The comic book medium has had a pretty interesting history. They went from being salacious dimestore sci-fi pulp about flesh eating moles that still found a way to be racially insensitive somehow or all about a guy in a trench coat called The SOMETHING shooting people, literally printed on paper meant to be thrown away after you were done reading it (hence the name ‘pulp’ referring to the terrible quality paper), to ‘funny pictures’ in newspapers, back to being salacious, then suddenly educational comics were all the rage, then crime stories, then it was all about weirdos in spandex punching an odd amount of gorillas and almost always Hitler which held on for just a few decades or something. ‘Teen romance’ was a hot genre for a while somewhere after the Hitler punching, as written by entirely out-of-touch 30 year old men of course whose romance writing abilities generally started at 'clearly adults masquerading as teenagers necking to spite someone else on the front cover' and ended at 'melodramatically shaming teenagers'.
Oh, the melodrama of these obviously not-at-all teenagers!
The tonal whiplash of mainstream comics books is pretty wild to look at historically. Popular media is very much shaped by the culture around it for obvious reasons, and this is very much apparent with comic books as they are a very pure, distilled form of culture. The dawn of the century saw them as extensions of the sci-fi pulp novel as people wanted to read about wondrous technology and dream of seeing hot alien dames on Venus and musclebound scientists punching lizards or whatever, the Depression saw them dealing with stories of down on their luck poor people like Little Orphan Annie or being entirely escapist fantasy with Richie Rich or something like Dick Tracy, and the 40’s and early 50’s saw the rise of war story comics for obvious reasons, like the ever famous DC comic character of Haunted Tank.
Those damn Nazi viking ghosts. Only Haunted Tank and its grizzled crew can hope to take that abomination on.
The 50’s also saw the rise of one specific subgenre of comic books, and one some may not realize played an integral part of comic book censorship and the direction of the entire medium because of it; horror comics. **** yeah.
The horror genre should need no introduction. It's historically one of the most pervasive and longest lasting forms of storytelling we’ve told as a species. That feeling of a chill crawling up your spine is what kept our ancestors alive and uneaten, and almost as far back as we’ve been making and telling stories some aspect of horror has been there. Mythology has a surprising amount of horror if you really think about it. Sisyphus? Guy has a buzzard constantly eating his liver while he’s pushing a rock up a never-ending hill. Pure horror. Norse mythology is frequently brutal as hell. Just look up Loki's punishment after killing Baldr; that's a Cannibal Corpse album cover right there. It should come as no surprise then that comics would also become infused with horror energy, and right in one of the darkest periods of modern history.
It should also not need an introduction or further explanation, but WWII kinda ****ed the hell out the world for awhile. WWI began to change popular conceptions of war from a gentlemanly jaunt of distinguished nobility to the stuff of nightmares, and WWII definitely finished that shift in one horrific swoop. The post-war world was a much darker place for many, from the soldier returning home to a potentially bombed home to their families having to deal with the symptoms of good old shell shock, as it was known back then. You can see this change in society across a multitude of different mediums of course, from movies to music and stage plays, but you know, comics, so just ignore all that other stuff for this.
What a perfect time to make some horror comics, basically.
This **** ain’t Richie Rich anymore.
Every new trend has an originator, the first one to make the pivotal steps that others would then follow, and for spooky horror picture stories it was a company called EC Publications. Educational Comics started in 1944 as a shell company of the larger All-American Publications, which is definitely not the name many of you would now know them as; Detective Comics, or DC Comics. 1945 saw a few different companies, All-American included, merge together and rebrand as DC which left All-American’s former editor, Maxwell Gaines, out of a job.
Max Gaines is historically a huge name in the comic industry, both for the fact he was the editor of what was basically proto-DC Comics, and also for the fact that he is considered the inventor of the traditional paneled comic book in 1933 with his publishing of titles like Funnies on Parade and Famous Funnies. He realized that many bought newspapers only for the ‘funny pages’, and so had the brilliant idea to publish a book of just the funny pictures. It kind of paid off, believe it or not. Through his work at All-American, he was also one of the three main guys who became responsible for ‘publishing’ a very little known character called mother****ing Superman; ‘publishing’ of course as the character himself was created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, and the character publishing rights were acquired through some incredibly skeezy and exploitative business strategies that’s a story in itself. Regardless, 1945 saw him without a job.
He took the publishing rights for an All-American series called Stories from the Bible with him out the door, and founded EC publishing a slew of either comedy strips or educational books aimed at young children featuring an abundance of talking animals for some reason.
Kinda off-putting maybe, but not quite yet horror.
EC soldiered on like this until 1947, when Maxwell Gaines died in a freak boating accident. So it goes. Suddenly his son, Bill Gaines, who was studying to become a chemistry teacher, found himself in charge of a comic company that was in the financial red. He didn’t like comic books, he had no plans to ever have a career in his father’s field, and basically had no idea what to even do with it. So he did what all smart people do; talk to people who knew what they were doing. After reading some comics books, he talked around to his staff at EC and friends of his father to get a feel for the market and to see if he even stood a chance at making this work. He came to realize that you had to make a really big proverbial splash to make it in the highly competitive comic book field, and so set out to make a big impact as soon as possible. He also wanted stories and books that put writing first, and treated the subject matter as something serious and not an after thought. Noticing a lack of horror books around, and recognizing that the genre is the perfect fit for the visually driven comic medium, he made that first titanic step forward into the mainstream, and unknowingly both guided the industry for years to come and also arguably ruined it all the same.
We’re finally here, horror comics.
This is the good ****, right here.
Under Bill Gaines, EC debuted three anthology horror series starting in 1949 that became the OG’s of the whole craze they’d spawn. There was Tales from the Crypt you just saw above, the earlier Vault of Horror from a few paragraphs ago, and The Haunt of Fear. All three were basically the same type of content, with only the specific framing narrator who introduced each story changing; Vault had the Vault-Keeper, Crypt had the Crypt-Keeper (yes, that Crypt-Keeper), and Vault of Fear had the very aptly named ‘Old Witch’. These three titles debuted and caught on like wildfire across the newsstands of the 50’s, in large part thanks to Gaines' very smart decision to have the books be treated seriously in terms of literary content, and to have the art be the driving onus of the whole thing. More series would follow from EC after, such as Shock SuspensStories and Shock Magazine. Now they weren’t the official ‘first’ horror magazines, as that title belongs to things like 1947’s Eerie or 1948’s Adventures into the Unknown, but EC was the first to hit mainstream appeal and popularize it.
To say that these EC horror comics were groundbreaking is an understatement; they utterly revolutionized the comic industry, even behind-the-scenes in the business side of it. EC drew top comic talent from all over, some of whom first cut their teeth drawing the ghoulish horrors within the comic book. Huge named or future names-to-be artists from Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Al Williamson and Reed Crandall worked for EC. How did they hold such an impressive roster? Get this; they simply actually treated them well.
The comic industry is famous for one thing above all other, especially back in the historical eras; treating comic artists like complete ****. They’d hardly ever get credited for their work, sometimes not even paid for their work, and would almost always get jerked around in one way or another across multiple companies at a time. It was a hard life indeed to try and be a comic artist, so when EC made such unfathomable business decisions like crediting artists and actually paying them it’s a no brainer that people wanted to work for them. EC would even create the books with artists in mind, with Gaines (aided by his editors Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman and freelance writer Johnny Craig) often designing the stories to better display a specific artist’s talent and strengths. If they wanted a big monster story, they knew that Wally Wood would draw only the most grotesque creatures and would give it to him. If they wanted something moody and atmospheric, then they’d call up Joe Orlando.
Pages from Vault of Horror #12 (through a later re-colourized reprint collection). The first two images, from ‘Horror in the Night’ are drawn by Harvey Kurtzman, and the last two from ‘The Werewolf Legend’ are drawn by Wally Wood and Harry Harrison.
The anthology stories were almost always adaptations or spins on already considered classic spook stories, but there were some original works thrown in as well. These originals often showed off EC’s strength; humour. The comics had a biting sense of fun to them, whether it’s in the rapid fire puns of the framing narrators or even in the stories themselves. They almost always had some black humour twist thrown in at the end, some ironic fate or punishment awaiting the almost always deranged main character getting his comeuppance. But they never went too far, and per Gaines’ mission statement the material was overall treated seriously. Some of these stories could be actually unsettling, and even more importantly EC often used them to tackle a variety of real world issues and ideas. They tackled racism and prejudice more than just a few times and in ways and tone that pulled no punches. Oh, and cOmIcS nEvEr UseD tO bE PoLiTiCaL says the moronic outrage grifter who’s never read a comic book in his life just now, somewhere on the internet, as drool spills out of the corner of his open mouth.
But they also had stories very much of their time. There’s a few that are basically man of the household doesn’t like his wife’s nagging, kills her with firepoker and/or train, or some entirely about female ‘hysteria’ and paranoia. The murderous husbands are always given their ironic punishments of course, but the subject matter is curious all the same. Horror is a reflection of what society fears, after all, and in the 40’s and 50’s there were plenty of men who were uneasy at the changing family dynamic that was becoming more and more prevalent. WWII famously saw women going to work en masse to bolster the economy and work force since most of the men were drafted overseas and with that gaining more overall social power, and plenty of hooplah was made over it; it’s not hard to imagine then an element of this making its way into some contemporary horror stories.
The story ‘Hate!’ by Al Feldstein (art by Wally Wood) is one standout story from Shock SuspenStories #5, and one that's still unfortunately relevant today. Heavy-handed and entirely unsubtle sure, but very effective all the same.
The comic market was a very cutthroat and competitive industry back then, and so when one person finds success with something the next week will see candy stores shelves filled with imitators. Oh, were there imitators. You had such titles as This Magazine is Haunted! spring up, or Black Cat, or Worlds Unknown, or Unknown Worlds, or Mystic, or Weird Terror, or Weird Mystery, or Mystery, or Beware, or Web of Mystery, or Ghostly Weird Stories, or Chamber of Chills, or Witches Tales, or Adventures into Weird Worlds, or…
Some of these covers started getting pretty gnarly, which just may have directly led to something we’re getting to.
Some very early work by soon to be legendary artist Frank Frazetta.
Horror comics took hold of the industry with an iron grip stronger than you could believe, and held on all throughout the early to mid 1950’s. Crime and detective comics still soldiered on, as did the primordial super hero comics following in the footsteps of Superman, but by and large the comic industry was all about those spooky ghosts and **** at this point.
With this industry boom came very tight competition amongst the different series. Everyone was battling away to get their magazines snatched up from newsstands instead of their rivals' books. Some would adapt famous stories to get attention, like just a whole slew of Lovecraft or Ray Bradbury stories. But not every magazine has the writing talent for this, and so some had to rely on pure shock value instead with their covers. The covers of these mid 50’s horror comics could become just a little boundary pushing considering they were still fundamentally aimed at young readers. Once one lurid mag started pushing against the walls of decency, then the others were almost forced to join in order to stay competitive. The earlier one above of the disintegrating face was just one of many such shock value covers, and there's quite a few more famous examples.
Yeah, maybe just a little tasteless and purely shameless. Keep in mind this could have been on a shelf next to the latest Archie comic.
I love some good visual horror, but even I have to admit that some of these magazine covers were getting out of control. I'm not the only one who thinks so either; the mid 50’s saw concerned parents and media pundits beginning to criticize and shine a shameful light on these salacious depictions of decapitations and head explosions. The biggest talking point was whether or not horror comics, as well as detective and crime comics, were a corruptive influence on children and inspiring them to commit crimes and/or axe murders. Like a lot of other media campaigns throughout history, the content was an eclectic combination of a few points worth talking about at least mixed in with a lot of sensationalism and just a few bizarre reaches. Comics were blamed for child delinquency and truancy; Orson Welles speaking to the BBC gave a very poignant and accurate counter to that specific argument. A very present element of the criticism was also of course about the sexuality of these comic books and how they were turning kids into “perverts”; for some reason, it always comes down to sex. As big as the media pushback on horror comics got however, there was yet to be a concrete example they could point as an example of how a comic could make someone depraved or perverted for blondes in red dresses…until the New York Thrill Killers in 1954, and specifically the effect a book called Nights of Horror allegedly had on them.
I don't really want to go into specific detail about the Thrill Killers, as they're actually a contentious and deep topic that I don't really have room to describe adequately here. They were basically 4 Brooklyn teenagers who were charged with one murder, and a few assaults around their borough. They did do the crimes, that's not in question, but the question everyone was asking was ‘why’? As it turns out, the ringleader of the group confessed to something that the media ran with, and I'm sure you can see where this is going. He was an avid reader of comic books, specifically horror and crime books and specifically one book in question; Nights of Horror, which he loved to read. He also personally said that the NYPD’s recent violent crackdown on the homeless as part of a hush-hush New York ‘cleanup’ campaign was what actually motivated him to start assaulting people and he was obviously a psychopath already but, you know, comics did it. Go with that instead.
Calling Nights of Horror a ‘horror comic’ is a misnomer; it's a violent BDSM fetish pornography book, through and through. It was trash sold exclusively in porno bookstores in Times Square, and would likely have never even been largely known had it not been involved tangentially with the Thrill Killers. It features depictions of naked women, and occasionally men, being whipped or tied up or otherwise menaced or tortured in violent ways. The only other noteworthy thing about Nights of Horror is the real identity of its anonymous artist; Joe Shushter, the original artist and one of the creators of Superman. By the 50s, he was entirely out of work having barely seen a cent from his creation of Superman. He was also going blind, as the poor man could not catch a break. And so he had to take whatever work he could get, and one such example of this unfortunately is this shameful book. I'm so sorry, Joe Shushter.
This image is just on the comics Wikipedia article, wild.
With this connection of violent teenage offenders to what was being called a horror comic despite not being one at all, uproar led to legal action that even made its way through to the Supreme Court. The honorable court proclaimed that banning the book from sale and production was not in violation of first amendment rights, and so it came to be. As a result, Nights of Horror was pulled out of any adult bookstores that the authorities could find them in, and the confiscated copies were destroyed. Very few copies now survive, which is a good thing honestly, and on sheer notoriety alone the usually low quality surviving copies are now collectors items. This set a legal precedent going forward; given enough social push and justification, comics could be censored. Using this first initial foot in the door of legal censorship, people were now clamouring for more steps to be taken, and none so strongly as psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.
Wertham was a veteran in the field of psychiatric medicine, specifically in the subfield of teenage and childhood psychiatry, and by the mid 50’s had a long and storied career. He taught at John Hoskins for seven years, was chief doctor in mental hygiene for the entire New York hospital system at one point, mentored dozens of other doctors, and often served as advisor and consultant for numerous police cases. He was even an incredibly progressive man for his time; he personally wrote and funded studies and articles speaking out against the mental health impact of segregation, and considered it a great crime. He opened a mental health clinic in the heart of Harlem specifically for black teenager patients, with an almost entirely volunteer staff that charged almost nothing for its services. Keep in mind that the clinic was opened in 1946; actual segregation was still in practice in areas around the country, and black New Yorkers still faced discrimination from their own hospital systems.
Fredrick Wertham I think was a genuine person; that's not in question. He genuinely knew his stuff in regards to what mental health treatment was at the time at least, and he genuinely wished to help and treat people. The balls it must have taken to open that Harlem clinic alone is impressive, and he did it despite facing pushback from some of his fellows. That being said, Wertham looks like a kind of man who is the embodiment of ‘anti-fun’. He looks like someone who has never contemplated the idea of ‘fun’, and doesn't want to even contemplate the idea of thinking about ‘fun’. On top of that, he also used very misleading evidence to reach biased and outright fabricated conclusions on comic books.
“My god, this magazine dares to show entertainment! Think of the children, and their nervous systems!”
Wertham became involved in the media uproar about comics through being the psychiatrist assigned to talk with the New York Thrill Killers. From here, he quickly became wrapped up in the sensationalism and movement, and his esteemed career and authority made him a figurehead. He published two important works we’ll touch on in regards to comic censorship; a 1953 news article in Ladies Home Journal ‘What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books’, and his now notorious 1954 follow up book Seduction of the Innocent.
‘What Parents Don't Know About Comic Books’ was the real critical mass of sensationalism. It claimed that comic books were literally irrevocably damaging kids’ nervous systems with their sometimes small and badly printed text, that “crime comic books teach children how to commit every type of crime imaginable, and how to get away with them”, that kids all over the country were violently torturing other children behind parents backs because of exposure to a horror comic book, and that they were also making them into perverts and potentially homosexuals; Wertham was really all up about the sexual perversion thing. A direct quote; “if one were to set out to teach children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault, and break into candy stores, no more insistent method could be devised [referring to comic books].” This magazine article is just insane, no questions. The conclusions it reaches are presented with only this for evidence; we made it the **** up.
“A teenager once stole a car and tried to run over a policeman in 1951.” Source: **** you.
Seduction of the Innocent was Wertham’s follow up, and if you thought that the Ladies Home Journal article was bad, well, strap in. Seduction was the origin point of the now famous joke of ‘Batman and Robin are gay’, only Wertham was serious with it; he cited a panel of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson co-existing in the same room as being a depiction of them in domestic and romantic partnership. God forbid two men coexist in the same room together. Think of the children, comic publishers! His presented evidence in Seduction was personal accounts of him talking to ‘troubled’ teenagers in halfway houses and juvenile prison wings, and finding out that some of them said they read comic books. Wertham proposed then that was conclusive proof of the corruptive effects of comic books turning kids into psychopaths; troublesome youths read comic books, therefore comic books turn children into troublesome youths. This is a classic example of the ‘correlation equals causation’ fallacy; the sample group he used was inherently biased, he presented no accounts of the regular teenagers who read comic books without issue, and his final conclusion is entirely baseless because of that. He claimed to find depictions of naked female breasts in background images in comic books, in tree bark designs and characters’ muscles. If you look at a tree and see breasts, that's a ‘you’ thing, Wertham. He also really liked to focus on Robin’s bare legs, and his ‘spritely form’ and how it was depicted ‘luridly’. Again, a you thing. Robin’s (in)famous outfit was just Peter Pan, that's it; why then did he not go after Peter Pan?
“Some comic books lead us into sin.” Okay, yeah, a ten-year old definitely said that exact phrase, Wertham. Sure.
Why did he do this? Like I said earlier, I think Wertham was a genuine man; I don't think this was a grift for personal or financial gain, or a purposeful deception. I think he got wrapped up in the sensationalism of the whole thing, and became too personally involved in the subject and lost his academic neutrality because of it. Like the number one thing you're supposed to do when doing a study is not turn it into a personal crusade; kind of like the first most important step really. The thing is some of his critiques were correct or at least worthy of discussion. There was something to be said about the depiction of violence in material that was being marketed directly to children, especially when it was drawn and shown in such a realistic manner. You may scoff looking at them now and think “well, they're not really that bad” but again, this was in the 1950’s; a kid could go into a candy shop, look at the bookshelf for some Richie Rich, and see an image of a woman's severed head. There was a genuine point there, but any legitimacy it may have had was ruined by Wertham’s entirely bungled nonsense. It's hard to take that valid criticism of violence desensitization seriously when he prefaces it with what's essentially “I'm seeing breasts in tree bark, and it's your fault”.
Ever the progressive man, he even had things to say about the depiction of women in comic books during that tumultuous era of women's right to work and the changing dynamics of the nuclear family. He claimed that comic books made women out to be objects and prizes for male characters to win or achieve, and they were almost always tied up or menaced. Sometimes, the man was right. But, once again, he follows that up with “Batman is trying to turn kids into homosexuals through Robin’s alluring spritely legs that I'm personally obsessed with”. Just ruins your valid criticism when you drop something like that right after.
Something to note of Wertham is that he, to some extent, changed his opinion of comic books in the ‘70s. He praised what was referred to as the ‘fanzine’ (basically just independent comics) culture of that era, showing a fairly impressive shift in opinion. Wertham is a strange and complicated fellow historically, I think. He was progressive as a 1950’s man could be, speaking out about segregation and media misogyny, but also clearly down to censor and control creative work; in some cases maybe a little justified to an extent, again head explosions and eyeball gouging, but still censorship all the same. People often look back now and depict him as a super villain absolutely obsessed with the destruction of the purely innocent comic industry when I think it was a little more nuanced than that.
“Mother, may I go into the candy store to purchase a tasty sweet treat, and perhaps a funny comic of talking animals?” That kid probably saw this cover and instantly became a sadistic ax murderer, and a pervert who’s into bare legs. Many such cases.
Seduction of the Innocent now has been entirely trashed by any academic worth their salt, and even some of Wertham’s contemporary fellows were critical of it. But none of that mattered, for the general public layperson couldn't catch the numerous errors Wertham made in his book and so it was propped up as a holy text of the movement. Batman and Robin are gay, canon.
But what does any of this matter? Who cares if some parents and a very grumpy looking psychiatrist were complaining about Robin's bare legs turning kids gay? What power did they have that something would actually happen? Well, just like the Thrill Killers and the censorship of Nights of Horror showed, as well as who knows how many other media witchhunts in the decades that would follow, enough pressure in the right place can in fact get things done. This time, it wouldn't just be pulling some magazines out of stores and destroying them. This time it would go all the way to the American Senate…which we’ll talk about in the next article, this **** is already nearly 30k characters and given any more exposure to horror comic images in quick succession, you people may become perverts. I'm thinking of your safety, here.
Until next time.
Oh, the melodrama of these obviously not-at-all teenagers!
The tonal whiplash of mainstream comics books is pretty wild to look at historically. Popular media is very much shaped by the culture around it for obvious reasons, and this is very much apparent with comic books as they are a very pure, distilled form of culture. The dawn of the century saw them as extensions of the sci-fi pulp novel as people wanted to read about wondrous technology and dream of seeing hot alien dames on Venus and musclebound scientists punching lizards or whatever, the Depression saw them dealing with stories of down on their luck poor people like Little Orphan Annie or being entirely escapist fantasy with Richie Rich or something like Dick Tracy, and the 40’s and early 50’s saw the rise of war story comics for obvious reasons, like the ever famous DC comic character of Haunted Tank.
Those damn Nazi viking ghosts. Only Haunted Tank and its grizzled crew can hope to take that abomination on.
The 50’s also saw the rise of one specific subgenre of comic books, and one some may not realize played an integral part of comic book censorship and the direction of the entire medium because of it; horror comics. **** yeah.
The horror genre should need no introduction. It's historically one of the most pervasive and longest lasting forms of storytelling we’ve told as a species. That feeling of a chill crawling up your spine is what kept our ancestors alive and uneaten, and almost as far back as we’ve been making and telling stories some aspect of horror has been there. Mythology has a surprising amount of horror if you really think about it. Sisyphus? Guy has a buzzard constantly eating his liver while he’s pushing a rock up a never-ending hill. Pure horror. Norse mythology is frequently brutal as hell. Just look up Loki's punishment after killing Baldr; that's a Cannibal Corpse album cover right there. It should come as no surprise then that comics would also become infused with horror energy, and right in one of the darkest periods of modern history.
It should also not need an introduction or further explanation, but WWII kinda ****ed the hell out the world for awhile. WWI began to change popular conceptions of war from a gentlemanly jaunt of distinguished nobility to the stuff of nightmares, and WWII definitely finished that shift in one horrific swoop. The post-war world was a much darker place for many, from the soldier returning home to a potentially bombed home to their families having to deal with the symptoms of good old shell shock, as it was known back then. You can see this change in society across a multitude of different mediums of course, from movies to music and stage plays, but you know, comics, so just ignore all that other stuff for this.
What a perfect time to make some horror comics, basically.
This **** ain’t Richie Rich anymore.
Every new trend has an originator, the first one to make the pivotal steps that others would then follow, and for spooky horror picture stories it was a company called EC Publications. Educational Comics started in 1944 as a shell company of the larger All-American Publications, which is definitely not the name many of you would now know them as; Detective Comics, or DC Comics. 1945 saw a few different companies, All-American included, merge together and rebrand as DC which left All-American’s former editor, Maxwell Gaines, out of a job.
Max Gaines is historically a huge name in the comic industry, both for the fact he was the editor of what was basically proto-DC Comics, and also for the fact that he is considered the inventor of the traditional paneled comic book in 1933 with his publishing of titles like Funnies on Parade and Famous Funnies. He realized that many bought newspapers only for the ‘funny pages’, and so had the brilliant idea to publish a book of just the funny pictures. It kind of paid off, believe it or not. Through his work at All-American, he was also one of the three main guys who became responsible for ‘publishing’ a very little known character called mother****ing Superman; ‘publishing’ of course as the character himself was created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, and the character publishing rights were acquired through some incredibly skeezy and exploitative business strategies that’s a story in itself. Regardless, 1945 saw him without a job.
He took the publishing rights for an All-American series called Stories from the Bible with him out the door, and founded EC publishing a slew of either comedy strips or educational books aimed at young children featuring an abundance of talking animals for some reason.
Kinda off-putting maybe, but not quite yet horror.
EC soldiered on like this until 1947, when Maxwell Gaines died in a freak boating accident. So it goes. Suddenly his son, Bill Gaines, who was studying to become a chemistry teacher, found himself in charge of a comic company that was in the financial red. He didn’t like comic books, he had no plans to ever have a career in his father’s field, and basically had no idea what to even do with it. So he did what all smart people do; talk to people who knew what they were doing. After reading some comics books, he talked around to his staff at EC and friends of his father to get a feel for the market and to see if he even stood a chance at making this work. He came to realize that you had to make a really big proverbial splash to make it in the highly competitive comic book field, and so set out to make a big impact as soon as possible. He also wanted stories and books that put writing first, and treated the subject matter as something serious and not an after thought. Noticing a lack of horror books around, and recognizing that the genre is the perfect fit for the visually driven comic medium, he made that first titanic step forward into the mainstream, and unknowingly both guided the industry for years to come and also arguably ruined it all the same.
We’re finally here, horror comics.
This is the good ****, right here.
Under Bill Gaines, EC debuted three anthology horror series starting in 1949 that became the OG’s of the whole craze they’d spawn. There was Tales from the Crypt you just saw above, the earlier Vault of Horror from a few paragraphs ago, and The Haunt of Fear. All three were basically the same type of content, with only the specific framing narrator who introduced each story changing; Vault had the Vault-Keeper, Crypt had the Crypt-Keeper (yes, that Crypt-Keeper), and Vault of Fear had the very aptly named ‘Old Witch’. These three titles debuted and caught on like wildfire across the newsstands of the 50’s, in large part thanks to Gaines' very smart decision to have the books be treated seriously in terms of literary content, and to have the art be the driving onus of the whole thing. More series would follow from EC after, such as Shock SuspensStories and Shock Magazine. Now they weren’t the official ‘first’ horror magazines, as that title belongs to things like 1947’s Eerie or 1948’s Adventures into the Unknown, but EC was the first to hit mainstream appeal and popularize it.
To say that these EC horror comics were groundbreaking is an understatement; they utterly revolutionized the comic industry, even behind-the-scenes in the business side of it. EC drew top comic talent from all over, some of whom first cut their teeth drawing the ghoulish horrors within the comic book. Huge named or future names-to-be artists from Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Al Williamson and Reed Crandall worked for EC. How did they hold such an impressive roster? Get this; they simply actually treated them well.
The comic industry is famous for one thing above all other, especially back in the historical eras; treating comic artists like complete ****. They’d hardly ever get credited for their work, sometimes not even paid for their work, and would almost always get jerked around in one way or another across multiple companies at a time. It was a hard life indeed to try and be a comic artist, so when EC made such unfathomable business decisions like crediting artists and actually paying them it’s a no brainer that people wanted to work for them. EC would even create the books with artists in mind, with Gaines (aided by his editors Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman and freelance writer Johnny Craig) often designing the stories to better display a specific artist’s talent and strengths. If they wanted a big monster story, they knew that Wally Wood would draw only the most grotesque creatures and would give it to him. If they wanted something moody and atmospheric, then they’d call up Joe Orlando.
Pages from Vault of Horror #12 (through a later re-colourized reprint collection). The first two images, from ‘Horror in the Night’ are drawn by Harvey Kurtzman, and the last two from ‘The Werewolf Legend’ are drawn by Wally Wood and Harry Harrison.
The anthology stories were almost always adaptations or spins on already considered classic spook stories, but there were some original works thrown in as well. These originals often showed off EC’s strength; humour. The comics had a biting sense of fun to them, whether it’s in the rapid fire puns of the framing narrators or even in the stories themselves. They almost always had some black humour twist thrown in at the end, some ironic fate or punishment awaiting the almost always deranged main character getting his comeuppance. But they never went too far, and per Gaines’ mission statement the material was overall treated seriously. Some of these stories could be actually unsettling, and even more importantly EC often used them to tackle a variety of real world issues and ideas. They tackled racism and prejudice more than just a few times and in ways and tone that pulled no punches. Oh, and cOmIcS nEvEr UseD tO bE PoLiTiCaL says the moronic outrage grifter who’s never read a comic book in his life just now, somewhere on the internet, as drool spills out of the corner of his open mouth.
But they also had stories very much of their time. There’s a few that are basically man of the household doesn’t like his wife’s nagging, kills her with firepoker and/or train, or some entirely about female ‘hysteria’ and paranoia. The murderous husbands are always given their ironic punishments of course, but the subject matter is curious all the same. Horror is a reflection of what society fears, after all, and in the 40’s and 50’s there were plenty of men who were uneasy at the changing family dynamic that was becoming more and more prevalent. WWII famously saw women going to work en masse to bolster the economy and work force since most of the men were drafted overseas and with that gaining more overall social power, and plenty of hooplah was made over it; it’s not hard to imagine then an element of this making its way into some contemporary horror stories.
The story ‘Hate!’ by Al Feldstein (art by Wally Wood) is one standout story from Shock SuspenStories #5, and one that's still unfortunately relevant today. Heavy-handed and entirely unsubtle sure, but very effective all the same.
The comic market was a very cutthroat and competitive industry back then, and so when one person finds success with something the next week will see candy stores shelves filled with imitators. Oh, were there imitators. You had such titles as This Magazine is Haunted! spring up, or Black Cat, or Worlds Unknown, or Unknown Worlds, or Mystic, or Weird Terror, or Weird Mystery, or Mystery, or Beware, or Web of Mystery, or Ghostly Weird Stories, or Chamber of Chills, or Witches Tales, or Adventures into Weird Worlds, or…
Some of these covers started getting pretty gnarly, which just may have directly led to something we’re getting to.
Some very early work by soon to be legendary artist Frank Frazetta.
Horror comics took hold of the industry with an iron grip stronger than you could believe, and held on all throughout the early to mid 1950’s. Crime and detective comics still soldiered on, as did the primordial super hero comics following in the footsteps of Superman, but by and large the comic industry was all about those spooky ghosts and **** at this point.
With this industry boom came very tight competition amongst the different series. Everyone was battling away to get their magazines snatched up from newsstands instead of their rivals' books. Some would adapt famous stories to get attention, like just a whole slew of Lovecraft or Ray Bradbury stories. But not every magazine has the writing talent for this, and so some had to rely on pure shock value instead with their covers. The covers of these mid 50’s horror comics could become just a little boundary pushing considering they were still fundamentally aimed at young readers. Once one lurid mag started pushing against the walls of decency, then the others were almost forced to join in order to stay competitive. The earlier one above of the disintegrating face was just one of many such shock value covers, and there's quite a few more famous examples.
Yeah, maybe just a little tasteless and purely shameless. Keep in mind this could have been on a shelf next to the latest Archie comic.
I love some good visual horror, but even I have to admit that some of these magazine covers were getting out of control. I'm not the only one who thinks so either; the mid 50’s saw concerned parents and media pundits beginning to criticize and shine a shameful light on these salacious depictions of decapitations and head explosions. The biggest talking point was whether or not horror comics, as well as detective and crime comics, were a corruptive influence on children and inspiring them to commit crimes and/or axe murders. Like a lot of other media campaigns throughout history, the content was an eclectic combination of a few points worth talking about at least mixed in with a lot of sensationalism and just a few bizarre reaches. Comics were blamed for child delinquency and truancy; Orson Welles speaking to the BBC gave a very poignant and accurate counter to that specific argument. A very present element of the criticism was also of course about the sexuality of these comic books and how they were turning kids into “perverts”; for some reason, it always comes down to sex. As big as the media pushback on horror comics got however, there was yet to be a concrete example they could point as an example of how a comic could make someone depraved or perverted for blondes in red dresses…until the New York Thrill Killers in 1954, and specifically the effect a book called Nights of Horror allegedly had on them.
I don't really want to go into specific detail about the Thrill Killers, as they're actually a contentious and deep topic that I don't really have room to describe adequately here. They were basically 4 Brooklyn teenagers who were charged with one murder, and a few assaults around their borough. They did do the crimes, that's not in question, but the question everyone was asking was ‘why’? As it turns out, the ringleader of the group confessed to something that the media ran with, and I'm sure you can see where this is going. He was an avid reader of comic books, specifically horror and crime books and specifically one book in question; Nights of Horror, which he loved to read. He also personally said that the NYPD’s recent violent crackdown on the homeless as part of a hush-hush New York ‘cleanup’ campaign was what actually motivated him to start assaulting people and he was obviously a psychopath already but, you know, comics did it. Go with that instead.
Calling Nights of Horror a ‘horror comic’ is a misnomer; it's a violent BDSM fetish pornography book, through and through. It was trash sold exclusively in porno bookstores in Times Square, and would likely have never even been largely known had it not been involved tangentially with the Thrill Killers. It features depictions of naked women, and occasionally men, being whipped or tied up or otherwise menaced or tortured in violent ways. The only other noteworthy thing about Nights of Horror is the real identity of its anonymous artist; Joe Shushter, the original artist and one of the creators of Superman. By the 50s, he was entirely out of work having barely seen a cent from his creation of Superman. He was also going blind, as the poor man could not catch a break. And so he had to take whatever work he could get, and one such example of this unfortunately is this shameful book. I'm so sorry, Joe Shushter.
This image is just on the comics Wikipedia article, wild.
With this connection of violent teenage offenders to what was being called a horror comic despite not being one at all, uproar led to legal action that even made its way through to the Supreme Court. The honorable court proclaimed that banning the book from sale and production was not in violation of first amendment rights, and so it came to be. As a result, Nights of Horror was pulled out of any adult bookstores that the authorities could find them in, and the confiscated copies were destroyed. Very few copies now survive, which is a good thing honestly, and on sheer notoriety alone the usually low quality surviving copies are now collectors items. This set a legal precedent going forward; given enough social push and justification, comics could be censored. Using this first initial foot in the door of legal censorship, people were now clamouring for more steps to be taken, and none so strongly as psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.
Wertham was a veteran in the field of psychiatric medicine, specifically in the subfield of teenage and childhood psychiatry, and by the mid 50’s had a long and storied career. He taught at John Hoskins for seven years, was chief doctor in mental hygiene for the entire New York hospital system at one point, mentored dozens of other doctors, and often served as advisor and consultant for numerous police cases. He was even an incredibly progressive man for his time; he personally wrote and funded studies and articles speaking out against the mental health impact of segregation, and considered it a great crime. He opened a mental health clinic in the heart of Harlem specifically for black teenager patients, with an almost entirely volunteer staff that charged almost nothing for its services. Keep in mind that the clinic was opened in 1946; actual segregation was still in practice in areas around the country, and black New Yorkers still faced discrimination from their own hospital systems.
Fredrick Wertham I think was a genuine person; that's not in question. He genuinely knew his stuff in regards to what mental health treatment was at the time at least, and he genuinely wished to help and treat people. The balls it must have taken to open that Harlem clinic alone is impressive, and he did it despite facing pushback from some of his fellows. That being said, Wertham looks like a kind of man who is the embodiment of ‘anti-fun’. He looks like someone who has never contemplated the idea of ‘fun’, and doesn't want to even contemplate the idea of thinking about ‘fun’. On top of that, he also used very misleading evidence to reach biased and outright fabricated conclusions on comic books.
“My god, this magazine dares to show entertainment! Think of the children, and their nervous systems!”
Wertham became involved in the media uproar about comics through being the psychiatrist assigned to talk with the New York Thrill Killers. From here, he quickly became wrapped up in the sensationalism and movement, and his esteemed career and authority made him a figurehead. He published two important works we’ll touch on in regards to comic censorship; a 1953 news article in Ladies Home Journal ‘What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books’, and his now notorious 1954 follow up book Seduction of the Innocent.
‘What Parents Don't Know About Comic Books’ was the real critical mass of sensationalism. It claimed that comic books were literally irrevocably damaging kids’ nervous systems with their sometimes small and badly printed text, that “crime comic books teach children how to commit every type of crime imaginable, and how to get away with them”, that kids all over the country were violently torturing other children behind parents backs because of exposure to a horror comic book, and that they were also making them into perverts and potentially homosexuals; Wertham was really all up about the sexual perversion thing. A direct quote; “if one were to set out to teach children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault, and break into candy stores, no more insistent method could be devised [referring to comic books].” This magazine article is just insane, no questions. The conclusions it reaches are presented with only this for evidence; we made it the **** up.
“A teenager once stole a car and tried to run over a policeman in 1951.” Source: **** you.
Seduction of the Innocent was Wertham’s follow up, and if you thought that the Ladies Home Journal article was bad, well, strap in. Seduction was the origin point of the now famous joke of ‘Batman and Robin are gay’, only Wertham was serious with it; he cited a panel of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson co-existing in the same room as being a depiction of them in domestic and romantic partnership. God forbid two men coexist in the same room together. Think of the children, comic publishers! His presented evidence in Seduction was personal accounts of him talking to ‘troubled’ teenagers in halfway houses and juvenile prison wings, and finding out that some of them said they read comic books. Wertham proposed then that was conclusive proof of the corruptive effects of comic books turning kids into psychopaths; troublesome youths read comic books, therefore comic books turn children into troublesome youths. This is a classic example of the ‘correlation equals causation’ fallacy; the sample group he used was inherently biased, he presented no accounts of the regular teenagers who read comic books without issue, and his final conclusion is entirely baseless because of that. He claimed to find depictions of naked female breasts in background images in comic books, in tree bark designs and characters’ muscles. If you look at a tree and see breasts, that's a ‘you’ thing, Wertham. He also really liked to focus on Robin’s bare legs, and his ‘spritely form’ and how it was depicted ‘luridly’. Again, a you thing. Robin’s (in)famous outfit was just Peter Pan, that's it; why then did he not go after Peter Pan?
“Some comic books lead us into sin.” Okay, yeah, a ten-year old definitely said that exact phrase, Wertham. Sure.
Why did he do this? Like I said earlier, I think Wertham was a genuine man; I don't think this was a grift for personal or financial gain, or a purposeful deception. I think he got wrapped up in the sensationalism of the whole thing, and became too personally involved in the subject and lost his academic neutrality because of it. Like the number one thing you're supposed to do when doing a study is not turn it into a personal crusade; kind of like the first most important step really. The thing is some of his critiques were correct or at least worthy of discussion. There was something to be said about the depiction of violence in material that was being marketed directly to children, especially when it was drawn and shown in such a realistic manner. You may scoff looking at them now and think “well, they're not really that bad” but again, this was in the 1950’s; a kid could go into a candy shop, look at the bookshelf for some Richie Rich, and see an image of a woman's severed head. There was a genuine point there, but any legitimacy it may have had was ruined by Wertham’s entirely bungled nonsense. It's hard to take that valid criticism of violence desensitization seriously when he prefaces it with what's essentially “I'm seeing breasts in tree bark, and it's your fault”.
Ever the progressive man, he even had things to say about the depiction of women in comic books during that tumultuous era of women's right to work and the changing dynamics of the nuclear family. He claimed that comic books made women out to be objects and prizes for male characters to win or achieve, and they were almost always tied up or menaced. Sometimes, the man was right. But, once again, he follows that up with “Batman is trying to turn kids into homosexuals through Robin’s alluring spritely legs that I'm personally obsessed with”. Just ruins your valid criticism when you drop something like that right after.
Something to note of Wertham is that he, to some extent, changed his opinion of comic books in the ‘70s. He praised what was referred to as the ‘fanzine’ (basically just independent comics) culture of that era, showing a fairly impressive shift in opinion. Wertham is a strange and complicated fellow historically, I think. He was progressive as a 1950’s man could be, speaking out about segregation and media misogyny, but also clearly down to censor and control creative work; in some cases maybe a little justified to an extent, again head explosions and eyeball gouging, but still censorship all the same. People often look back now and depict him as a super villain absolutely obsessed with the destruction of the purely innocent comic industry when I think it was a little more nuanced than that.
“Mother, may I go into the candy store to purchase a tasty sweet treat, and perhaps a funny comic of talking animals?” That kid probably saw this cover and instantly became a sadistic ax murderer, and a pervert who’s into bare legs. Many such cases.
Seduction of the Innocent now has been entirely trashed by any academic worth their salt, and even some of Wertham’s contemporary fellows were critical of it. But none of that mattered, for the general public layperson couldn't catch the numerous errors Wertham made in his book and so it was propped up as a holy text of the movement. Batman and Robin are gay, canon.
But what does any of this matter? Who cares if some parents and a very grumpy looking psychiatrist were complaining about Robin's bare legs turning kids gay? What power did they have that something would actually happen? Well, just like the Thrill Killers and the censorship of Nights of Horror showed, as well as who knows how many other media witchhunts in the decades that would follow, enough pressure in the right place can in fact get things done. This time, it wouldn't just be pulling some magazines out of stores and destroying them. This time it would go all the way to the American Senate…which we’ll talk about in the next article, this **** is already nearly 30k characters and given any more exposure to horror comic images in quick succession, you people may become perverts. I'm thinking of your safety, here.
Until next time.
