EC Comics' iconic style returns in fan art from creator Tyler Pennington, with cover recreations from publications like now-defunct Comics Code Authority, but very few have done it in such a highly rendered and classically pulpy style, evoking the creations of Virgil Finlay, Graham Ingels and Bernie Wrightson.
Humor, horror and comeuppance are among the most common themes employed by EC Comics, and the writers and artists who made EC Comics are legendary to legions of fans for outraging censors by telling the macabre stories they wanted to tell, despite what others thought. EC Comics has a long legacy, including comics, movies, television and the sadly discontinued Mad Magazine, but for many fans, the peak of EC will always be its horror comics, which inspired HBO's horror anthology Tales from the Crypt.
Feeling inspired by the EC greats, Pennington started leaning into his EC Comics influences and posting fan art to Instagram. Pennington's page is filled with ghoulish imagery that would be perfectly at home within the pages of Tales from the Crypt, with ghouls, human sacrifice, uncanny terrors, and more than a few drawings of EC Comics' iconic Ghoulunitics. Each piece takes roughly 20 to 40 total hours to complete depending on the drawing, and are mostly drawn at a size of 11x14. In fascinating posts like the one below, Pennington shares not just his own art, but the original art and process videos of the work that went into their recreation.
The skill and effort on display is jaw-dropping and reminiscent of the best of the pulp illustrators. Pennington's take on Tales from the Crypt almost imagines what EC Comics might have been like had they been created 50 years earlier, paying tribute not only to the artists at EC Comics but their inspirations as well. Pennington employs drawing techniques that are increasingly uncommon today that can only be the result of hundreds of hours at the drawing table, and ion for the art he's creating. Pennington leaves no stone unstippled, and each face forever etched with fear, as is readily apparent in the piece below.
Asked about his first exposure to EC Comics and how it impacted his art by Screen Rant, Pennington replied:
I guess my first exposure would have been through the HBO series. I loved it as a kid and didn’t realize for years that it was actually based on comics. When I got into my teens I discovered a love for comics and eventually put the two together. EC since then has been a big inspiration to me. Even though I’ve only recently been pushing out that type of work I’ve loved it for a long time. I think now more than ever it has made the biggest impact in my work. I feel like my artistic skill and interests have finally started catching up with each other and I’m happy to be doing a lot of EC.
While Tyler Pennington is inspired by the EC Comics greats that came before him enough to create bone-chilling Tales from the Crypt fan art, there is no doubt that had he been born 80 years ago, he'd be one of the artists whose name fans would see scrawled on the side of the Cryptkeeper's tomb.
