I just read these old writings (out of order, naturally):

I enjoyed reading both, but there was a glaring omission in that neither talked about the worst thing about the Feldstein E.C. stories—more than the Kurtzman, but not exclusively so—the captions. These have too frequently broken what I feel is a critical rule that captions need follow, specifically, that the words and pictures work together to provide something they can't separately. Groth puts it better than I am able: "[...]burdened by formula and cliche, the writing prolix, overwrought, and fatuously earnest."

The worst thing about the captions is that they were so frequently unnecessary.

As a reader, this caption is a complete waste of my time. In fact, the caption wastes my time because it keeps me from spending time parsing the artwork as storytelling because it stomps all over its imagery. This caption takes a wonderful landscape and prevents me from relishing in its details by spitting a few at me. A great writer could spend 1000 words painting this scene for me in the same detail that Krigstein creates with a few dozen pen lines supported by wonderful flat colors.

Many of Krigstein’s stories do not suffer this same indignity, as Kurtzman-as-editor-or-writer had a masterful eye for cartooning and using the whole of the page to tell the story, not relying on dry expository captions to describe what was already so wonderfully rendered.