EC actually was both story driven and Narrative box/dialogue heavy- with the exception of maybe the Kurtzman war books. I think the difference in the art quality of the EC (which is early 50s) and the late 30's thru 40's comes down to generational issues as well as editorial/publisher ones.
Gaines, the publisher of EC, and his editors could recognize quality, demanded it, and nurtured it. They were fans of the medium, not just paper pushers making a buck off of a niche product they could produce by and for a lowest common denominator.
By this time, you were also entering into a generation of artists that had grown up with comics (and superior newspaper strips) and they could make qualitative distinctions.
The best newspaper hero-strip cartoonists (Caniff, Crane, Raymond, Foster, etc) were world class illustrators/cartoonists/storytellers. Newspaper strips were a prestigious gig - unlike comics early years which was full of publishers using amateurish, uneducated artist to simply produce pages to meet demand.
The EC artists grew up being able to see the difference between quality work and hack work. Their visual vocabularies became more sophisticated and they were able to draw on the experience and work of their predecessors in terms of what not to do as well as what to do.

You were also out of the desperation of the war and depression years and entering into a more consumer culture. Photography was now in the realm of more casual hobbyists, and within reach of more hard working 'starving' cartoonists. Photo reference and the tools to make them, were well within reach. When you go back into the early Golden Age books,  Jack Burnley (who did Starman, and various Superman and Batman gigs) is one of the very few artists you'll find where you could tell he was using photo reference. He would use complex Sickles style chiarascuro whereas 95% of the others were using a simple clear line, flat color style.

Also as the 50's progress and you get into the 60's- you are getting young artists coming along who specifically want to work in the field, as opposed to being forced to work in it because they can't get work in more prestigious and lucrative areas like magazine illustration or newspapers. And alongside those are now middle aged artists like Kubert and Infantino and Toth who got started early in their teens and have now fully mastered the craft.

Basically the Golden Age was a lot like the Image Age of the early 90's. Product was selling in vast quantities and strong draftsmanship or storytelling skills were not necessarily what was required or admired to have a strong selling book. So the publishers were content to shovel out as much crap as the public would buy.

Last Edited By: Paul Denham May 5 13 9:13 PM. Edited 1 times.