Shock Treatment And Other Stories

Forced to abandon its horror and crime comics, EC turned to a pair of well-crafted, high-tension medical dramas by later Hall of Fame greats Jack Kamen, Reed Crandall, Graham Ingels, and Joe Orlando — Shock Treatment And Other Stories collects them all.

When the Comics Code forced EC Comics to abandon its popular horror and crime titles, EC launched a “New Direction” in hopes of attracting new readers. Among the new titles were two medical dramas, M.D. and Psychoanalysis, which were competing in a rapidly changing media landscape, increasingly dominated by television. It would be more than five years before TV caught up with EC with shows such as Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey, and The Eleventh Hour — precursors to the medical shows we know today.

Artists Jack Kamen, Reed Crandall, George Evans, Graham Ingels, and Joe Orlando paired with writers Robert Bernstein, Jack Oleck, Carl Wessler, and Daniel Keyes to produce a series of taut tales of physical and psychological crises and the doctors who must make split-second life-or-death decisions. All the stories from M.D. and Psychoanalysis are collected in this volume, including: “The Fight for Life” (Ingels) — mankind’s fight against disease before modern medicine; “Shock Treatment” (Evans) — a young boy’s attempt at suicide; “The Lesson” (Crandall) — the race to save the life of a teenage girl mutilated in a high-speed crash; and “When You Know How” (Orlando) — during a blizzard, a doctor has to perform emergency surgery on a critically injured boy in his family’s kitchen using only the utensils at hand.

Plus: all twelve stories from Psychoanalysis, each masterfully drawn by Jack Kamen and most written by Daniel Keyes about the struggles of three patients to reconcile their inner fears and turmoil with their outward lives. With an introduction by Dr. Travis Langley, author of the heroes-and-villains Psychology book series.