This is a chilling and improbable tale of the living dead: Even though they were savaged by the politeness police and left lifeless some 60 years ago, EC comic books, which spawned notorious titles like Tales From the Crypt, Shock SuspenStories and Mad, have become the comics that refused to die.

Just last month, Fantagraphics released two more albums in its EC Comics Library, started last year, and will soon publish its first volume of illustrator interviews in “The EC Artists.” Dark Horse Comics has revived the EC Archives, and will continue the series with “Tales From the Crypt: Volume 4,” next month. IDW Publishing is producing stunning, portfolio-size Artist’s Editions, with work by EC all-stars like Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman (who created Mad magazine) and others. IDW also put out biographies this year of Wood and EC’s indispensable editor-writer-artist, Al Feldstein.

So why, decades after its death, is EC still alive — and even thriving?

Gary Groth, Fantagraphics president and editor of its EC Library, thinks he knows. “The EC line represents a high-water mark in the history of commercial comics,” he wrote in an e-mail. “They were arguably the best commercial comics company in the history of the medium, and their list of artists and writers between 1950 and 1955 represents a Who’s Who of the most accomplished craftsmen working in comics at that time.”

And in an essay this year, he wrote: “EC came as close as a mainstream comics publisher could to being the comics equivalent of Barney Rosset’s Grove Press. What other comics publisher would even think of adapting stories from The Saturday Evening Post, use stories by Guy de Maupassant or steal from the best — Ray Bradbury?”