With his wholesome approach, Jack Kamen stood out amongst the
grandguignol grunge, gritty realism, or futuristic dazzle of his fellow
EC cartoonists -- but his brilliant editor/writer Al Feldstein found a
way to exploit the surface innocence of his style with seemingly nice
stories of romance gone horribly wrong, or future fantasies with an
unexpectedly brutal twist. And nowhere did Kamen's clean-but-lush
graphics work better than in the stories he created for EC's
science-fiction comics. The title story, "Zero Hour" (one of three in
this book adapted from works by Ray Bradbury), set in a Spielbergian
suburban idyll, is particularly well served by Kamen's surface
innocence; "A Lesson in Anatomy" works similar magic, with its
Mayberry-esque setting veering into alien-invasion terror. If there was
any devil in Kamen, it came out in his loving depiction of the female
face and form, and you could see why his hapless heroes were often
fatally entranced with them -- as in "Punishment Without Crime"
(Bradbury again), "He Who Waits!" (a scientist finds an extreme way of
rejoining his eight-inch-tall inamorata), and "Miscalculation!" (the
lucky recipient of a package from the future literally brews his own
harem); even the supercomputer in "Only Human!" proves vulnerable to a
beautiful woman's charms. Zero Hour And Other Stories contains 22
classic EC yarns -- plus the usual all-new biographical, historical, and
critical essays that have made Fantagraphics' EC Library series the
ultimate version of these classics.
