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Horror comics
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American horror comics published between 1947 and 1954 are characterized by their gruesomely scripted and illustrated tales of ghosts and ghouls, zombies and vampires, haunted houses and graveyards, sexual perversion and sadism, torture, cannibalism, lycanthropy, dementia and other outrč horror fiction elements. Horror comics briefly flourished in the United States before being curbed in their content and availability on newsstands after Senate subcommittee hearings in 1954.
Precursors to horror comics include the detective and crime comics that incorporated horror motifs such as spiders and eyeballs into their graphics, and occasionally featured stories adapted from the literary horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe or other writers, or stories from the pulps and radio programs. The first true, full blown, stand alone horror comic book is open to debate with one-shots Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1943) by Classic Comics and Eerie Comics (1947) by Avon Periodicals being chief contenders for the honor.
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Encyclopedia
American horror comics published between 1947 and 1954 are characterized by their gruesomely scripted and illustrated tales of ghosts and ghouls, zombies and vampires, haunted houses and graveyards, sexual perversion and sadism, torture, cannibalism, lycanthropy, dementia and other outrč horror fiction elements. Horror comics briefly flourished in the United States before being curbed in their content and availability on newsstands after Senate subcommittee hearings in 1954.
Precursors to horror comics include the detective and crime comics that incorporated horror motifs such as spiders and eyeballs into their graphics, and occasionally featured stories adapted from the literary horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe or other writers, or stories from the pulps and radio programs. The first true, full blown, stand alone horror comic book is open to debate with one-shots Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1943) by Classic Comics and Eerie Comics (1947) by Avon Periodicals being chief contenders for the honor. Adventures Into the Unknown claims the distinction of being the first horror comic book to see regularly scheduled publication, hitting newsstands in 1948.
In the early 1950s, horror comics publishers were perceived as having crossed the boundaries of good taste by the public and others concerned about the dangers comic books posed. Public outcry brought matters to a head in 1954 with Congressional hearings that targeted horror and other violent comic books as contributors to the juvenile delinquency crisis then sweeping America. In the aftermath of the hearings, the comic book industry formed the self-regulating body, Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). Under its Comics Code Authority (CCA), many horror comic books publishers revamped their titles or, in some cases, simply ceased publication. For many, the heyday of horror comics was over.
Precursors
Horror motifs played a small but evident part in comics of the early and middle 1940s. The Frankenstein monster appeared as a recurring feature character in the anthology comics series Prize (1940-1948), but morphed, first, into a superhero during the war years and then into a humor character with his own comic book from 1945 until 1952. Classic Comics adapted several literary horror tales including The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (#12, 1943), Three Famous Mysteries (#18, 1944) and Frankenstein (#26, 1945). It has been suggested Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (#13, 1943) is the first horror comic.
Suspense Comics (1943) incorporated spiders, eyeballs, devils and other horror motifs into the graphics of their superhero and detective fare, and Yellowjacket Comics (1944) ran eight "Tales of Terror" features narrated by an old witch, a device borrowed perhaps from the radio show, The Witch's Tales. Two of the eight tales were adapted from the work of nineteenth-century American horror writer, Edgar Allan Poe.
In 1945, Harvey Comics brought Front Page to newsstands, and, in 1946, Strange Story. In both titles, Bob Powell's Man in Black acted as the sardonic narrator and commentator of unusual and spooky tales in the fashion of the commentators found in radio shows such as Inner Sanctum and The Whistler. Adventure and detective title Mask Comics (1945) featured two horror covers by L. B. Cole—one, depicting moth people being lured by a candle labeled 'EVIL', and the other depicting Satan himself. Spook Comics (#1, 1947) and Spooky Mysteries (#1, 1947), while both detective and adventure books, integrated the imagery of devils and tales of ghosts in their contents.
First horror titles
Full-blown horror comics trace their origins to the years immediately following World War II when hip comics readers dismissed caped crimebusters and tights-and-trunks superheroes as passe. In addition, the many returning GIs who had acquired a taste for sex and violence from the comic books provided them by the Federal government sought the same sort of titillation stateside.
In January 1947, Avon Periodicals published Eerie Comics, a title some consider the first out-and-out, stand-alone horror comic book not taking its inspiration from any known source such as radio, film, pulp fiction, or classic literature. Its debut cover featured a red-eyed, dagger-toting ghoul threatening a rope-bound, scantily clad, voluptuous young woman in a lonely and moonlit ruin. The anthology title offered six stories with an adult attitude that were fairly tame in the depiction of gore. One tale followed a man haunted by the ghost of a stuffed tiger; another, a shipwreck on an island infested with flesh-eating lizards; and another, a man spooked by the bloody corpse of his murdered wife. While the writers are unknown, the book's artists included Joe Kubert, George Roussos, and Fred Kida. After its first issue, the title went dormant, but reappeared in 1951 as Eerie and enjoyed seventeen regularly published issues.
Late in 1948, B&I Publishing (later known as American Comics Group) released the first regularly published, though somewhat restrained, horror comic book Adventures Into the Unknown. B&I based the comic book on traditional prose ghost stories, rather than radio drama or earlier comics, with the first issue featuring a brief adaptation of Horace Walpole's gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. Adventures Into the Unknown was a success and enjoyed a run of nearly twenty years.
Horror had been a minor element in Marvel Comics through the war years with vampires and zombies toiling in the employ of the Nazis and the Japanese, but the company entered the horror arena full-tilt in 1949 by dropping their costumed superheroes while retaining the gruesomeness. Marvel Mystery became Marvel Tales and two issues of Captain America (#74 and #75) became Captain America's Weird Tales. Harvey followed suit in 1951 by discarding crimefighter The Black Cat, and converting her book to Black Cat Mystery.
EC Comics
In 1947, William Gaines inherited Educational Comics from his father Maxwell Gaines. Titles published by the company under Maxwell Gaines' tenure included the benign Tiny Tot Comics and Picture Stories from the Bible. William Gaines chose a more blatantly commercial tack. He changed the meaning of the acronym EC to Entertaining Comics, and added such lines as Crime Patrol, Saddle Justice, and Modern Love.
In 1948, Gaines hired artist and writer Al Feldstein who soon became an editor. Gaines and Feldstein shared similar tastes in suspense and horror, and, in 1950, the EC horror line was created with Weird Fantasy, Weird Science, The Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt, and The Vault of Horror. Readers were greeted in each issue by a trio of ugly hosts—The Old Witch, The Crypt Keeper, and The Vault Keeper—who acted as sardonic commentators gleefully recounting the unpleasant details of the stories and mocking the reader with a twisted sense of humor.
Feldman did most of the early scripting with artwork provided by Jack Kamen, Graham Ingels (who signed his work "Ghastly"), Wallace Wood, and Johnny Craig. Feldstein often wrote a story a day with twist endings and poetic justice taken to absurd extremes. In one tale, a kindly junkman commits suicide after receiving cruel, anonymous Valentines from a sneering rich man and his son. The junkman rises from his grave to seek vengeance with the rich man being delivered the sticky heart of his dead son on Valentine's Day. In the controversial story "Foul Play", a crooked baseball player is murdered and his severed head used as a baseball. Some EC staff were offended with the questionable taste displayed in the tale.
EC's wordy melodramas with their powerfully rendered art appealed to adolescents and young adults who felt buffeted about by bullies, teachers, and others not under their control. Such youngsters may have limited themselves to EC fare and found the value systems in such books to their taste. Scripts demonstrated no grey areas in the moral code: the good were good and the bad were irredeemably bad. Goodness and innocence suffered but the guilty suffered even more.
EC provided a liberating alternative to teens from conformist Cold War culture and the middle class mores of the early 1950s. Hollywood had yet to exploit teens in the rebellion film and rock and roll had yet to be discovered. EC tapped into the alienation experienced by the young and exploited it as a marketable commodity.
Sales figures proved EC had hit the jackpot and imitators became legion. Harvey's Witches Tales, DC's House of Mystery, and Marvel's Strange Tales shared newsstand space with lesser quality titles such as Web of Evil, Horrific and Fanstastic Fears. Many titles were crudely scripted and even more crudely drawn, with publishers adopting only the roughest elements of the EC formula. Science fiction author and horror comics authority Lawrence Watt-Evans has noted, "Horror comics began to show more gore, more violence, ever more explicitly. It became a matter of topping what had come before: if one issue showed a man killing his wife, the next would top that by having him hack his wife to pieces, and the next would top that by having him eat her corpse."
Backlash
In the late 1940s, comic books became the target of mounting public criticism for their content and their potentially harmful effects on children. In some communities, children piled their comic books in schoolyards and set them ablaze after being egged-on by parents, teachers, and clergymen. John Mason Brown of the Saturday Review of Literature described comics as the "marijuana of the nursery; the bane of the bassinet; the horror of the house; the curse of kids, and a threat to the future." In March 1948, Dr. Frederic Wertham, senior psychiatrist of the New York Department of Hospitals, moderated a symposium called "The Psycho-pathology of Comic Books" and in articles published in Collier's and Saturday Review, charged comic books with undermining morals, glorifying violence, and being sexually aggressive in an abnormal way. Wertham's supposition that comic books and juvenile deliquency were linked was picked up by national publications. Time reported in October 1948 that a 14-year-old boy poisoned a 50-year-old woman after finding the idea and the recipe in a comic book. In one reported incident, a 10-year-old boy was found hanging with comic books depicting such an event lying at his feet, and, in another incident, two teenage boys committed a burglary after reading about the method in a comic book. In response to public pressure and bad press, an industry trade group, the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP) was formed with the intent of prodding the industry to police itself. The Association proved ineffective as few publishers joined and those who did exercised little restraint over the content of their titles.
The Seduction of the Innocent
In 1954, Dr. Frederic Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a tome that claimed horror, crime and other comics were a direct cause of juvenile delinquency. Wertham asserted, largely based on undocumented anecdotes, that reading violent comic books encouraged violent behavior in children. Wertham painted a picture of a large and pervasive industry, shrouded in secrecy and masterminded by a few, that operated upon the innocent and defenseless minds of the young. He further suggested the industry strong-armed vendors into accepting their publications, and forced artists and writers into producing the content against their will.
Wertham alleged comics stimulated deviant sexual behavior. He noted female breasts in comics protruded in a provocative way and special attention was lavished upon the female genital region. A cover by Matt Baker from Phantom Lady was reprinted in the book with the caption, "Sexual stimulation by combining 'headlights' with the sadist's dream of tying up a woman". Boys interviewed by Wertham said they used comic book images for masturbation purposes, and one young comics reader confessed he wanted to be a sex maniac. Wertham contended comics promoted homosexuality by pointing to the Batman–Robin relationship and calling it a homosexual wish dream of two men living together. He observed that Robin was often pictured standing with his legs spread and the genital region evident.
Most alarming, Wertham contended that comic books turned children into deceitful little beings, reading funny-animal comics in front of their parents but turning to horror comics the moment their parents left the room. Wertham warned of suspicious stores and their clandestine back rooms where second hand comics of the worst sort were peddled to children. The language used evoked images of children prowling about gambling dens and whorehouses, and anxious parents felt helpless in the face of such a powerful force as the comics industry. Excerpts from the book were published in Ladies' Home Journal and Reader's Digest, lending respectability and credibility to Wertham's arguments.
A fourteen-page portfolio of panels and covers from across the entire comic book industry displayed murder, torture, and sexual titillation for the reader's consideration. The most widely discussed art was that from "Foul Play", a horror story from EC about a dishonest baseball player whose head and intestines are used by his teammates in a game. Seduction of the Innocent sparked a firestorm of controversy and created alarm in parents, teachers and others interested in the welfare of children; the concerned were galvanized into campaigning for censorship.
Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency
Public criticism brought matters to a head. In 1954, anti-crime crusader Estes Kefauver led the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Dr. Wertham insisted upon appearing before the committee. He first presented a long list of his credentials, and then, in his clipped German accent, spoke with authority on the pernicious influence of comic books upon children. His passionate testimony at the hearings impressed the gathering. Kefauver suggested crime comics indoctrinated children in a way similar to Nazi propaganda. Wertham noted Hitler was a beginner compared to the comics industry.
Publisher William Gaines appeared before the committee and vigorously defended his product and the industry. He took full responsibility for the horror genre, claiming he was the first to publish such comics. He insisted that deliquency was the result of the real environment and not fictional reading materials. His defiant demeanor left the committee (which felt the industry was indefensible), astonished. He had prepared a statement that read in part, "It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid."
Crime Suspenstories, issue 22, April/May 1954, was entered into evidence. The exchange between Gaines and Kefauver led to a front-page story in The New York Times:
"He was asked by Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee, if he considered in "good taste" the cover of his Shock SuspensStories, which depicted an axe-wielding man holding aloft the severed head of a blond woman. Mr. Gaines replied: "Yes, I do — for the cover of a horror comic.""
Though the committee's final report did not blame comics for crime, it recommended that the comics industry tone down its content voluntarily.
Decline
By 1953, nearly a quarter of all comic books published were horror titles. In the immediate aftermath of the hearings, however, several publishers were forced to revamp their schedules and drastically censor or even cancel many long-standing comic series.
In September 1954, the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) and its Comics Code Authority (CCA) was formed. The Code had many stipulations that made it difficult for horror comics to continue publication, since any that didn't adhere to the Code's guidelines would likely not find distribution. The Code forbade the explicit presentation of "unique details and methods of crime...Scenes of excessive violence...brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gun play, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime...all scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism...Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, or torture".
Gaines believed that clauses in the code forbidding the words "crime", "horror" and "terror" in comic book titles had been deliberately aimed at his own best-selling titles Crime SuspenStories, The Vault of Horror and The Crypt of Terror. These restrictions, as well as those banning vampires, werewolves and zombies, would make EC Comics unprofitable and Gaines refused to join the association.
Gaines announced he was canceling his horror and crime titles "because of a premise, that has never been proved, that they stimulate juvenile delinquency. We are not doing it so much for business reasons as because this seems to be what American parents want—and the parents should be served." Much later, he admitted, "I'd been told that if I continued publishing my magazines, no [wholesaler or retailer] would handle them. I had no choice."
Gaines ceased publication of his three horror titles on September 14, 1954. Though some horror titles on newsstands such as American Comics Group's Adventures Into the Unknown continued publication, for many the heyday of horror comics was over.
Further reading
- Beaty, Bart. Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ISBN 1-57806-819-3.
- Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books) hearings before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee To Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the U.S., Eighty-Third Congress, second session, on April 21, 22, June 4, 1954. (OCLC Worldcat link to )
- Nyberg, Ami Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ISBN 0-87805-975-X.
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