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Which of the EC Archives are you personaly most excited about

That's tough to say. What makes EC great, and to some the greatest comics ever produced, is the diversity of their stories. I've always been partial to WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY because of the quality of stories Feldstein wrote for those books and I adore Wally Wood and Al Williamson. On the other hand, I'm a huge classic horror film buff (I co-created and designed MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT magazine) so I'm also partial to the horror titles with Ingels and Craig being two of my favorites. Working on the Achives has aloud me to re-examine the EC war titles and there's no denying Kurtzman's brilliance, both in his storytelling and his use of EC's stable of artists. Let's not forget SHOCK's "preachies," they were way ahead of their time. So I just can't pin down one title. I think that may be why so many people are either rediscovering these stories or enjoying them for the first time, it's their diversity.
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what exactly have you designed for these volumes?

I've designed everything you see with these books aside from the original art of course. Russ and I go back a few years as I was a designer and writer for him on COMIC BOOK MARKETPLACE magazine. He pretty much handed me the whole ball of wax. The whole idea of the EC ARCHIVES started with an issue we were doing of COMIC BOOK MARKETPLACE. The theme of the issue was Jewish comic creators and we decided to reprint the SHOCK story "Hate!". We had Marie Severin hand paint and color it. It turned out beautiful and that was the germ that started the Archives. I supervise all the coloring for the Archives. Proofing and correcting every page, my wife is a colorist for DC and Marvel, so I know a bit about comic coloring. The dustjackets, table of contents, boilerplate page, foreword, house ads, EC history pages are all designed by me. Even the size of the Archives was a joint decision between Russ and me. The amount of white space around the art is my decision. With all of this, the real man behind it all is Russ Cochran. None of this would happen without him. If you love these volumes, you owe him a big thank you. In addition to that, he's a good person and a good friend.
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Did Marie Severin have any input into the new coloring?

As I said before, Marie was the inspiration for these books and we wanted her to be involved, but at this time she just doesn't have the energy or time. But we try to follow her style as much as we can.

Hope this has helped and shed some light on things. Got to get back to work, there's always a deadline to meet.

Michael Kronenberg
Art Director/Designer
EC ARCHIVES