed to testify, and folks tried everything from refusing to answer questions to trying to defend themselves to using their Fifth Amendment rights to avoid saying anything that might be taken as compromising. It went badly for everyone involved. (Fun fact: Bobby Kennedy was a McCarthy staffer).

Just as the film industry began self-policing, the comic publishing industry hurried to prove itself loyal. And so, American publishing companies threw a grenade into their own works, submitting to bullies and canning comic series like Epitaphs and Tales from the Crypt when the biggest publishing association formed the Comics Code Authority (CCA) to self-censor its members. Famously, even the words “horror” and “crime” were banned from appearing in titles. Black protagonists were often shit-canned, as were plot lines that made the “bad guys” too sympathetic. As with other codes (in TV, film, and radio), crime could never be seen as paying off, and depictions of sex were strictly prohibited. So EC comics went all in on its one promising series, MAD magazine, and shuttered everything else circa 1956.

And here we are, . Oni Press has been around for some 25+ years now and is picking up defunct lines like Epitaphs and Cruel Universe (press release here)—and hints at others to come!—to print all new stories in the style of the old, somewhat infamous (for some reason) horror and oddity comics.

So how is the new EC Epitaphs? First, a disclaimer. If you read my review of Fuck This Place, you know I’m so close to 100% brand-new to comics on the whole that we might as well just say that it’s a totally new medium for me (see very bottom for my comic-reading resume). But I’m not new to storytelling or to horror, as you know. So I’m doing my best here, and maybe I’ll OPEN YOUR EYES (nod to Clay McCleod Chapman’s recent, excellent novel) and get you checking out a new medium alongside me.

The short version here—the throughline—is that these comics are awesome. The stories are short, salty, and pack a punch. There are morality tales (along the lines of “be careful what you wish for”—not the anti-communist morality tales McCarthy would have loved). There are twisty turns (“Family Values” is my favorite in the bunch, a comic blueprint for a killer Black Mirror episode if there ever were one). And there’s a lot of blood and guts. Icky!

I breezed through this collection, and I’ll say this: Were I reading these comics one at a time, I’d go nuts waiting for each issue. I’m glad to be stumbling into Epitaphs after a complete volume has been assembled. The storytelling in this collection is strong, and the art supports the stories. I can’t wait for Volume 2.

In the meantime, thanks to Oni Press’s EC Comics Epitaphs From the Abyss, I now have a distinct hunger for horror comics. Drop your recs in the comments or send me a note on BlueSky!

My comic-reading resume, in toto: I read Spawn for its first 50 or so issues and a ton of Calvin & Hobbes and a few Batman collections when I was a kid… and then Doonesbury when I was in college… but compared to most comic book readers out there, I’m a greenhorn.