Entertaining Comics, more commonly known as EC Comics, is a major comic book company.
History
During the 1950s, Entertaining Comics had a virtual monopoly on the industry, which stopped focusing on superheroes and instead focused on swashbuckling pirate stories, starting with Piracy and then a spin-off, Buccaneers.
This changed in 1960 with the seminal release of Tales of the Black Freighter from upstart National Comics, praised for its mature (some would say macabre) storytelling, which many critics felt drastically elevated the art form and ushered in a new age for the medium.
National Comics rose to become a major competitor to Entertaining Comics.[1]
Trivia
- National/DC Comics rising in 1960 to challenge the dominance of Entertaining Comics mirrors the beginning of the "Silver Age of Comic Books", which in real life happened in the 1960s, but with the roles reversed: instead, it was Marvel Comics which rose in the 1960s to challenge the dominance of DC Comics. In the Watchmen universe, DC Comics itself is the more "gritty, outsider" publisher compared to Entertaining Comics. This is also ironic as in the 1950s, EC's comics would be seen as grittier than DC's comics of the time.
