Grave Business and Other Stories

Grave Business and Other Stories by Graham Ingels
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Grave Business and Other Stories is a collection of EC Comics stories illustrated by Graham Ingels.

After reading EC books featuring Wally Wood and Jack Davis, I was skeptical about whether or not Graham Ingels could continue the hot streak. His art features a lot of little lines and doesn't have the bold punchiness of either Wood or Davis. However, the first and last panels of the second page of Jury Duty won me over. One depicts a man walking to his execution with the shadow of the gallows behind him. The other is a down the trapdoor shot after the execution. I was hooked.

There are 27 stories between the covers of Grave Business, including the title one about a crooked funeral home owner and his ridiculous markups. Like all EC stories, he gets what's coming to him. The tales range cover such diverse subjects as Frankenstein's monster, vampires, werewolves, taxidermy, spiders, a ventriloquist dummy, crooked orphanage proprietors, cheating wives, cheating husbands, and much, much more.

Like I said earlier, I wasn't enthralled with Ingels' art at first but Ghastly Graham grew on me in a hurry. His fine line work made some pages look like woodcuts. Black and white is probably the best way to look at a lot of his pages. I would think color would just muddy things up. My favorite art of all was probably in Ooze In The Cellar. Graham Ingels knows his way around a pseudopod.

Grave Business was the third Fantagraphics collection of EC Horror I've read and the best one yet. Four out of five stars.



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