·
·
· Back to Article
·
·
·
· Click to Print
·
Thursday, Apr. 29, 2004
The Glory and Horror of EC Comics
By Richard Corliss
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]: 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.
Fifty years ago this month, a comic-book publisher dared to defend his business before a panel of skeptical lawmakers. The publisher, William M. Gaines of the Entertaining Comics Group (EC), had asked to testify before the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. On the afternoon of April 21, 1954, Gaines took the stand in a Foley Square courtroom in lower Manhattan to tangle with Estes Kefauver, who had made his name (and the cover of TIME) chairing televised hearings on organized crime. In 1951 the Senator had exposed the Mafia to a nationwide audience. Now he would confront another menace: the purveyors of comic books that, one psychologist claimed, made kids go bad.
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.� And this from a witness for the defense!
As an aging kid who was an EC fan 50 years ago, I�d testify that most of us survived reading horror comics. So did Bill Gaines, under oath. �Jimmy Walker once remarked that he never knew a girl to be ruined by a book,� Gaines proclaimed, referring to the late New York City mayor, and adding, �Nobody has ever been ruined by a comic.�
But people have been ruined by Senate investigations. And smear campaigns in newspapers. And �experts� whose evidence turn out to be fraudulent. All three of these factors put an axe to the neck of the horror and crime comics of the early 50s, and abruptly aborted one of the great explosions of vox-pop literature.
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 burghers of propriety: 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.
The difference was distribution. Film companies owned the companies that distributed their films and the theaters that showed them (until 1948, when the Supreme Court busted the studios� vertical monopoly). What Hollywood made, the audience could see. Comic book publishers didn�t control distribution. When the putative guardians of public morality put the screws to crime and horror comics, distributors refused to put them on newsstands. The number of horror and crime titles on the stands dropped in a few months from 150 to nearly none. And Gaines, whose company had flourished in the horror boom, and whose Senate testimony had made him the face of the B comic-book industry — the Mae West of pulp picto-fiction — took the heat. Refusing to join his competitors� new Comics Code Authority, he shut down all but one of his magazines.
As it happened, that one was MAD.
ME AND MY SCHADENFREUDE
A personal note. I came to EC through MAD, which was dreamed up in 1952 by Harvey Kurtzman and written by him as a 10-cent comic book (23 issues) and a 25-cent magazine. In 1956, five issues into the magazine�s life he left EC after a dispute with Gaines, taking all his artists — Bill Elder, Jack Davis and (briefly) Wally Wood — with him. I and many other Kurtzman fans followed him to Trump, the slick humor mag that Hugh Hefner funded and, after two issues, folded. From 1957 to 1966, Kurtzman edited Humbug (11 issues) and Help! (26 issues), and I was rooting him on, along with the others in his small but fervent peanut gallery.
I continued to read MAD but I found it less artful and much less funny. I�m sure I was also pissed at Gaines for letting him go and at Albert Feldstein, a longtime EC writer-editor, for assuming control of MAD. And I guess I was a bit resentful that, while Kurtzman struggled to produce a popular and well-distributed humor magazine, the Feldstein MAD flourished. (When he succeeded Kurtzman, MAD was selling about 750,000 copies. By the mid-70s the circulation had risen to 2.3 million. He retired in 1984, and circulation has lapsed to about 250,000 today.)
I still trust my comedy and loyalty instincts. I still think that Kurtzman was EC�s comedy genius, and that MAD suffered when he left. (More about Kurtzman in a forthcoming column.) But over the past year or so I�ve accumulated a nearly complete collection of the EC horror, crime and science-fiction magazines through ebay and two exemplary classic comics websites: Bud Plant and Russ Cochran�s EC Crypt. Reading the magazines that Feldstein wrote and edited in the early 50s, I have greater respect for him — an admiration for his tireless inventiveness and, as a fashioner of ghoulish tales, his gleeful mean streak. I must also confess to a grudging respect for Gaines, who did more than package the stories Feldstein wrote. He helped write them too, in daily brainstorming sessions that came to be known as the Bill & Al Show.
BEYOND THE BIBLEBill Gaines was the son of M.C. (Max) (or Charlie) (the man was so amiable he had two nicknames?) Gaines, who in 1933 had the bright idea of charging money for Famous Funnies, a 64-page collection of reprints from Sunday color comic strips — before then, the collections had been given away — and who, in 1938, found a home for Superman, the first comic-book sensation. �Max Gaines is rightly credited as the Father of the Comic Book,� writes Digby Diehl in �Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives.� By the mid-40s Max had his own company, which he called Educational Comics; it ran a line of illustrated Bible and American history stories. In 1947 Max died in a boating accident and Bill took over the business. EC was $110,000 in debt.
He was a long shot to make a profit or a passion. A �nerd� (Feldstein�s word for Gaines when he recalled their first meeting) who looked like a Jewish Drew Carey and lived with his mom throughout EC�s prime years, Gaines had scant interest in his dad�s business. �Comics? I hated �em,� he wrote in a 1954 piece (reprinted in the excellent anthology �Tales of Terror!: The EC Companion�). �Never touched the stuff. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher.� Now he was stuck with a line of pious comics, and a pre-pre-Code code of comic-book conduct, drawn up by Max�s editor 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.� That�d change.
At first Gaines showed up only to issue pay checks. Then he got to work. He secularized his merchandise, gradually retiring the Bible stories in favor of genres that were selling to young postwar consumers. And in 1948 he hired Feldstein, then just 22. What a smart pickup! Feldstein was every boss� favorite employee: a hard-working idea man with inexhaustible energy and a nose for the market. For a few years he was editing and writing seven complete magazines every two months, often illustrating stories and drawing the covers. (Kurtzman, before MAD, was painstakingly producing only two magazines — the war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat — on the bimonthly schedule.) Feldstein could turn on a dime. In the June-July 1954 issue of Panic, he wrote a derisive parody of Major Donald E. Keyhoe�s best-selling book �Flying Saucers from Outer Space.� A few months later, he wrote a special issue of Incredible Science-Fiction dedicated to the proposition that UFOs were real. His highly-touted source: Major Donald E. Keyhoe,
For a year or so, Gaines and Feldstein tried magazines devoted to romance, space adventures, detective stories and the Old West. None scintillated. Then, perhaps noticing the advent of a few horror titles (Eerie was the first, in 1947), they introduced a few horror elements into their Crime Patrol and War on Crime titles. The last issue of Crime Patrol (March-April 1950) had a full larder of spooky-titled tales: �The Corpse in the Crematorium,� �Trapped in the Tomb,� �The Graveyard Feet � and a Crypt-Keeper tale, �The Spectre in the Castle!�
GAINES GOES GORY
In early 1950, Gaines cleaned house. Indeed, he practically blew it up. He junked all the old titles and replaced them with a bolder line he called �New Trend� comics. War Against Crime became The Vault of Horror; Crime Patrol was made over into The Crypt of Terror (its title changed to Tales of the Crypt after a few issues); Gunfighter morphed into The Haunt of Fear; Saddle Romances gave way to Weird Science, and A Moon, a Girl, a Romance to Weird Fantasy. All the new magazines were introduced within a few months in early 1950. Crime SuspenStories premiered six months later, Shock SuspenStories in early 1952. Presumably, the subscribers to the old magazines found the new ones in their mail boxes. What must those Zane Grey fans and sweet schoolgirls have thought?
It didn�t matter, for the horror line attracted hundreds of thousands of new readers. �By mid-1953 business at EC was astonishing,� writes Maria Reidelbach in �Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine.� �The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror and the renamed Tales from the Crypt had a circulation of 400,000 copies each;... Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat lagged behind, at about 225,000 copies each.� Decades later, Feldstein recalled that Haunt of Fear sold fewer copies than the other two horror titles, and for a good reason: �What the hell is a Haunt anyway?�
With EC�s success, the horror freshet became a flood of 150 or more imitators and competitors. But Gaines was doing fine. He had a small staff: Feldstein, Kurtzman, writer-artist Johnny Craig, a secretary, a few others. Most of the illustrators were free-lancers who at first were paid $18 per page for pencil work, $13 for inking; the fee later rose to about $50 a page. And the income was, for Gaines, incomparable. According to his Senate testimony, EC�s annual gross revenue by this time was about $1 million, the net $50,000. Not bad for merchandise that went for 10 cents a pop. That meant they were selling 10 million comics a year. The company�s motto might have been: EC Does It.
The horror comics offered grown-up, or at least adolescent fare — which is why it was popular with kids; they wanted a passkey to the forbidden, the extreme, and in these campfire tales they could feel scaredy-brave both by subjecting themselves to horror tales and by daring to read something that might be condemned by their parents. Which suggests a financial oddity: EC�s main audience was teen and young adult males — the target demographic for today�s advertisers. Yet the average New Trend magazine contained no more than three pages of outside advertising. The revenue came almost entirely from readers.
EC-CENTRICITY
And EC gave them their dimes� worth. Bill and Al�s flourishing line of bimonthly comics brought the dead-of-night short story to lurid, four-color life. As longtime MAD writer Frank Jacobs noted in his 1982 book �The MAD World of William M. Gaines,� each magazine �seethed with wild, twisting tales brought to life by spectacular art that is today regarded by aficionados as the dawning of a new age in comic-book illustration.�
Horror comics were the first successful instances of comic books without a regular hero or heroine — a Superman or Little Lulu. But the EC horror mags did have �hosts�: the wise-cracking Crypt Keeper, Vault Keeper and Old Witch (whose function Feldstein adapted from the framing device for Arch Oboler�s radio suspense show �Lights Out�). These post-mortals set up each story and signed off at the end, leaving the audience laughing, or screaming. And the story itself? It was a thing of familiar elements. To wit:
A story set in the midnight of a demented soul. A tale of several deadly sins — every one, really, but lust, which was replaced by bloodlust. Moral tales, in a retributive, Old Testament fashion: an eye for an eye, and I�ll raise you four limbs and your intestines, payable on the last page of the story. Villains who sneer, victimized wives who go �sob... sob� and outsiders who show up at the end to count the corpses. Vivid descriptions of terror, to prepare the reader for the enormity of what he was about to encounter, the crucial dialogue rendered in boldface. Typical dialogue, from �The Grave Wager� (Vault of Horror #16): �He�s sitting in the corner whimpering like a scared puppy! And his hair has turned snow white!� Or this, from �Horror House� (Vault of Horror #15): �Great scott! She�s aged twenty years! She must have seen something horrible beyond words to make her the babbling lunatic we see!� And a surprise ending — the O. Henry-style twist that made the malefactor pay in the most gruesome way possible.