EC Comics

Race, Shock, and Social Protest

Qiana Whitted

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813573106
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Entertaining Comics Group (EC Comics) is perhaps best-known today for lurid horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and for a publication that long outlived the company's other titles, Mad magazine. But during its heyday in the early 1950s, EC was also an early innovator in another genre of comics: the so-called "preachies, " socially conscious stories that boldly challenged the conservatism and conformity of Eisenhower-era America. EC Comics examines a selection of these works—sensationally-titled comics such as "Hate!, " "The Guilty!, " and "Judgment Day!"—and explores how they grappled with the civil rights struggle, antisemitism, and other forms of prejudice in America. Putting these socially aware stories into conversation with EC's better-known horror stories, Qiana Whitted discovers surprising similarities between their narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies. She also recounts the controversy that these stories inspired and the central role they played in congressional hearings about offensive content in comics.The first serious critical study of EC's social issues comics, this book will give readers a greater appreciation of their legacy. They not only served to inspire future comics creators, but also introduced a generation of young readers to provocative ideas and progressive ideals that pointed the way to a better America.

Chapter One

“Spelled Out Carefully in the Captions”

How to Read an EC Magazine

Oh, by the way . . . here’s a little hint! READ ALL THE CAPTIONS IN E-C MAGAZINES AS WELL AS THE BALLOONS. They contain thrilling descriptions, important information pertaining to plot, and time sequences, etc. YOU CANNOT FULLY ENJOY . . . IN FACT, YOU CANNOT FULLY UNDERSTAND OR FOLLOW . . . ANY STORY WITHOUT THOROUGHLY READING EVERY WORD!

—The Crypt Keeper

EC publisher Bill Gaines strived to make the experience of reading an Entertaining Comic fundamentally different from that of other comic-book serials. Continuing story arcs were rare in EC, and there were no recurring superheroes, funny animals, or cowboys to hitch one issue to the next. The bimonthly titles typically adhered to an anthology format with four to six distinct stories—each with a beginning, a middle, and a devastating end.1 Over time, however, the comics of EC’s New Trend line became associated with a shared network of narrative, aesthetic, and promotional strategies that were designed to cultivate serialized reading practices among regular readers. Gaines and his lead editor, Al Feldstein, adopted the portmanteau word SuspenStories2 to brand the intense action of their tightly plotted narratives and the range of artistic styles across genres. As Gaines explained in the February 1954 issue of Writer’s Digest, “The EC approach in all these books is to offer better stories than can be found in other comics. At EC the copy itself—both caption and dialogue—has taken the number one position. This is a switch from the old days of comics when the art was most important and the story secondary. We take our stories very seriously. They are true-to-life adult stories ending in a surprise. That’s our formula.”3

The formula that made EC’s “Jolting Tales of Tension” so successful also helped to create the conditions for more explicit social and political protest, particularly in the comics known as the preachies, which challenged racism, anti-Semitism, anticommunist red-baiting, and other forms of social discrimination in the United States. As horror and crime comics came under fire amid the uproar over juvenile delinquency in the early 1950s, Gaines and Feldstein often pointed to the preachies as evidence of their creative team’s ability to successfully target their messages through the comics form.

This chapter analyzes EC’s attempt to establish clear boundaries between “entertaining” and “educational” reading practices that were mindful of the public’s anxieties over how comic books could influence young readers. Essential to this effort was an editorial emphasis on how narrative captions, dialogue, and other words acted as signposts of meaning. If comics were indeed as hazardous as critics such as Sterling North, Fredric Wertham, and Estes Kefauver feared, the social-protest comics might prove that EC’s writers could contain those dangers and redirect the medium’s unstable visual forces at will. It was an approach that sounded better in theory than in practice, as “The Whipping” from the controversial issue of SuspenStories #14 demonstrates. Yet the creative aims, execution, and impact of the preachies function not only as an extension of the EC tradition but also as an example of the comic-book industry’s early attempts to use the medium and its generic conventions to combat racism and other social ills.

EC writers and artists generated an expansive knowledge base of stock-character tropes and narrative perspectives for the New Trend line that would tantalize first-time readers while empowering more experienced subscribers to navigate any story the company produced. Comics scholars such as Linda Adler-Kassner, Carol Tilley, and Jared Gardner also single out the strategic appeals on EC’s interactive letter pages that encouraged readers to make connections with one another in a “raucous community of misfits.”4 When readers began to follow the Crypt Keeper’s hints to “READ ALL THE CAPTIONS IN E-C MAGAZINES AS WELL AS THE BALLOONS” and once they could assess the differences between the EC artists after turning so many pages, Gaines and Feldstein took more creative risks with consumers in mind. Whether the comic’s surprise twist uncovered a werewolf’s deadly revenge or the racial terror of a lynch mob, Gaines was confident that EC fan-addicts knew the difference between real blood and the fake stuff.

“Virtue Doesn’t Always Have to Triumph”

In An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, Thomas J. Roberts explores the devalued pleasures of so-called low-taste reading habits in genre fiction most commonly associated with pulp magazines and paperbacks. Given that readers who delight in science fiction, western, romance, mystery, and other popular genres often regard these stories as if they were “written by a tradition rather than by an individual,” Roberts’s observations are useful in considering the ways in which EC’s genre comics are consumed as part of a system of texts and contexts.5

Roberts helpfully underscores the kinds of learnedness required to find satisfaction within these traditions, their plot devices, and their character types, and he notes the ways in which each genre’s enthusiasts generate different thresholds of quality: “Most of what seems inexcusably unintelligible in popular fiction is crystal clear to the people who have learned how to read it.”6 Furthermore, as the volume of stories grows, the genres accrue richer, more sophisticated meanings and thematic concerns, which reward those who read in bulk. “Genre reading is system reading,” Roberts explains. “That is, as we are reading the stories, we are exploring the system that created them. Further, the system is always changing, and in reading the new stories the system is writing we are following the changes in that system.”7 An editorial note in the EC war comic Two-Fisted Tales reiterates this view: “As all our old readers know, the E-C line stressed quality . . . TOP-NOTCH QUALITY . . . both in story content and art. If you enjoy this magazine, you’ll enjoy all E-C magazines.”8

Gaines’s call for story ideas in Writer’s Digest offers a glimpse into how EC artists, writers, and editors operated within and against these discursive systems during the early 1950s. The feature, titled “Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots,” invited writers to submit scripts and synopses for their horror, crime, shock, and science-fiction comics. Gaines begins, “We give up. For five years my editors and I have been writing an average of a comic book every six days; five a month, 60 a year. Each magazine contained four stories. That’s 240 plots a year, 1200 in five years. Now we’re written out. Bone dry. And we need your help.”9

The piece goes on to provide a brief history of the company that M. C. Gaines started in an effort to produce educational comics before shifting under his son’s direction to more sensational fare, including Tales from the Crypt and Mad, that proved to be more profitable. The familiar image of Bill Gaines that emerges in the feature is of the reluctant CEO burdened by his father’s legacy but converted by the power of comics. What follows is an intriguing précis of EC story types:

You should know this about our horror books: we have no ghosts, devils, goblins or the like. We tolerate vampires and werewolves, if they follow tradition and behave the way respectable vampires and werewolves should.

We love walking corpse stories.

We’ll accept an occasional zombie or mummy.

And we relish the contes cruels story.

On the other hand, Shock SuspenStories do not contain supernaturalism. We want shock endings to wind up plain, logical suspense stories.

Crime SuspenStories contain no shock. These are logical stories in which the villain tries to get away with murder—and probably does. No cops and robbers stories.

Virtue doesn’t always have to triumph.10

While Bradford W. Wright, David Hajdu, and others have referenced this passage as evidence of EC’s publishing philosophy,11 we should also keep in mind that as an advertisement, the generic descriptions are part of a rhetorical self-fashioning to attract submissions. The categories are just as aspirational as they are explanatory; this is how Gaines saw his comics at their best and how he wanted others to see them.12 Indeed, the emphasis on innovative copy that takes “the number one position” seems especially fitting for a call in a trade journal for writers.

At the same time, the sinister playfulness of the EC way is modeled rather effectively in the Writer’s Digest descriptions. The list includes horror comics with a penchant for the weird, that rely less on the supernatural tricks of your run-of-the-mill haunted house and more on the terrifying twists of fate that were characteristic of the contes cruels.13 EC’s crime and shock comics are anchored by logical progressions and, by extension, the semblance of social reality. Here the status quo is the stage on which the suspenseful windup takes place, thereby intensifying the notion of real-life shock. Wright notes, “Like [James M.] Cain’s novels, EC’s crime comics featured criminals who were for all appearances attractive, middle-class, suburban, ‘normal’ people who happened to possess a disturbing capacity for murder.”14 From this perspective, the subsequent declaration that “virtue doesn’t always have to triumph,” while offered as a genre-specific storytelling trait, reinforces the implied ideological investments of EC’s narrative and artistic choices. At issue in disrupting conventional ideas of normalcy is the question of how society defines virtue to begin with, particularly for those who treat difference as menacing or monstrous.

It is no wonder, then, that the first example of EC’s formula cited in the Writer’s Digest call is not a plot drawn from The Haunt of Fear but a message story called “Blood Brothers” from Shock SuspenStories #13. Gaines summarizes the story: “It’s about Sid, who drives his best friend, Henry Williams, to suicide when he finds out Williams is part Negro. The surprise: after the tragedy has occurred, Sid learns that he too has Negro blood in him, from a blood transfusion that saved his life when he was a child.”15 Readers quickly learn what happens to the downtrodden and the marginalized in EC’s story world when there are no masked heroes to save them. A black man takes his own life in “Blood Brothers,” and as I discuss in more detail in chapter 3, it is unlikely that the white man who terrorized him will be prosecuted for the crime.

“Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots” affirmed the notion that the readers who benefited the most from an EC comic were those interested in acquiring what Roberts refers to as the genre competency to see each story as participating in a larger tradition. By contrast, in the months that followed, the US Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency was discouraged from considering the merits of this systemic reading approach. Testimony from experts and observers outside the industry often singled out individual comic-book issues and insisted on their status as “inexcusably unintelligible” story objects.16 Of the half-dozen comic books that Richard Clendenen presented to the Senate subcommittee that was led by Senator Estes Kefauver in April 1954, two were published by EC: Haunt of Fear #24 and Shock SuspenStories #14. The EC issues, marked by the chairman as exhibit number twelve, were cited as evidence of the “substantial degree of sadism, crime, and horror” contained in one-quarter of the seventy-five to one hundred million comic books that would be sold in the United States that year.17

On the Shock SuspenStories #14 cover (figure 4), bullet holes scatter across the chest of a man being shot. Empty shell casings float alongside the tip of an automatic-gun nozzle firing in the foreground, while a broken mirror reflects the menacing image of the shooter in a trench coat and hat. To his left, a terrified woman recoils at the vicious attack; as she twists away, shadows outline her full breasts and hips. This was the kind of comic that Clendenen, as executive director of the Senate subcommittee, had been charged to investigate in order to evaluate the medium’s popularity and influence on young readers.

As part of Clendenen’s testimony on April twenty-first, he read aloud plot summaries from the crime and horror stories and dispassionately enumerated the acts of dismemberment, suicide, and cruelty alongside a slideshow of images. Yet what seemed to trouble the executive director the most was not severed heads. Instead it was the plight of an orphaned boy preyed on by vampire foster parents in a story called “The Secret” from The Haunt of Fear. Clendenen took little comfort in that plot’s surprise twist, in which the boy is revealed to be a werewolf and kills his adult foes. Clendenen’s reading emphasized instead how kind, attentive, and “nice-looking” the mother and father pretend to be until the night they demand their foster child’s blood. He goes on to describe how in another EC story, “a small golden-haired girl named Lucy” turns out to be the criminal mastermind who sends her mother t...