Mr. Beaser: Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?
Mr. Gaines: My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
Sen. Kefauver [alluding to the cover illustration for Crime SuspenStories #22 shown above]: This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic….
Sen. Kefauver: This is the July one [Crime SuspenStories #23]. It seems to be a man with a woman in a boat and he is choking her to death with a crowbar. Is that in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: I think so.
For comics, the 1950-54 period is analogous to Hollywood movies in 1930-34. Both are known as the pre-Code era, although a loose, laxly administered set of standards was already in place for both media. The early 30s for films, and the early 50s for comics, were seen as times of bold, often lurid entertainment, and are viewed in retrospect as pop-cultural high points. Both formats triggered powerful opposition among the cultural pillars of their respective periods: movies with the Catholic Church and its newly formed Legion of Decency, comics with members of the press, Congress and at least one respected sociologist. Finally, both were sanitized—mildly, for movies; fatally, for horror comics.
When Max Gaines died in 1947 in a boating accident, his son William inherited the failing Educational Comics (a comics publisher that ran a line of illustrated Bible and American history stories), and re-invented it, starting a fresh line of comics under the newly coined Entertaining Comics umbrella that would fly in the face of the pre-pre-Code code of comic-book conduct, drawn up by his father’s editor-in-chief Sheldon Mayer: “Never show anybody stabbed or shot. Show no torture scenes. Never show a hypodermic needle. Don’t chop the limbs off anybody. Never show a coffin, especially with anybody in it.”
EC is most famous these days for two things. First are its horror comics, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear, their censorship and dramatic end at the very peak of their popularity. These titles reveled in a gruesome joie de vivre, with grimly ironic fates meted out to many of the stories’ protagonists. Second is the still popular Mad Magazine, brain-child of EC’s Harvey Kurtzman. Harvey Kurtzman was a familiar name to me and my brothers growing up in the eighties, whereas the rest of the EC crew are known primarily to the older generation, or young artists looking for inspiration in that earlier explosive period.
In the EC universe of creative talent, Kurtzman was seconded by Al Feldstein, along with an array of highly accomplished freelance artists, such as Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Will Elder, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen, Bernard Krigstein, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton, and Wally Wood. Kurtzman and Feldstein themselves also drew stories, which generally were written by them and Craig, with assistance from Gaines. Other writers including Carl Wessler, Jack Oleck and Otto Binder were later brought on board.
There was no fast and hard line between writer and artist in those days, but there certainly was an EC formula for story-telling, a formula not very unlike the old Twilight Zone episodes for those of you in need of a reference point, something inherited from earlier periodicals of the weird and bizarre, as well as the radio shows of the 20’s on, such as the notorious radio show, Lights Out.
In an interview published in Squa Tront #9, Feldstein made several interesting admissions. One of them was on page 5: “Our plots came from a conglomeration of sources — movies we’d seen, books we’d read… we weren’t really intending to steal stuff, we were just looking for inspiration to give us ideas to come up with something original…” One medium in particular had a dramatic role in forming the very format in which EC comics were told. Old Time Radio (OTR). If you were to search for the inspiration of EC’s horror hosts, you wouldn’t have to look any further than the OTR shows of Feldstein and Gaines’ youth. Again, in Feldstein’s words: “We had come on to this thing of doing horror and scary stuff. Bill and I had remembered The Witch’s Tale and Lights Out from radio — this is all old hat, I know — and we tried it out in the comics…” The GhouLunatics were direct descendants from the wicked host of The Witch’s Tale. Feldstein admitted as much later on in the same article: “…when I first came up with the Crypt Keeper and the Vault Keeper, who were direct steals from the witch in The Witch’s Tale. I don’t remember the witch being as facetious, and with the puns, but she cackled…”
True. EC’s Old Witch, Crypt Keeper and Vault Keeper didn’t inherit their sick sense of humor from The Witch’s Tale. Instead, they got that from Raymond, the host of Inner Sanctum Mysteries. Raymond was famous for morbid puns and evil asides at the beginning, middle, and end of every story. It was a gimmick that made Inner Sanctum one of the most popular and longest running radio series of its time. Fortunately for EC, Raymond’s trademark wit wasn’t actually trademarked or copyrighted. If it were, EC could have been in BIG trouble, which of course they would get in eventually.
But perhaps it’s time we sampled on of these notorious EC stories, and their odd plot twists. For example ‘Hot-Rod’ (Weird Fantasy #19), in which vengeance comes at the hands of Fate. First the grisly murder: “Amos brought the monkey wrench down on Cynthia’s skull again and again until the pillow and her head melted into a fused mass of red pulp.” Then the fitting comeuppance: With a car that speeds through time and space, Amos plans the perfect alibi. After killing Cynthia, he’ll drive to a faraway town and establish his presence at the exact time of the murder. But he revs the motor too much and at the end realizes, “Good Lord! I’m on Mars! And… and… and I’m out of gas!”
However, the horror titles were not the only line of titles put out by EC that were doing interesting and new things. The company’s war comics Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales often featured weary-eyed, unheroic stories out of step with the jingoistic times. Shock SuspenStories tackled weighty issues such as racism, sex, drug use and the American way of life. EC always claimed to be “proudest of our science fiction titles”, with Weird Science and Weird Fantasy publishing stories unlike the space opera found in such titles as Fiction House’s Planet Comics. Crime SuspenStories had many parallels with film noir. As noted by Max Allan Collins in his story annotations for Russ Cochran’s 1983 hardcover reprint of Crime SuspenStories, Johnny Craig had developed a “film noir-ish bag of effects” in his visuals, while characters and themes found in the crime stories often showed the strong influence of writers associated with film noir, notably James M. Cain.
But it is the horror stories that will always be tied to our understanding of EC, largely because of that notorious showdown. The horror books certainly were gross and grotty. In ‘Ghastly Terror!: The Horrible Story of the Horror Comics’ (1999), Brit comics fan Stephen Sennitt describes the melodramatic panorama as “an incredible array of primal fears; a plunge into the abyss of social and cultural insecurity, and a deep distrust of one’s fellow-man—but more than this, a ghoulish fixation on vengeance, guilt and punishment. The punishment of vanity, greed, gluttony and arrogance, all in the pages of comics aimed ostensibly at children and youths! Major themes of the precode horror comics are decapitation, or dismemberment, or disfigurement of some kind, such as destruction of the face by acid, or the poking out of eyes.”
Of course, there is one other pulpy paper periodical EC Comics is known for, Mad Magazine, whose levels of irreverence equaled if not outmatched the gore and horror of over EC Comics titles, and was the only one of their titles to survive the censorship of that era. And how? By becoming a “magazine” in 1955, and within a year, Al Feldstein was made editor-in-chief and immediately began accumulating the iconic team of contributors that made Mad what we know it as—the periodical that made Weird Al Yankovic weird, where lowbrows could be lowbrow, and highbrows could go stuff it, which made Alfred E. Neuman an institution.
Throughout the ages, Mad adapted to fit the times, most memorably in the 70’s, when it became more political, but if we take a step back to think of Mad magazine, the magazine of our youth, which one day, will leave us like everyone has to go eventually, and specifically to think of where it came from, the comics legacy of EC and the censorship code that maybe didn’t cause Mad to become a magazine (publisher William Gaines said in a 1992 interview, "was not changed [into a magazine] to avoid the Code" but "as a result of this [change of format] it did avoid the Code") but does at the very least seem an apt moment of birth for a magazine that lived and breathed in-your-face-ness and thumbing it at the rubes, but more than that, the shift from pre-code EC comics to the Mad magazine of the latter half of the 50’s and then 60’s and 70’s also, I would argue marks a shift in the social psychosphere, the point at which Modernism begins its transition into the technicolor world that would become the Postmodern latter half of the twentieth century.
I would argue that the fall of EC Comics is a kind of “tree of knowledge” moment, a moment when the world is radically altered because someone has decided, We need to do something about this bad thing. (Similar to the McCarthy-ism of the day but also to the government’s response to 9/11 and the sort of freewheeling removal of civil liberties it provoked.)
And what was the story that finally broke them? It had to do with a space traveler who stumbles upon a world afflicted by a horrible prejudice. The story was called, “Judgement Day”. The story depicted a human astronaut visiting a planet inhabited by robots as a representative of the Galactic Republic. He finds the robots divided into functionally identical orange and blue races, one of which has fewer rights and privileges than the other. The astronaut decides that due to the robots’ bigotry, the Galactic Republic should not admit the planet. In the final panel, he removes his helmet, revealing himself to be a black man.
“This really made ’em go bananas in the Code czar’s office. ‘Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us’, recalls Feldstein. ‘I went in there with this story and Murphy says, “It can’t be a Black man”. But … but that’s the whole point of the story!’ Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. ‘Listen’, he told Murphy, ‘you’ve been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business’. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he bellowed. ‘I’m going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I’ll sue you’. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. ‘All right. Just take off the beads of sweat’. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. ‘Fuck you!’ they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form.”
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
