Home To Stay! The Complete Ray Bradbury EC Stories [review]

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: “I heard you got Bradbury’s interest in adapting his stories in comic book form by doing a couple without his foreknowledge.”

WILLIAM F. GAINES: “That’s the nicest way anybody has ever put it.”

. . .

The first thing I did after getting home from the 2022 San Diego Comic Fest where I learned of this then-upcoming EC Comics anthology was to get my pre-order in immediately –

-- and, man, am I ever glad I did!

I presume most folks reading this know the backstory, but in case you don’t:

EC Comics ripped off Ray Bradbury, but instead of getting angry, Ray wrote a letter praising the adaptations then ever so casually mentioning he hadn’t yet received his royalty check…

Publisher William F Gaines fired the check off ASAP then asked Ray if they could adapt more of his stories.

“Sure,” said Ray, “Just pay me and put my name in the cover.”

Thus began of a beautiful publishing relationship, one celebrated in this great oversized Fantagraphics collection of not just all the official Ray Bradbury stories EC adapted, but also the ones =ahem!= “inspired” by Ray but uncredited to him.

The EC adaptations occurred at a sweet spot in Ray’s career.  Though some of his earliest stories showed signs of promise, a lot of what he wrote and sold then reads pretty gawdawful even by the low standards of pulp magazines of that era.

Ray cited his short story “The Lake” (which is not quite a ghost story…) as the moment he realized he got a handle on his writing muse and after that came a decade or so of pure gold.

Even after that golden age, he still wrote top notch stories and essays, and lived out his life as one of America’s most respected writers.

The EC Comics stories played no small part in that.

As I’ve oft pointed out, behind Ray’s aw-shucks small town midwestern boy exterior percolated one of the shrewdest minds when it came to marketing and self-promotion.

Case in point, when tipped off by his good friend / special effects animator Ray Harryhausen that Warner Bros. planned to plagiarize “The Foghorn” as the basis for an upcoming movie, Ray didn’t waste time or money suing but got Harryhausen to set up a meeting with the studio suits to discuss writing the screenplay.

Ray got ‘em hooked real good then dropped the bombshell he actually wrote the short story they intended to rip off.

The suits blanched, expecting a threat of a lawsuit, but instead Ray agreed to write the screenplay at standard WGA rates…

…so long as they put in all the advertising “based on the Saturday Evening Post story by Ray Bradbury.”

The suits, thinking they were getting off cheaply, readily agreed, patting themselves on the backs for dodging a lawsuit that could have put the kibosh on their movie.

And when The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms came out, millions of Americans saw posters and advertising that told them Ray Bradbury wasn’t merely Ray Bradbury but rather “Ray Bradbury, Saturday Evening Post writer” and then holy %#@& that made him a Major American Author!

Pretty savvy for a kid from Waukegan, huh?

The EC stories did the same thing.  While not the most popular comic books of the era, they sure impressed tens of thousands of young readers that Ray Bradbury was a name to note when looking for sci-fi and horror stories, and that gave Ray a market penetration the rest of the sci-fi community could only envy.

Home To Stay! The Complete Ray Bradbury EC Stories is an exquisite volume, over three hundred pages of early 1950s sci-fi goodness.

The stories EC “selected” included some of Ray’s best, selections from The Martian Chronicles and Dark Carnival that retain their power to this day.

Wisely, Fantagraphics opted not to color the original black and white art.  Designed for conventional four-color comic book printing, the original black and white art is strong on its own, but can be ill served by modern printing standards.

Trying to ape the original garish art style -- which worked well for a comic book printed on cheap paper -- would produce an eye gouging ugly mess on the large size and higher grade paper Fantagraphics selected.

Conversely, coloring it to modern standards would undermine the strength of the original art.

Better by far the high quality reproduction of this volume.

And the stories themselves?

Well, first off they’re illustrated by a bevy of powerhouse hitters from that generation of artists, names that are familiar and beloved to this day — Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Will Elder, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen, Roy Krenkel, Bernard Krigstein, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Angelo Torres, Al Williamson, and Wallace Wood.

The stories themselves are adapted by EC editor Al Feldstein to varying degrees of success.  When he no longer needed to hide his source material, Feldstein could let Ray’s own words do the heavy lifting, and those stories can absolutely soar.

Included in this volume are such timeless Bradbury classics as "A Sound of Thunder", "Touch and Go", "The Million Year Picnic", "Mars Is Heaven","There Will Come Soft Rains…" and of course, “The Lake.”

Feldstein, of course, got Ray’s attention by mashing up the short stories “Kaleidoscope” and “Rocket Man” into the title story, “Home To Stay,” a blend that Ray himself later admitted he should have thought of when writing those stories.  He gave serious consideration to suing EC but instead chose the Christian thing to do (in Ray’s own words) and sent of his famous letter that (a) got him paid and (b) started this incredible collaboration.

And I must say, the stories work best collected together, not folded in with other, more outrageous work.  I’ve read reprints and facsimile editions of early EC comics and while there are diamonds to be found, there’s also a lot of zirconium.

Collecting all Ray’s stories in one really gorgeous volume is a brilliant idea, and one I’m glad Fantagraphics risked.

© Buzz Dixon