EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest 9780813566337

Citation preview

EC COMIC S

Edited by Corey K. Creekmur, Craig Fischer, Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Ana Merino

Volumes in the Comics Culture series explore the artistic, historical, social, and cultural significance of newspaper comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels, with individual titles devoted to focused studies of key titles, characters, writers, and artists throughout the history of comics; additional books in the series address major themes or topics in comics studies, including prominent genres, national traditions, and significant historical and theoretical issues. The series recognizes comics of all varieties, from mainstream comic books to graphic nonfiction, produced between the late nineteenth century and the present. The books in the series are intended to contribute significantly to the rapidly expanding field of comics studies but are also designed to appeal to comics fans and casual readers who seek smart critical engagement with the best examples of the form. Twelve-Cent Archie Bart Beaty Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948 Noah Berlatsky Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon Ian Gordon Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics Andrew Hoberek EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest Qiana Whitted Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism Paul Young

EC COMIC S R A CE , S H OCK , A N D S OCI A L P R O T E S T

Qiana Whitted

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Catalog ing- in- Publication Data Names: Whitted, Qiana J., 1974- author. Title: EC Comics : race, shock, and social protest / Qiana Whitted. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2019] | Series: Comics culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018022093 | ISBN 9780813566320 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813566313 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: EC Comics--History. | Comic books, strips, etc.--Moral and ethical aspects. | Literature and society--United States--History--20th century. | Social problems in literature. Classification: LCC PN6712 .W47 2019 | DDC 741.5/355--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022093 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2019 by Qiana Whitted All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

For Alex

CO N T E N T S

Preface ix Introduction The Preachies 3 Chapter One “Spelled Out Carefully in the Captions”: How to Read an EC Magazine 25 Chapter Two “We Pictured Him So Different, Joey!”: Optical Illusions of Blackness and Embodiment in EC 51 Chapter Three “Oh God . . . Sob! . . . What Have I Done . . . ?”: Shame, Mob Rule, and the Affective Realities of EC Justice 77 Chapter four “Battling, in the Sea of Comics”: EC’s Invisible Man and the Jim Crow Future of “Judgment Day!” 104 Conclusion “Hence We See Justice Triumph!” 133 Appendix: Annotations of Key EC Titles 137 Notes 141 Bibliography 165 Index 177

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When I read Mad as a kid during the early 1980s, my favorite part was the back cover “fold-in.” My parents allowed me to buy the humor magazine long before I was old enough to understand its political satire, so instead I opted to spend most of my time with the advertising parodies and the sitcom spoofs: Magnumb P.U., The Clodsby Show, The Dopes of Haphazzard. Waiting at the end of the issue was a zingy tableau by the artist and writer Al Jaffee. Beneath the tagline—“here we go with another ridiculous mad fold-in”—Jaffee illustrated colorful, modern landscapes and scenes of people in everyday situations. Each picture was accompanied by a verse that posed an enigmatic question for readers to answer by folding in the page until the arrows marked “A” lined up in the middle next to arrows “B.” Condensed just so, the page revealed a new picture and a clever quip made from the abridged text. In the October 1981 issue of Mad (#226), for instance, Jaffee asks, “What convenient place has the chemical industry found to dump its toxic products?” When you fold in the picture of a laboratory’s churning machines and vats of strange liquid, revealed are a carton of milk, a tuna can, and a block of cheese—simple grocery items—and the answering caption: “In our bellies.” The feature served—and continues to serve—as the magazine’s parting laugh, a gimmick with satirical bite that I now realize was also an invitation into the creative process. Like so many Mad readers, I loved comparing the places where Jaffee blended the second cartoon inside the first. Leaning close to the surface of the page, pulling the arrows back and forth, I marveled over the story that our hands made together. Even now I remain fascinated by the way the words and

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images that seemed so familiar could be reoriented to expose something wholly unexpected from within. The Mad fold-in’s sleight of hand suggests a fitting analogy for this book’s examination of the Entertaining Comics Group (EC). The controversial publishing company is widely remembered for producing horror, crime, war, humor, and science-fiction comic books in the late 1940s and early 1950s. EC “mags” gained a reputation for terrorizing adolescents with the Crypt Keeper’s fiendish glare; for splitting open panels with severed heads, oozy swamp monsters, and alien tentacles; and for cranking out punch lines that ended with Alfred E. Neuman’s toothy grin. Yet my study devotes little attention to the company’s best-selling horror comics or to Mad itself, EC’s longest-running title. The focus of this book, instead, is on a profoundly influential type of story that EC writers and artists developed to directly engage the problems that Americans faced during the early Cold War and civil-rights eras. I analyze how these social-protest comics draw on the conventions of EC’s signature genres to confront racial prejudice, religious intolerance, anticommunist rhetoric, and other forms of social discrimination. Such progressive messaging was not limited to a single EC series; sandwiched between bizarre tales of shock and gore, the stories that EC publisher Bill Gaines referred to as the “preachies” were just as likely to appear in a work of fantasy as in one focused on suspense. This book demonstrates how integral the preachies are to the larger picture of Entertaining Comics. I argue further that the narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies of “the EC way” constitute one of the most effective means through which questions of social justice were explored in American comic-book culture after World War II. To fully grasp the significance of these stories and the conditions that produced them, I offer my own version of the fold-in, starting with a set of interpretive arrows that call attention to key historical, political, and cultural contexts. My readings are informed by the work of comics historians and cultural studies scholars who have been chronicling the story of EC since the company discontinued its comics division in 1956 in response to the restrictions imposed by the Comics Magazine Association of America’s Comics Code.

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Vital to my investigation is the dialogue between EC and its reading communities, past and present, through letters, fanzines, editorials, and social media posts that deliberate over each issue and connect the stories to lived experiences. And in my observations of the comics themselves, I take great pleasure in highlighting the unexpected merits of the visual and verbal features that mark their cultural status as formula fiction. The so-called clichés and constraints of genre ultimately serve as an important conduit for EC to disrupt normative assumptions about race and ethnic identity and to complicate relative notions of patriotism, tradition, safety, and authority in the process. As an alternative view of EC emerges through this study’s critical analysis, my hope is that readers will come away with deeper insight into how American comic books advance the public understanding of complex social problems through popular media.

*** Writing this book has been the experience of a lifetime. As much as I value the time, access to resources, and institutional support that allowed me to begin the project, I am especially thankful for the people who helped me to find the confidence and courage that I needed to finish it. To my husband, Kenny, for his love and boundless support, and to our two little superheroes, Naima and Alex, I am grateful to have taken each step of this journey with you. Thank you to my parents and to my sisters, Thena and Jaimé, for always cheering me on. Thank you Rebecca Wanzo, Brannon Costello, and Brian Cremins for your support at every stage, for your advice and sharp questions, and for the good cheer that makes me proud to call you friends. Very special thanks to Carol Tilley, Andy Kunka, and Ben Saunders for taking the time to offer such thoughtful feedback on the manuscript and to my writing buddy Lucy Annang-Ingram for keeping me on task with a smile. For expert guidance throughout this process, thank you Corey Creekmur, Leslie Mitchner, Lisa Banning, Nicole Solano, Vincent Nordhaus, Andrew Katz, Jasper Chang, Victoria Verhowsky, and the editorial board of the Comics Culture Series at Rutgers University Press.

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I am greatly indebted to Hollianna Bryan and Giovanna Pompele for their editorial assistance, and for additional help with research, thank you Michael Odom, Francesca Lyn, Harvey Jessup, and Kristina-Lois Hampton. Many thanks to Cindy Jackson and the staff at the Comic Arts Collection at Virginia Commonwealth University and to Martha Kennedy, Megan Halsband, and Georgia Higley at the Library of Congress. I am also grateful for the assistance of the Provost’s Humanities Grant at the University of South Carolina, the USC Institute for African American Research fellowship, and the USC Department of English Research Professorship in completing this project. I am honored to be part of a community of comics studies scholars who have so generously shared their time and invited me to give talks and interviews, to write blog posts, and to join them on conference panels. Special thanks to Noah Berlatsky, Frank Bramlett, Julian Chambliss, Michael A. Chaney, Ryan Claytor, Roy T. Cook, Conseula Francis, Jared Gardner, Jonathan Gayles, Andréa Gilroy, Jonathan W. Gray, Mark Heimermann, Andrew Hoberek, John Jennings, Susan Kirtley, Zack Kruse, Mark Minett, Osvaldo Oyola, Chris Pizzino, Stacey Robinson, and Brittany Tullis. Thanks also to my colleagues in English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina for their feedback and encouragement, including Lindsay Arave, Mark Cooper, Susan Courtney, Bobby Donaldson, Greg Forter, Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Anne Gulick, Cat Keyser, Nina Levine, Dan Littlefield, Val Littlefield, Marvin McAllister, Tara Powell, Kimberly Simmons, Doyle Stevick, Nancy Tolson, Scott Trafton, and Tracey Weldon-Stewart. One of the great joys of writing this book has been the conversations with EC readers, critics, and collectors, including Mark Arnold, Thommy Burns, Frank Nuessel, Robert Reiner, and “EC’s Number One Fan,” Larry Stark. And finally, thank you to the artist Marcus Kiser for illustrating the stunning cover image and to Lindsay Starr at Rutgers University Press for producing such an incredible cover design.

EC COMIC S

IN T R O D U C T IO N

THe PreacHieS During the Q&A for “The Horror Panel” at the 1972 Entertaining Comics (EC) Fan-Addict Convention, an audience member raised a question about “Judgment Day!”—the futuristic antidiscrimination story that first appeared in 1953. “I just wanted to congratulate you on doing stories about race and religion. You were the first comics to do that,” he began, prompting EC’s publisher, William M. Gaines, to deadpan, “Yes, I think in these days that’s called ‘relevance.’” When the attendee went on to ask where the story ideas originated from, EC’s lead editor and writer, Al Feldstein, explained, “We came out of World War II, and we all had great hopes for the marvelous world of tomorrow. And when we started writing our comics, I guess one of the things that was in the back of our minds was to do a little proselytizing in terms of social conscience. So Bill and I would try to include, mainly in our science fiction, but I think we did it in the horror books too, what we called “preachy” stories—our own term for a story that had some sort of plea to improve our social standards.”1 The proselytizing in “Judgment Day!” begins with a helmeted astronaut named Tarlton from the Great Galactic Republic who is sent from Earth to the planet Cybrinia to inspect its nascent robot civilization. During the course of his tour, Tarlton is to learn of the well-established segregation practices between the orange and blue androids in their transportation, education, and housing facilities, despite the fact that all are manufactured with identical parts. As a result, the planet of mechanical life fails the inspection. Tarlton determines that the robots have not yet reached the level of maturity attained by humans, prompting his dispirited robot guide to ask, “Is

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there any hope, Tarlton? For us?” Tarlton replies, “Of course there’s hope for you, my friend. For a while, on Earth, it looked like there was no hope! But when mankind on Earth learned to live together, real progress first began. The universe was suddenly ours.”2 When the space investigator removes his helmet in the comic book’s last panel, viewers see for the first time that Tarlton is a black man. As the emissary from Earth, he is the embodiment of humanity’s “real progress” (figure 1). Scripted by Feldstein and illustrated by the artist Joe Orlando, “Judgment Day!” was published in Weird Fantasy #18 along with three other tales of interstellar travel and alien encounters, including “Zero Hour,” adapted from a story by the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury. While the comic book appeared during the months in 1953 when the US Supreme Court was hearing arguments debating

Figure 1. “Judgment Day!” from Weird Fantasy #18 (1953)

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the constitutionality of racial segregation laws in education, the story depicted a future on Earth in which Brown v. Board of Education was already the norm. Among the many readers praising EC’s world of tomorrow was Bradbury himself, who remarked that the comic “should be required reading for every man, woman, and child in the United States.” A school principal requested additional copies of the issue for his students.3 Even the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender acknowledged the story on its editorial page as “worthy of special citation.”4 Yet “Judgment Day!” is only one of a distinct group of EC stories designed to challenge readers’ assumptions about racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, Cold War paranoia, and other anxieties over social difference and American heterogeneity. The preachies—also referred to in this book as social-protest comics or message stories—are cautionary, discomforting, and often quite grim; many rely on an extradiegetic narrator to drive home the lessons signaled by exclamatory titles such as “Hate!” and “The Guilty!” Critics of the preachies do not hesitate to characterize the stories as ham-fisted and overly didactic, while admirers speak just as effusively of the guts it took to print them. Their surprise plot twists tend to underscore the deep moral failings of the status quo through acts of violence and depravity that reflect the contradictions of the post–World War II era known as both the “Fabulous Fifties” and the “Age of Anxiety.” During this period, scientific innovations generated lifesaving vaccines even as the United States and Russia tested hydrogen bombs that threatened mutual annihilation. The nation could boast of progress in industry and technology, along with extraordinary levels of economic consumption, but the prosperity also encouraged white American families to become more insular and complacent about the need for societal change.5 EC responded to this moment with stories such as “The Patriots!” from Shock SuspenStories #2 (1952) that dramatize how swiftly a culture of containment within middle-class suburban enclaves can trigger a flash point of deadly mob violence. “Perimeter!” from Frontline Combat #15 (1954) captures the tensions among white and black American soldiers in newly integrated platoons during the Korean War. “Master Race” from Impact #1 (1955) concludes with the grisly death of a former Nazi commandant hounded in exile by the guilt

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he feels over his role in the Holocaust. When Gaines and Feldstein began working together at EC with artists and writers such as Johnny Craig, Jack Kamen, Graham Ingels, Wallace Wood, Marie Severin, Jack Davis, and Harvey Kurtzman, their collaborative efforts not only “extend[ed] the limits of the medium in all directions”6 but also resulted in an idiosyncratic brand of narrative commentary. This book broadens the critical conversation surrounding the representation of race and social protest in early US comic books. Of the many cultural historians and comics studies scholars who have turned their attention to EC over the years, few have parlayed an appreciation for the preachies into an opportunity for closer reading and more comprehensive assessment. To date, much of the writing about the company is composed of biographies, fanzine tributes, interviews with the creators, and other materials designed to accompany reprints and collector’s editions of the original comic art. The discussions of craft and the business of comic-book production are often coupled with personal anecdotes and reflections from EC’s most ardent admirers in key titles such as The Mad World of William M. Gaines, Feldstein: The MAD Life and Fantastic Art of Al Feldstein!, and The Life and Legend of Wallace Wood. My study takes a different approach by analyzing the creative choices and critical significance of the message stories within the EC brand and against the larger ideological contexts of the late 1940s and 1950s. Building on the work of Frank Nuessel, Frank Jacobs, Grant Geissman, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Bradford W. Wright, David Hajdu, Carol Tilley, Thommy Burns, and Daniel F. Yezbick, the nearly two-dozen titles that I discuss are not meant to stand in for the hundreds that Bill Gaines published, nor are they the sole evidence of the company’s “true” intentions. Rather, the social-protest comics are part of a larger continuum of strategies reified with each issue by a team of artistic collaborators nimble enough to produce both a cackling Crypt Keeper and a black astronaut from the Great Galactic Republic. e for Educational: 1944–49 EC was not actually the first company to publish comic books about race and religion. After World War II, mainstream publishers, such as Fawcett, Parents’ Magazine Press, and National Comics Publications (later known as DC), endeavored to take a progressive stance

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against social inequality in some of their comics too. Detective stories in The Challenger from Interfaith Publications explicitly pledged “to fight race prejudice, discrimination, and all other forms of fascism in North America”7 in 1946, while a year later, the journalist Orrin C. Evans boasted that “every brush stroke and pen line” in his All-Negro Comics was produced entirely by African American artists in order to showcase more positive stories for young, black comic-book readers.8 More common were one-shot historical and biographical comics of well-known African American figures: for example, the 1945 profile of Sojourner Truth in the “Wonder Woman of History” feature from Wonder Woman #13 or the 1947 issue of Negro Heroes that collected previously published pieces on Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, Matthew Henson, and Joe Louis in one comic.9 These important efforts were sporadic, short-lived, and often undertaken with significant financial risk in a market where crude racial, ethnic, and religious caricatures were popular and profitable. Furthermore, creators and publishers did not always share the same political and ideological interests or agree on how these messages should be conveyed through comics. Consider the Fawcett artist C. C. Beck’s disdain for “sermons about crime and race equality” in a 1979 interview when asked, “What didn’t you like about Fawcett comics?” He replied, “All of us at Fawcett always liked to produce a good comic. We liked excitement, adventures, strange locations, and interesting people. We didn’t like war propaganda, sermons about crime and race equality and other worthless stuff the publishers were always experimenting with. We were left alone the majority of the time, although they forced us to get rid of Billy Batson’s pal, Steamboat.”10 Nevertheless, a large publisher that was willing to experiment could afford to reach out to an inclusive audience with a limited series such as National’s “Johnny Everyman,” which occasionally tackled social issues in Comic Cavalcade and World’s Finest Comics.11 Smaller, independent publishers, on the other hand, had the creative freedom to produce more provocative stories, but they suffered from narrow distribution and limited resources to publish more than an issue or two. Often these comics were produced for churches, youth groups, and civic organizations. As a midlevel, New York comic-book publisher, EC lacked the kind of robust circulation that National would achieve with a character

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such as Superman or Fawcett with Captain Marvel. Still, sales of EC’s horror titles averaged almost half a million copies per issue, and Mad attracted even higher numbers.12 The unexpected success allowed EC’s white editors to produce story lines that addressed more controversial social and political issues—without facing the kind of scrutiny that put the black comics publisher Orrin C. Evans out of business.13 Likewise, EC’s efforts tended to steer clear of heroes and inspirational plots, preferring instead to condemn the cruelty and indifference of everyday people. The African American studies scholar Gerald Early adds that “[Gaines] effectively combined pulp with liberal politics, and he offered a more challenging moral vision than usually directed toward adolescents.”14 Continued profitability allowed EC’s message stories to accumulate over an extended period, beginning in earnest with the debut of Shock SuspenStories in 1952 until the reprint of “Judgment Day!” in Incredible Science Fiction #33 in 1956. It is doubtful, of course, that hundreds of thousands of readers were picking up EC mags each month for thrilling tales about the consequences of racism. Monsters and murderers were showcased on the front cover; the preachies tended to be debated in the letters column at the end of an issue. Even so, readers consistently expressed appreciation for these stories, particularly after the public crusade against comic books began to associate children’s exposure to the crimes and horrors represented in EC’s more popular titles with the looming threat of “juvenile delinquency.”15 Fans leveraged plots such as “Judgment Day!” as a corrective, as proof that EC could not be all that bad— or, in the words of one 1953 letter, “Congratulations to Joe Orlando, the artist, and to Al Feldstein, the author, for the best story every printed by E.C. We have never read a story in a comic with so much meaning and moral. This is your answer to critics who say your mags are harmful.”16 The sustained visibility and success of EC has led fans and scholars alike to overstate the exceptionality of the preachies, as in Bradford W. Wright’s claim that the pages of EC “became for a time the only forum in popular entertainment debating the issue of a racial segregation.”17 Yet Wright helpfully qualifies this assertion elsewhere by shedding light on the broader reading environment in which the comics were produced. He writes,

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The true cultural significance of the EC comic books is lost unless one recalls that these were neither subversive underground pamphlets nor elitist musings on the state of American civilization. William Gaines and his staff were not seeking to compete with the Daily Worker, the Nation, or any other political tract. They were in the comic-book business first and foremost for profit. When the EC writers assaulted the mainstream, they actually believed that they were producing entertainment. And indeed they were. For in the comic books of EC, millions of young Americans saw the anxieties of their times as well as their own insecurities writ large. In some homes the mere act of purchasing and reading an EC comic book, perhaps at night with a flashlight under the bed-covers, was an act of individual defiance and affirmation in a culture of vapid conformity.18 Reframing “entertainment” as an assault on mainstream norms was key to the transformation of the company that Gaines inherited from his father in 1947. When Maxwell Charles Gaines (né Ginsberg) started the business three years earlier, EC stood for Educational Comics, with titles designed primarily for children and their teachers, including Picture Stories from the Bible, Tiny Tot Comics, and Animal Fables. Max Gaines (also called M.  C. Gaines) had a history in the comicbook industry going back to 1933, when he worked for Eastern Color Printing. Along with sales manager Harry Wildenberg, Gaines came up with the idea of reprinting Mutt & Jeff and other syndicated newspaper comic strips in the saddle-stitched booklet that would become known as the modern American comic book. Initially the comics were produced as promotional giveaways for retailers such as Proctor & Gamble and Kinney Shoes before Gaines later convinced newsstands to sell an expanded version called Famous Funnies for a dime starting in 1934.19 In the decade that followed, Max Gaines went on to establish the All-American line, an enterprise funded in cooperation with Harry Donenfeld’s National Allied Publications, which produced Detective Comics and was commonly referred to as the Superman-DC group. (Indeed, Gaines is credited with convincing Donenfeld to publish Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman in Action Comics #1.)20 When Gaines sold his share of All-American in

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1944, along with the rights to properties such as Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Green Lantern, Donenfeld merged the companies to form National Comics Publications.21 The series that Max Gaines retained, Picture Stories from the Bible, became the foundation of Educational Comics. Historians suggest that the elder Gaines turned to educational comics for children in the belief that they would be a better investment than superheroes, though his background as a school principal also factored into his decision. Nicky Wright notes that “in the cynical world of comic book publishing, Maxwell Gaines stood away from the pack. He believed comics books could be used as an educational tool, hence the Bible and History series.”22 Published under company aliases such as School Comics, Inc., these early “well-intentioned (but lackluster) titles” added new offerings to the Picture Stories series, including Pictures Stories from American History, Pictures Stories from World History, and Picture Stories from Science.23 Interestingly enough, the fourth and final issue of Pictures Stories from American History in 1947 focused on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and westward expansion. Rather than treat the subject of slavery as incidental to the War Between the States, this comic’s first story, “A Country at the Crossroads,” foregrounds the perspective of a black fugitive from slavery in its opening pages. The man speaks to a group of Northerners about his race’s plight, recalling the experience of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic Ocean, sold at auction in the United States, and put to work in the cotton fields of the antebellum South. The black man explains at one point, “often our masters were good . . . but sometimes . . .” A pictured flashback picks up where the caption leaves off, with a white man stepping between a black family and saying, “You’re no use here anymore, Mady. I’m selling you and your child down the river” (figure 2).24 The story, by writer Jerry Coleman and artist Allen Simon, stops short of denouncing the white-supremacist ideology inherent in American slavery; instead, it targets the laws and economic practices that would deny a man the “freedom to choose his own way of life”25—a strategy that also fosters empathy for the white abolitionists who were prevented from offering aid under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

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Figure 2. “A Country at the Crossroads” from Picture Stories from American History #4 (1947)

Elsewhere in the issue, the account of Reconstruction calls attention to the Black Codes and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in ways that take seriously the aspirations of African Americans, depicting their speech and physical features as intelligent and respectable. As with other stories in the series, long narrative captions and generous dialogue dominate the comic’s conventional layouts and visual perspectives. Moments of intense action, such as Lincoln’s assassination and the Ku Klux Klan’s night terrors, punctuate a largely informational narrative that moves methodically from one historical milestone to the next. Despite this “certain stiffness in the style,” the historian Les Daniels describes the Picture Stories series as being “sincere and reasonably successful.” Perhaps even more importantly, Daniels views these titles as part of Gaines’s larger effort “to inject culture into the world of comic books.”26 The same summer in 1947 when Picture Stories from American History #4 was published, Max Gaines was tragically killed in a motorboat accident. Ownership of EC passed into the reluctant hands of his son, Bill, whose strained relationship with his father carried over into a strong aversion for comic books. The younger Gaines preferred science-fiction pulp magazines and grew up listening to old horror radio shows such as The Witch’s Tale and Lights Out.27 As for comics, Gaines recalled, “I hated ’em. Never touched the stuff. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher.”28 Indeed, after three years in the Army Air Corps, Gaines was studying at New York University when his mother, Jessie,

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convinced him to take over the business. His feelings about comics did not change until months later, when he picked up a few copies of his father’s comics himself.29 Those early EC magazines presented a road map for charting the educational signposts of comics narrative, from the forthright depiction of America’s past to each issue’s paratextual features, including the list of educators who formed each title’s advisory board. Nevertheless, EC was $100,000 in debt. Neither the kids’ comics nor the “dry stuff,” as Bill Gaines referred to Picture Stories from the Bible, were making money.30⁠ He and EC business manager Sol Cohen realized that they would have to be savvier than the elder Gaines in order to turn “the smallest, crummiest outfit in the field” into a thriving company.31 With interest in crime comics reaching a peak in 1948 and Lev Gleason Publications selling one and a half million copies of Crime Does Not Pay per issue, EC launched its own crime comics, War Against Crime and Crime Patrol.32 The late 1940s also saw the company attempt to draw readers of western and romance comics through Gunfighter, Saddle Justice, and Modern Love. Superhero comics were suffering a postwar decline, but Gaines was able to generate some interest in a succession of titles featuring Moon Girl, EC’s version of Wonder Woman. Ultimately the strategies that Gaines and Cohen developed were aimed at promoting popular genre comics for reading enjoyment and sales. This meant that as the direction of the company changed, the name needed to change too. EC fanzine editor Ted White recalls Cohen’s straightforward assessment of the matter: “‘Educational’ was a word no comic-buying kid wanted to see. It was a kiss of death on any comic book.”33 A New Trend in Magazines: 1950–55 In 1948, Gaines hired Albert Feldstein to develop a comic called Going Steady with Peggy. Feldstein had been a part of the comic-book industry since the age of fifteen, when he worked as a gofer after school for the S. M. Iger studio and later advanced to backgrounds, inking, and drawing.34 After serving in the Army Air Corps, Feldstein became a freelance artist and occasional writer, making a name for himself with the teenage books at Fox Comics. Going Steady with Peggy was to be EC’s latest foray into teen romance, but Gaines reconsidered the

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decision to push the comic into a market that was already showing signs of oversaturation. Feldstein was retained at EC under a new contract and worked instead on the western and crime comics for several months as he and Gaines became friends. Once Feldstein began to take on more editorial duties, he came to EC’s owner with a proposition: “Look Bill, why are we following these idiots and, when the trend dies, getting caught? Why don’t we innovate, and why don’t we have people follow us?”35 The two Brooklyn natives shared a lifelong love of horror and science-fiction stories going back to the old radio shows. Feldstein even had experience with earlier efforts in horror and suspense as a contributing artist on Adventures into the Unknown #3 from American Comics Group in 1949.36 He and Gaines experimented in April 1950 by placing their own original horror stories in two of EC’s crime comics. The subsequent bump in sales persuaded Gaines to transform War Against Crime and Crime Patrol into the EC’s first horror series: The Vault of Horror and The Crypt of Terror (which later became Tales from the Crypt). A third title, The Haunt of Fear, appeared a month later. Among the comics that followed were a pair of science-fiction mags, Weird Science and Weird Fantasy (which later merged into Weird Science-Fantasy); a new crime comic called Crime SuspenStories; two war titles, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat; two humor titles, Mad and Panic; and near the end of EC’s run, the short-lived Piracy, about adventure on the high seas. Artists such as Graham Ingels, Johnny Craig, and Jack Kamen were hired to join Wood in creating what EC proudly advertised as a different kind of comic book: “Introducing a New Trend in Magazines . . . Illustrated SuspenStories we dare you to read!” Within a year of debuting this “New Trend,” EC began to turn a profit by producing the kind of genre comics that would mark a transitional era in the industry, known as “The Atomic Age of Comics.”37 Bill Gaines did not hesitate to credit his father for “starting the comics magazine industry,” but he proudly staked his own claim in horror: “I was the first publisher in these United States to publish horror comics. I am responsible, I started them.”38 Harvey Kurtzman, who was originally hired as an artist in 1949, was later promoted to writer and editor of the war titles, as well as Mad in its early years. Responsibility

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for The Vault of Horror was turned over to Johnny Craig. Feldstein served as the lead editor of the remaining titles, scripting stories that he developed with Gaines for a variety of artists. In a 1969 interview, Gaines explained the process that he and Feldstein followed: We’d plot together, generally. I would come up with the “springboards,” and then we’d sit down, the two of us, and we’d plot out the idea. Then Al would go off and write the story from about one o’clock to four o’clock. Al would actually write the story in pencil on the drawing board, breaking everything down into panels as he went. Then, the story would be sent out for lettering. As you know, we used Leroy machine lettering. When the thing was lettered it was given to the artist, already broken down into panels, the balloons drawn in, and the lettering already in the balloons. And that’s all the artist would get; he got no other script. Al would go over the story with him, and then the artist would take it from there, with no other directions.⁠39 Because each issue contained four to six stories, the production schedule was grueling, with Feldstein scripting four stories a week for months at a time. Despite the fact that he claimed to be solely concerned with “meeting the deadlines and grinding out the stuff,”40 Feldstein helped introduce innovations such as the three GhouLunatic narrators of the horror comics, and he developed the distinctive approach to visual storytelling that served as the foundation for EC’s most successful formulas. “Feldstein’s scripts were vastly superior to many short story writers,” observes Nicky Wright, while Jarrett Keene refers to the EC editor as “a natural born storyteller with a knack for pacing and twist endings.” Daniels compares the sharp focus, brevity, and tone of the visual narratives to Edgar Allan Poe’s notion of the unity of effect. The writer Larry Stark, a first-generation reader whom the EC staff affectionately called the company’s number-one fan, referred to the writing as “Pulitzer Prize material” when compared to other comics.41 Just as importantly, the scripts were customized according to each individual artist’s style. Feldstein, who had previously worked in larger comics studios as part of an assembly line of uncredited artists, allowed EC’s pencilers to sign their work and gave each room to design the

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visual aspects of the narratives according to their strengths.42 Short profiles on the artists in the comics helped to further acquaint readers with the talent behind the scenes. One of the company’s most popular artists was Wallace “Wally” Wood, who illustrated stories for nearly every genre that EC produced and was often singled out for his work in science fiction. Like Feldstein, Wood freelanced at Fox and Avon before being retained permanently by Gaines as a staff artist in 1950. As Daniels notes, “His attention to detail, his skill in delineating the human form, and the imagination employed in depicting the unknown, placed him in the front rank of comic book illustrators.”43 Along with developing tightly plotted stories with high-quality art, EC’s creative teams were known for tempering spine-chilling scenarios with gallows humor, puns, and inside jokes that, as Matthew Pustz notes, heightened the comics’ appeal: “Although the stories could be very grim, the puns gave readers the idea that nothing should be taken too seriously, that they were involved in a secret, inside joke that nonreaders or those not devoted to EC Comics simply could not understand.”44 This approach was best suited for older readers, and Gaines and Feldstein were unequivocal in their desire not to underestimate their audience by attempting to produce comics that would appeal to very young children. Feldstein reiterated the point at the 1972 EC FanAddict Convention: “We were writing for teenagers and young adults; we were writing for the guys that were reading it in the Army. We were writing for ourselves at our age level, and I think perhaps that was responsible for the level we reached.”45 The 1951 story “Reflection of Death!” from Tales from the Crypt #23 offers one memorable example. At the start, a splash page of the Crypt Keeper beckons, “Welcome, dear fiends! Come in!” Ghosts, werewolves, and mummies crowd around his chair. With a shrunken head hovering above, he promises that “this one is sure to freeze the blood in your veins” before inviting readers to turn the page.46 As the main character, “you” are a white man named Al on a long road trip with a friend who drives late into the winter night. After your car veers into a set of oncoming headlights and crashes, you see through Al’s eyes as he emerges from “empty . . . eternal” blackness in search of assistance. The men and women you subsequently encounter (including a hobo cooking stew under a bridge) refuse to help and flee with mounting fear and revulsion. At last when you behold yourself in a mirror, a

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Figure 3. “Reflection of Death!” from Tales from the Crypt #23 (1951)

dead, rotting reflection gapes back. If this is a nightmare, then you are its monster (figure 3). With a jolt, you wake up, only to find yourself behind the wheel of the car, prompting the vicious cycle to begin again. “Heh, heh! Well, kiddies! That’s it!” the Crypt Keeper says in the closing panel. “Like it? Like being a corpse? Well, you might as well get used to it! It’s bound to happen eventually. Oh come, come! Why the grave look?”47 Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the New Trend comics was the “snap-ending,” Feldstein’s term for the surprise plot twists that brought stories such as “Reflection of Death!” to a thrilling close. EC’s editors were influenced by “The Gift of the Magi” author, O. Henry, as well as the suspense and science-fiction pulps of the period. As a storytelling maneuver in EC scripts, the snap-ending would become

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inextricably tied to notions of poetic justice that marked the horror and crime comics in particular.⁠48 Daniels, in his discussion of the “offbeat endings which stopped the story dead at the moment of greatest impact,” characterizes the effect as “providing simultaneously a definite chill and the satisfaction of seeing an unpleasant character get a suitable comeuppance. . . . This was reinforced by the fact that the plots were constructed so that the source of horror was also the source of justice.”49 For instance, in “’Taint the Meat . . . It’s the Humanity!” from Tales from the Crypt #32, a butcher named Mr. Gristle tries to work around the food rationing during World War II by greedily selling a combination of stale beef and horsemeat to his customers. He ignores his wife’s protests, and as a result, their own son is accidentally poisoned after a bad meal. In the final snap, the comic’s focalization shifts abruptly to a dazed Mrs. Gristle; she stands behind the butcher case in a bloodsmeared apron and dispassionately offers pieces of her husband’s corpse for sale: “Tainted meat . . . ? Tainted meat anyone?”50 The vengeful ends of what Yezbick refers to as EC’s “angry little fables” are all but warranted in the story worlds of these comics when the originating offense is so deeply unconscionable.51 Murderous deception driven by greed, power, and self-interest sets the stage for retributive justice. Gaines was explicit in his contention that the stories he published “were really quite moral.” He explained, “If somebody did something really bad, he usually ‘got it.’ And of course, the EC way was he got it the same way he gave it.”52 When asked about the formula, Feldstein remarked, “That I think was partially due to the fact that we plotted all the stories together and we as a team, Bill and I, had a feeling for the kind of story we enjoyed, which was that kind, with the snap-ending, or the kind with some social injustice that we could chastise.”53 The brand also relied a great deal on perspectives designed to boost reader identification. Stories such as “Reflection of Death!” deploy the second-person mode—visually as well as verbally—to heighten readers’ ability to connect with the thoughts and sensations of unfamiliar bodies, to immerse themselves in lives they may never encounter on their own (a chilling thought for readers who are asked to imagine themselves as a walking corpse). “Readers were lured into

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identification with what they also feared,” Daniels reminds us.54 Taken together, these narrative and artistic patterns constitute the creative tradition that bridged all of EC’s comic books. It is through what Gaines refers to as “the EC way” that his publishing company could corner the market on 1950s horror comics while also compelling readers to engage the most urgent problems of American society. Stories off the Beaten Path When Shock SuspenStories debuted in 1952, the comic series was advertised as an EC sampler that featured a science-fiction, war, crime, and horror “SuspenStory” in each issue with a snap- (or shock) ending. As the comics critic Thommy Burns notes, Gaines and Feldstein decided to replace the war offering in the second issue with an unclassifiable type of tale that they categorized as a “Shock SuspenStory,” and it went on to become a permanent fixture in the second slot.55 “The Patriots!” was the first shock comic to debut, followed in issue #3 by “The Guilty!,” a story in which an innocent black man is accused of murdering a white woman but is shot by the sheriff before being exonerated. When a reader wrote to ask about the change, the editors explained, “We want Shock to not only contain crackerjack yarns in E.C.’s chosen fields, but also to contain occasional ‘off-the-beatenpath’ stories that we feel are worthwhile, . . . stories that do not fall into the categories of horror, s-f, suspense, or war, but that still retain the shock motif!”56 Just as EC experimented with horror two years earlier, Gaines and Feldstein took a calculated risk in making these “worthwhile” stories a regular feature. It is not uncommon for readers, past and present, to treat all the stories that appeared in Shock SuspenStories as preachies, given the extent to which the series gained a special reputation for controversial plots that drew on the elements of the EC tradition to “do a little proselytizing.”57 The series undoubtedly serves as a home for the kind of social realism that has come to be associated with the preachies; still, it is important to emphasize that EC’s message stories cut across genres. Its most well-known story to venture off the beaten path appeared in a science-fiction title (“Judgment Day!”), while another celebrated story, “Master Race,” was originally slated for an issue of Crime SuspenStories. Here it may be useful to keep in mind that the term preachies was not a label that EC used in an official capacity but rather a tongue-in-cheek

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pun originally coined by Gaines to mock the pretense of a company that claimed to no longer be interested in educating anybody. He and Feldstein, along with EC fans, continued to circulate the ironic term in later years; there are even instances in which it is used to signify any EC comic that expressed concerns about real-life social conditions and prevailing attitudes.⁠58 In an unpublished monograph, Frank Nuessel defines the preachies simply as comics “with a significant moral to tell” and fittingly locates their aims at the place where the educational and the entertaining meet.59 Nuessel’s scholarly overview of EC indexes the New Trend line into numerous subcategories that feature social commentary on McCarthyism, racism, capital punishment, drug addiction, rape, corruption, false patriotism, nuclear war, animal cruelty, and more.60 Voices that are more critical of EC’s efforts push back against what the comics scholar Bart Beaty calls “the myth of quality that is attached to EC comics.”61 This includes commentary by writers, such as Lawrence Watt-Evans, who assert that the horror and suspense comics from Avon, American Comics Group, and Trans-World deserve as much attention as the titles that Gaines developed do.⁠62 Among the most scathing criticisms of the company is “EC and the Chimera of Memory,” written by the critic Suat Tong Ng for the Comics Journal in 2003 and reprinted on the blog Hooded Utilitarian. Frustrated by devotees who, to his mind, overstate the artistic worth of EC as the “best comics ever made,” Ng purports to take a more clear-eyed view of stories that are ultimately “stifled by a certain intellectual laziness.”63 He argues that outside the early issues of Mad, EC offered no meaningful insight for any but the youngest readers; the comics were too “shackled by commerce” to achieve the lasting value of Goya’s prints, the film Citizen Kane, or the work of the comics auteur Joe Sacco. Ng acknowledges the progressive subject matter of the social-protest comics, but he adamantly insists that EC did not go far enough: “The ‘preachies’ were hopelessly didactic, simplistic, and inarticulate,” he writes, “failing at every point to delineate character or elicit sympathy for their cause.”64 I do not regard the preachies as a failure, of course. Nor am I arguing their unmitigated success. The work that EC did to represent race and social protest is complex, as is its influence in popular culture. Yet I agree with Ng that scholars need to apply critical scrutiny to the

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actual content of these stories and refuse to treat even the most sincere celebrations of the company’s genius as self-evident. Ultimately the field is better served by the clear articulation of the measures by which even the self-styled proselytizing of the preachies can be deemed useful and worthy of all this attention. EC’s visual and verbal formulas for riveting genre comics were born out of the struggle to creatively reconcile mass appeals to social conscience with a reputation for carefree entertainment. Even bound by the constraints of commerce, the comics that EC produced stood apart for many 1950s readers. Wright explains that “with only nine titles and a weak distribution network, EC was a relatively small publisher, but it enjoyed commercial success disproportionate to its size. Moreover, it seemed, the more outrageous the stories, the better they sold.”65 Stark and others point out that the horror stories became even more gruesome in later years in order to keep up with the competition and that EC relied more on “house-plots” and less on “artfully conceived stories.”66 Fierce competition for readers in a market that had swelled to several hundred horror titles does appear to have influenced the decision to publish stories that even their creators would later regret, such as “Foul Play!” The snap-ending in this revenge tale from The Haunt of Fear #19 featured a baseball game being played in the dark of night with the body parts of a nefarious teammate.67 Still, EC held fast to the preachies, and the editors continued to expand and defend their content once the industry came under fire. When Gaines volunteered to appear before the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954, his prepared remarks reiterated a common line of defense against anticomics critics, namely, that the publications were harmless diversions. “Pleasure is what we sell, entertainment, reading enjoyment. Entertaining reading has never harmed anyone,” he stated.68 But Gaines strayed from these prepared remarks to address a claim made earlier that morning by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham about a story called “The Whipping” from Shock SuspenStories #14: I would like to discuss, if you bear with me a moment more, something which Dr. Wertham provoked me into. Dr. Wertham,

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I am happy to say, I have just caught in a half-truth, and I am very indignant about it. He said there is a magazine now on the stands preaching racial intolerance. The magazine he is referring to is my magazine. What he said, as much as he said, was true. There do appear in this magazine such materials as “Spik,” “Dirty Mexican,” but Dr. Wertham did not tell you what the plot of the story was. This is one of a series of stories designed to show the evils of race prejudice and mob violence, in this case against Mexican Catholics. Previous stories in this same magazine have dealt with antiSemitism, and anti-Negro feelings, evils of dope addiction and development of juvenile delinquents. This is one of the most brilliantly written stories that I have ever had the pleasure to publish. I was very proud of it, and to find it being used in such a nefarious way made me quite angry.69 Chapter 1 takes this testimony as a starting place for a more indepth discussion about how EC’s editors partitioned elements of the comics form to distinguish between “entertaining” and “educational” messaging. Such efforts, while seldom as straightforward as Gaines claimed, nevertheless reveal a dynamic set of reading practices that the company worked to cultivate among consumers—beginning with the decisive role of EC’s narrative captions. As for that issue of Shock SuspenStories that was passed around Senator Estes Kefauver’s subcommittee in April 1954, I use it as a case study to examine the formal and aesthetic storytelling strategies of EC. I take a closer look at EC’s engagement with blackness through image and text in chapter 2 and focus on the stories “The Guilty!” and “In Gratitude  .  .  .” from Shock SuspenStories as well as “Perimeter!” from Frontline Combat. I analyze the forthright condemnation of discrimination in these comics. I also address the physical depiction of racial difference and the infrequency with which the black characters are permitted to speak or act for themselves. Readers who look to EC for stories about the interior lives of people of color will be disappointed, finding instead narratives more concerned with tracing the corrupting power of racism on white society in a way that, interestingly

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enough, recalls the moral trajectory of M. C. Gaines’s Pictures Stories from American History. Chapter 3 shifts more pointedly to the nature of justice in EC preachies that ask, if hate is learned, “how can it be untaught?”70 In response, I single out the coercive use of shame to explore how the act of shaming functions as the impetus for individual and collective transformation. This is especially the case in Shock SuspenStories, where the antagonists from “Blood Brothers,” “The Patriots!,” “Hate!,” and “A Kind of Justice” suffer few punitive repercussions for criminal acts of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and sexual assault. In these communities, where the principles of democracy are supplanted by the vigilantism of mob rule, punishment comes instead through affect, the humiliating rupture of social bonds. As readers, even our body schema becomes invested in the sentimental tears and slumped shoulders of the shame experienced on the page. This chapter concludes with a discussion of how the story “Master Race” strays from this template in a way that not only denounces Hitler’s regime but also indicts the silent bystanders for whom self-righteous pangs of regret are not enough. I return to “Judgment Day!” in chapter 4 to focus on the comic’s critique of Jim Crow through speculative fiction and argue that the visual narrative’s departure from the social realism of Shock SuspenStories raises questions about the tensions between social identity, technology, and the idealization of progress. I place Feldstein and Orlando’s comic in conversation with Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, as both share outlaw protagonists and engage the surreal machinery of sight and semblance. While “Judgment Day!” is not without its own shortcomings, the allegorical fantasy is, in many ways, the culmination of the quintessential formulas that have come to define the Entertaining Comics Group as an unabashedly “commercial venture” that had the capacity to show, as Feldstein once stated, “that the world can be righteous if we allow it to be.”71 Perhaps it is no surprise then that “Judgment Day!” also marks the end of EC’s comic-book division. The Comics Code Authority (CCA) was formed by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954 after the Senate hearings to monitor the content of participating

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comic-book publishers. Gaines responded to the restrictions of the CCA’s Code for Editorial Content by replacing the New Trend line with “New Direction” comics that included titles such as Impact, Valor, Psychoanalysis, and Incredible Science Fiction.72 None lasted for more than five issues. In the winter of 1955, the CCA refused to give its seal of approval to a story slated for an issue of EC’s Incredible Science Fiction. Feldstein submitted “Judgment Day!” as an alternative, but it was also rejected. He explains, “We wanted them to give us a good reason why they were turning it down, but they were smart enough not to. It was a straight plea for racial tolerance, orange and blue robots, and the only objection I understand they had was that they wanted us to remove the sweat from the Negro’s temples and forehead in the last panel, which we refused to do.”73 Gaines reprinted the story unchanged and discontinued the production of nearly all his comic books, leaving only the humor magazine Mad. With companies such as EC unable to withstand the stricter regulations of the market, as Carol Tilley points out, “the CMAA’s code effectively marked the end of comics’ reign as the most popular print medium among children in history.”74 And so there would be no more new springboards of Shock SuspenStories or Incredible Science Fiction after 1956. No more letters for “The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner.” No more snap-endings done the EC way. While the company’s reputation for social and political critique would continue to flourish through the biting satire of Mad, EC’s legacy as a maverick in the mainstream comic-book industry grows out of these Atomic Age controversies, from the gore of “Foul Play!” and the cruelty of “The Whipping” to the black man’s sweat in “Judgment Day!” The company’s ambitions went on to inspire new generations of comics creators, particularly those associated with underground and alternative comics from 1960s and 1970s. Tributes featured in fanzines, such as Blab! by Monte Beauchamp, capture the lasting impact of the publisher on mainstream and independent comics creators such as Alan Moore, Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Peter Bagge, Drew Friedman, Moebius, Gary Panter, and Carol Lay.75 Such accolades have drawn new readers to EC, creating a demand for reprints from publishers

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including Russ Cochran, IDW Publishing, Dark Horse Comics, and Fantagraphics. They have generated a wealth of spirited commentary, biographies, indexes, interviews, gallery exhibitions, and rare memorabilia. By keeping the narrative and aesthetic provocations of the preachies in circulation, the chapters that follow contribute to this archive with a critical analysis of race and social protest in EC.

CH A P T E R O N E

“SPeLLeD OUT carefULLY iN THe caPTiONS” How to read an ec Magazine

Oh, by the way . . . here’s a little hint! read all the captions in e-c magazines as well as the balloons. They contain thrilling descriptions, important information pertaining to plot, and time sequences, etc. you cannot fully enjoy . . . in fact, you cannot fully understand or follow . . . any story without thoroughly reading every word! —The Crypt Keeper

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

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number one position. This is a switch from the old days of comics when the art was most important and the story secondary. We take our stories very seriously. They are true-to-life adult stories ending in a surprise. That’s our formula.”3 The formula that made EC’s “Jolting Tales of Tension” so successful also helped to create the conditions for more explicit social and political protest, particularly in the comics known as the preachies, which challenged racism, anti-Semitism, anticommunist red-baiting, and other forms of social discrimination in the United States. As horror and crime comics came under fire amid the uproar over juvenile delinquency in the early 1950s, Gaines and Feldstein often pointed to the preachies as evidence of their creative team’s ability to successfully target their messages through the comics form. This chapter analyzes EC’s attempt to establish clear boundaries between “entertaining” and “educational” reading practices that were mindful of the public’s anxieties over how comic books could influence young readers. Essential to this effort was an editorial emphasis on how narrative captions, dialogue, and other words acted as signposts of meaning. If comics were indeed as hazardous as critics such as Sterling North, Fredric Wertham, and Estes Kefauver feared, the social-protest comics might prove that EC’s writers could contain those dangers and redirect the medium’s unstable visual forces at will. It was an approach that sounded better in theory than in practice, as “The Whipping” from the controversial issue of SuspenStories #14 demonstrates. Yet the creative aims, execution, and impact of the preachies function not only as an extension of the EC tradition but also as an example of the comic-book industry’s early attempts to use the medium and its generic conventions to combat racism and other social ills. EC writers and artists generated an expansive knowledge base of stock-character tropes and narrative perspectives for the New Trend line that would tantalize first-time readers while empowering more experienced subscribers to navigate any story the company produced. Comics scholars such as Linda Adler-Kassner, Carol Tilley, and Jared Gardner also single out the strategic appeals on EC’s interactive letter pages that encouraged readers to make connections with one another in a “raucous community of misfits.”4 When readers began

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to follow the Crypt Keeper’s hints to “read all the captions in e-c magazines as well as the balloons” and once they could assess the differences between the EC artists after turning so many pages, Gaines and Feldstein took more creative risks with consumers in mind. Whether the comic’s surprise twist uncovered a werewolf ’s deadly revenge or the racial terror of a lynch mob, Gaines was confident that EC fan-addicts knew the difference between real blood and the fake stuff. “Virtue Doesn’t Always Have to Triumph” In An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, Thomas J. Roberts explores the devalued pleasures of so-called low-taste reading habits in genre fiction most commonly associated with pulp magazines and paperbacks. Given that readers who delight in science fiction, western, romance, mystery, and other popular genres often regard these stories as if they were “written by a tradition rather than by an individual,” Roberts’s observations are useful in considering the ways in which EC’s genre comics are consumed as part of a system of texts and contexts.5 Roberts helpfully underscores the kinds of learnedness required to find satisfaction within these traditions, their plot devices, and their character types, and he notes the ways in which each genre’s enthusiasts generate different thresholds of quality: “Most of what seems inexcusably unintelligible in popular fiction is crystal clear to the people who have learned how to read it.”6 Furthermore, as the volume of stories grows, the genres accrue richer, more sophisticated meanings and thematic concerns, which reward those who read in bulk. “Genre reading is system reading,” Roberts explains. “That is, as we are reading the stories, we are exploring the system that created them. Further, the system is always changing, and in reading the new stories the system is writing we are following the changes in that system.”7 An editorial note in the EC war comic Two-Fisted Tales reiterates this view: “As all our old readers know, the E-C line stressed quality . . . top-notch quality . . . both in story content and art. If you enjoy this magazine, you’ll enjoy all E-C magazines.”8 Gaines’s call for story ideas in Writer’s Digest offers a glimpse into how EC artists, writers, and editors operated within and against these discursive systems during the early 1950s. The feature, titled “Madman

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Gaines Pleads for Plots,” invited writers to submit scripts and synopses for their horror, crime, shock, and science-fiction comics. Gaines begins, “We give up. For five years my editors and I have been writing an average of a comic book every six days; five a month, 60 a year. Each magazine contained four stories. That’s 240 plots a year, 1200 in five years. Now we’re written out. Bone dry. And we need your help.”9 The piece goes on to provide a brief history of the company that M. C. Gaines started in an effort to produce educational comics before shifting under his son’s direction to more sensational fare, including Tales from the Crypt and Mad, that proved to be more profitable. The familiar image of Bill Gaines that emerges in the feature is of the reluctant CEO burdened by his father’s legacy but converted by the power of comics. What follows is an intriguing précis of EC story types: You should know this about our horror books: we have no ghosts, devils, goblins or the like. We tolerate vampires and werewolves, if they follow tradition and behave the way respectable vampires and werewolves should. We love walking corpse stories. We’ll accept an occasional zombie or mummy. And we relish the contes cruels story. On the other hand, Shock SuspenStories do not contain supernaturalism. We want shock endings to wind up plain, logical suspense stories. Crime SuspenStories contain no shock. These are logical stories in which the villain tries to get away with murder—and probably does. No cops and robbers stories. Virtue doesn’t always have to triumph.10 While Bradford W. Wright, David Hajdu, and others have referenced this passage as evidence of EC’s publishing philosophy,11 we should also keep in mind that as an advertisement, the generic descriptions are part of a rhetorical self-fashioning to attract submissions. The categories are just as aspirational as they are explanatory; this is how Gaines saw his comics at their best and how he wanted others to see them.12 Indeed, the emphasis on innovative copy that takes “the number one position” seems especially fitting for a call in a trade journal for writers.

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At the same time, the sinister playfulness of the EC way is modeled rather effectively in the Writer’s Digest descriptions. The list includes horror comics with a penchant for the weird, that rely less on the supernatural tricks of your run-of-the-mill haunted house and more on the terrifying twists of fate that were characteristic of the contes cruels.13 EC’s crime and shock comics are anchored by logical progressions and, by extension, the semblance of social reality. Here the status quo is the stage on which the suspenseful windup takes place, thereby intensifying the notion of real-life shock. Wright notes, “Like [James M.] Cain’s novels, EC’s crime comics featured criminals who were for all appearances attractive, middle-class, suburban, ‘normal’ people who happened to possess a disturbing capacity for murder.”14 From this perspective, the subsequent declaration that “virtue doesn’t always have to triumph,” while offered as a genre-specific storytelling trait, reinforces the implied ideological investments of EC’s narrative and artistic choices. At issue in disrupting conventional ideas of normalcy is the question of how society defines virtue to begin with, particularly for those who treat difference as menacing or monstrous. It is no wonder, then, that the first example of EC’s formula cited in the Writer’s Digest call is not a plot drawn from The Haunt of Fear but a message story called “Blood Brothers” from Shock SuspenStories #13. Gaines summarizes the story: “It’s about Sid, who drives his best friend, Henry Williams, to suicide when he finds out Williams is part Negro. The surprise: after the tragedy has occurred, Sid learns that he too has Negro blood in him, from a blood transfusion that saved his life when he was a child.”15 Readers quickly learn what happens to the downtrodden and the marginalized in EC’s story world when there are no masked heroes to save them. A black man takes his own life in “Blood Brothers,” and as I discuss in more detail in chapter 3, it is unlikely that the white man who terrorized him will be prosecuted for the crime. “Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots” affirmed the notion that the readers who benefited the most from an EC comic were those interested in acquiring what Roberts refers to as the genre competency to see each story as participating in a larger tradition. By contrast, in the months that followed, the US Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency was discouraged from considering the merits of this systemic reading approach. Testimony from experts and

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observers outside the industry often singled out individual comicbook issues and insisted on their status as “inexcusably unintelligible” story objects.16 Of the half-dozen comic books that Richard Clendenen presented to the Senate subcommittee that was led by Senator Estes Kefauver in April 1954, two were published by EC: Haunt of Fear #24 and Shock SuspenStories #14. The EC issues, marked by the chairman as exhibit number twelve, were cited as evidence of the “substantial degree of sadism, crime, and horror” contained in one-quarter of the seventy-five to one hundred million comic books that would be sold in the United States that year.17 On the Shock SuspenStories #14 cover (figure 4), bullet holes scatter across the chest of a man being shot. Empty shell casings float alongside the tip of an automatic-gun nozzle firing in the foreground, while a broken mirror reflects the menacing image of the shooter in a trench coat and hat. To his left, a terrified woman recoils at the vicious attack; as she twists away, shadows outline her full breasts and hips. This was the kind of comic that Clendenen, as executive director of the Senate subcommittee, had been charged to investigate in order to evaluate the medium’s popularity and influence on young readers. As part of Clendenen’s testimony on April twenty-first, he read aloud plot summaries from the crime and horror stories and dispassionately enumerated the acts of dismemberment, suicide, and cruelty alongside a slideshow of images. Yet what seemed to trouble the executive director the most was not severed heads. Instead it was the plight of an orphaned boy preyed on by vampire foster parents in a story called “The Secret” from The Haunt of Fear. Clendenen took little comfort in that plot’s surprise twist, in which the boy is revealed to be a werewolf and kills his adult foes. Clendenen’s reading emphasized instead how kind, attentive, and “nice-looking” the mother and father pretend to be until the night they demand their foster child’s blood. He goes on to describe how in another EC story, “a small golden-haired girl named Lucy” turns out to be the criminal mastermind who sends her mother to the electric chair. Such a story exploited vulnerable youth, Clendenen suggested, based on his background experience as a social worker.18 The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham shared Clendenen’s concerns for the welfare of children, as he articulated in his book Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth, published

Figure 4. Cover of Shock SuspenStories #14 (1954)

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shortly before the hearings in 1954.19 As Gabriel Mendes explains, “because [comic books’] depiction of violence and depravity threatened the ethical development of young people, according to Wertham, they constituted a threat to the mental and emotional health of all children.”20 When it was his turn to testify that afternoon in April, Wertham singled out “The Whipping” from the Shock SuspenStories comic and criticized its depiction of social prejudice. Rather than tallying the number of mutilated bodies, as the executive director had, Wertham counted twelve uses of the epithet “Spick” in the story to demonstrate that the damage such a comic could cause rivaled Hitler’s regime in generating “race hatred” among white readers: You know at the present moment New York City and other cities have a great social problem in integrating immigrating Puerto Ricans. It is very important to establish peace in these neighborhoods where friction may arise, or has arisen. This particular comic book that I am referring to now has a story in which a derogatory term for Puerto Ricans, which I will not repeat here, but which is a common derogatory term, is repeated 12 times in one story. This greasy so and so, this dirty so and so. It is pointed out that a Spanish Catholic family moved into this neighborhood—utterly unnecessary. What is the point of the story? The point of the story is that then somebody gets beaten to death. The only error is that the man who must get beaten to death is not a man; it is a girl.21 Wertham’s interpretation generated the most outrage from Gaines when his turn came to testify. “The Whipping,” which Gaines described as “one of the most brilliantly written stories that I have ever had the pleasure to publish,” was actually “designed to show the evils of racial prejudice and mob violence,” which therefore justified the inclusion of derogatory words. His rebuttal took a stance similar to the Writer’s Digest call for plots and drew on the genre-specific vocabularies that privileged system reading. He insisted that the dialogue was better understood not only within the context of one story but also in relation to others in the series.22 Associate chief counsel Herbert Beaser was not so sure. His questions to Gaines during the Senate subcommittee hearings took up

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the issues raised by “The Whipping” and prompted the following exchange about the way that EC claimed to transmit and withhold messages at will: Mr. Beaser: Mr. Gaines, let me ask you one thing with reference to Dr. Wertham’s testimony. You used the pages of your comic book to send across a message, in this case it was against racial prejudice; is that it? Mr. Gaines: That is right. Mr. Beaser: You think, therefore, you can get across a message to the kids through the medium of your magazine that would lessen racial prejudice; is that it? Mr. Gaines: By specific effort and spelling it out very carefully so that the point won’t be missed by any of the readers, and I regret to admit that it still is missed by some readers, as well as Dr. Wertham—we have, I think, achieved some degree of success in combating anti-Semitism, anti-Negro feeling, and so forth. Mr. Beaser: Yet why do you say you cannot at the same time and in the same manner use the pages of your magazine to get a message which would affect children adversely, that is, to have an effect upon their doing these deeds of violence or sadism, whatever is depicted? Mr. Gaines: Because no message is being given to them. In other words, when we write a story with a message, it is deliberately written in such a way that the message, as I say, is spelled out carefully in the captions. The preaching, if you want to call it, is spelled out carefully in the captions, plus the fact that our readers by this time know that in each issue of Shock SuspenStories, the second of the four stories will be this type of story. Mr. Beaser: A message can be gotten across without spelling out in that detail. For example, take this case that was presented this morning of the child who is in a foster home who became a werewolf, and foster parents— Mr. Gaines: That was one of our stories. Mr. Beaser: A child who killed her mother. Do you think that would have any effect at all on a child who is in a foster placement, who is with foster parents, who has fears? Do you not think that child in reading the story would have some of the

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normal fears which a child has, some of the normal anxieties tightened, increased? Mr. Gaines: I honestly can say I don’t think so. No message has been spelled out there. We were not trying to prove anything with that story. None of the captions said anything like “If you are unhappy with your step mother, shoot her.”23 Testifying before the US Senate subcommittee, it was arguably in Gaines’s best interest to insist that the brutal story about a white supremacist who mistakenly kills his own daughter ultimately teaches young readers a valuable lesson, while the Haunt of Fear werewolf story offers only recreational pleasures. At risk were Gaines’s professional reputation, his company’s profits, and the livelihood of his employees. In the eyes of his critics, however, the fact that he appeared to have no qualms about placing such enormous trust in children to sort through potentially conflicting messages did not bode well for his qualifications as a responsible steward of youth culture. Linda Adler-Kassner points out that in the decade following World War II, “children’s value systems were perceived as either ‘totally malleable,’ or pure and innocent until corrupted by society.”24 Gaines’s defensive pivot to the question of narrative intent, instead of reassuring the Senate subcommittee, only seemed to reinforce the messiness of the comic book’s interpretive demands. As a result, the publisher who the New York Times claimed saw “no harm in horror”25 came to epitomize the volatility of comics as an inherently unstable visual form, one that was simply too pliable to be distributed to children without adult oversight. The high stakes of this intense exchange with Beaser also demonstrate how Gaines unpacked the logic behind the creation of his comics. Rather than deny the cruelty and violence that comic books portrayed (and that could be found, he pointed out, in any newspaper), Gaines takes his cues from the reactionary measures of the Atomic Age in which he lived to argue instead for EC’s creative decision-making as a containment system equipped with discursive barriers to shield readers from harm. Gaines’s invocation of what is “spelled out carefully in the captions” alerts readers to these fail-safe measures and even concedes the idea insinuated throughout much of anticomics criticism that the fusion of word and picture is capable of great dangers when too much is required of the viewer’s imagination. As Gardner

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points out, “the comic, with its formal and inescapable demands for active completion by the reader, is therefore necessarily a most predatory aesthetic objects.”26 EC’s careful approach to the interactions of text and image is important, then, for understanding how the taboo combination of explicitness, incredulity, and reading pleasure that the company branded as “shock” could also be adapted to engage more complex social messages—to “prove something,” as Gaines states in his testimony. Consider how Gaines attempted to counter Beaser’s examples of what is visually “depicted” by pointing to what the captions have “spelled out.” In doing so, Gaines introduces the Senate subcommittee to a way of reading and seeing that assigns certain elements of the page more interpretive weight than others. Pictures connote the precarious emotive and sensory registers of the predatory aesthetic object in this hierarchy; they astonish, disgust, and terrify. But words (or narrative captions, in particular) are used to foreclose the risks taken by the page’s visual play when Gaines and Feldstein believed that the social coherence of the plot was at stake. The notion that captions could more easily make the comic’s intent clear regardless of how sensational the deeds may appear on the page is underscored by editorial messages to readers. The importance of reading every word is stressed in EC’s back matter and in fan newsletters, along with paratexts such as the “hint” quoted at the start of the chapter. Emphasized in the Crypt Keeper’s capital letters are the demands of EC’s own cultural literacy, expressed not just for the benefit of Tales from the Crypt fans but to help all EC readers map the informational registers of any title and to encourage them to connect their enjoyment of the story with a deeper comprehension of how visual and verbal codes work together. As a consequence of this approach, the EC tradition became associated with text-heavy comics. “Wordy” but also “well-written,” notes one critic, while another observes about Feldstein, “the EC wordsmith tended to overwrite, stuffing pages with text-heavy captions and speech balloons that pushed the art to the edges of the panels.”27 To develop original five- to seven-page stories without serial characters or established story worlds, Feldstein relied on opening exposition along with detailed omniscient and second-person narration to make the implications of the plot explicit. These techniques also

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helped to reinforce the distinction that EC stressed in its marketing about “putting stories first” in order to create better comics. Gaines’s testimony bypassed the highly acclaimed talents of artists to spotlight the regulatory role of the text and the narrative voice-over. Critics such as Wertham had been successful in disparaging the process of “picture-reading” in ways that suggested, according to Bart Beaty, that “the medium itself was inherently problematic and was consequently irretrievable for a literate culture.”28 In turn, EC regarded the caption’s written words—placed deliberately, carefully, and by specific effort—as a bulwark against claims that the very act of reading a comic could be dangerous. Exhibit Number Twelve A closer look at the issue of Shock SuspenStories that was submitted as evidence during the US Senate subcommittee hearings further highlights the challenges of isolating text and image in the manner that Gaines describes. The first page of “The Whipping” opens with a generous narrative description to introduce our protagonist, a white, middle-aged, slightly balding, family man named Ed. He stands beneath a streetlight with a white sheet folded over his arm and a leather strap in his hand. Once the reader learns that “the look of hate in his angry, angry eyes” had been trigged by the young Mexican American man who is dating Ed’s daughter, the extradiegetic narrative voice conspires with the bigoted protagonist, focalizing the events through his perspective in order to describe the helpless outrage and panic that turns him into a murderous vigilante.29 When he visits the homes of his white neighbors to tell them about the “dirty Spick” who attempted to sexually assault his daughter, the captions alert us to the calculations behind the “shocking lies” invented by Ed to rouse other white fathers to anger: “frightening them . . . stirring them to action . . . prodding them toward violence.”30 Once the mob pulls the white bedsheets over their faces, the allegiances of the narrative voice shift and turn accusatory. The captions begin to speak more frankly about the hateful delusions and the fictions that sustain the characters’ racist beliefs. Wallace Wood’s illustrations of Ed in costume emphasize his eyes, blown wide and seething with rage behind a mask, alongside the insistent rise and fall of his leather strap (figure 5). When amid the chaos of shadow and

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Figure 5. “The Whipping” from Shock SuspenStories #14 (1954)

anonymity another father expresses concern, Ed silences him too, with the whip, and the captions berate the bystander’s feeble attempt: “stung by his own work .  .  . suffering the pain of his own mission. He’d objected, yes! But he’d objected too late.”31 Ed is repeatedly

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described as a “whip-wielder,” “perpetrator,” and “bigot” until the dramatic last panel, when he also realizes—too late!—that his daughter is the fatal victim of his hate and not her olive-skinned husband; his fixation on whiteness and purity has yielded only the haunting shame of her “white dead face.” In the comics historian Amy Kiste Nyberg’s reading of the story, she calls attention to the differences between what the reader learns from the captions and what is being depicted visually. She maintains that Wertham’s misreading of the story may not have been deliberate, because there are actually two stories being told in “The Whipping,” one through the images and the dialogue in the word balloons, and another in the captions that accompany the story. The social message about the evils of racism is conveyed by the omniscient narrator through the use of captions. But if a reader skips the captions and skims the dialogue, a much different story is told, where the racism seemingly is justified by the attempted rape of Amy; the fact that it is a trumped-up charge is explained only in the caption.32 Nyberg adds that “no one reading the entire story would construe it as one preaching racial hatred” and reiterates that despite Wertham’s misreading, the story’s intent was quite clear.33 She points out, too, that Wertham was not alone in doing this; anticomics critics often isolated “panels and dialogue from comic book stories out of context” to bolster their argument.34 Nevertheless, her explanation lends too much credence to the notion that separating page elements in this manner can legitimately yield “two stories” rather than an insufficient interpretation of one. Wertham’s “skips” and “skims” are even more troublesome when used to argue the threat posed by millions of comics sold in the United States. His methods appeared to satisfy Senator Kefauver, who agreed after browsing through “The Whipping” that he simply could not “find any moral of better race relations in it.”35 Yet in Wertham’s role as an expert witness and an authority on juvenile delinquency, his propositions for industry regulation were too often based on the menacing editorial intent he assigned to the most narrow, literal readings of comics such as Shock SuspenStories #14. Gardner explains, “Wertham

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himself slows down and focuses on certain elements and fails to fill in others; his summary makes logical narrative connections of various panels while eliding or forgetting other extended (and very slow) passages and ignoring or missing key narrative information.”36 Gaines’s efforts to provide an opposing view that defended the merits of EC to the US senators failed in 1954, although the subcommittee ultimately concluded that “there was little evidence to connect comic book reading with criminal behavior.”37 Wertham took particular offense to the notion that the comics that “were otherwise objectionable” could be used to combat racism and other social problems.38 Stories that fell under what the psychiatrist described as such “barbaric neologisms as suspenstories [sic]” could be of no help to young people. Put simply, Wertham stated, “You cannot clear up the muddy water in a stream by planning a clear brook that flows in the opposite direction.”39 And as Carol Tilley points out in her research on the “numerous falsifications and distortions” that Wertham incorporated into Seduction of the Innocent to make his case, the sentiments expressed in his study shaped the enduring perception of the comicbook industry as toxic.40 For comic-book readers, however, a different standard prevailed— one that rewarded the kind of readings that synthesize multiple visual and verbal cues within each story and across genres. Many of these enthusiasts expressed their appreciation for comics as “harmless entertainment” in the hundreds of letters sent on behalf of EC to the US Senate subcommittee.41 Others such as Bobby Lee Jones, a white reader from Terre Haute, stressed EC’s social interventions: “There is one comic on the market published by Entertaining Comics Publishers that has brought out a great help to the problem of racial segregation. Many of their stories have set a lot of people on the right track. At least a few of my friends now speak to a person of the opposite color and call him buddy now instead of the vile remarks they used before. All because they read a few of the articles in this group.”42 So what happens, then, if instead of following Wertham’s lead, we listen to readers like Bobby Lee Jones? A more systemic analysis of “The Whipping” reveals plot devices and personalities that were designed to spark the EC reader’s familiarity with certain narrative trajectories. Nyberg notes, for instance, that Wertham and other concerned adults may have been troubled by the fact that “the evil was perpetrated by a

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figure of authority whom children have been taught to respect.”43 But as Wright also points out, part of EC’s appeal came from the way the writers and artists consistently undermined authority figures.44 The comics scrutinized the consequences of unchecked power that could come from socioeconomic entitlement in America—particularly, as I elaborate on in chapter 3, when associated with white, middle-class men and mob violence. Suspicions follow characters such as Ed in ways that are not the case with other comics and other areas of mass culture that normalize white, patriarchal authority, particularly when superheroes, detectives, or cowboys are the lead protagonists. For a comic-book company whose stories were often narrated from the perspective of villains and monsters, the white family man’s power was unstable from the moment he was first introduced with the whip in his hand. Furthermore, racial and ethnic minorities, such as Louis Martinez in “The Whipping,” are seldom presented as subjects of ridicule or danger in an EC comic, although most of the stories are unequipped to deal with them as anything other than passive subjects in need of saving.45 They exist mainly as victims of wrongdoing in segregated neighborhoods, graveyards, military platoons, and even in outer space. It would have been unusual for EC to allow acts of racial violence committed by vigilantes to stand without the repercussions being articulated to the reader, through visual cues if not more explicitly by the narrator. The notion that the pictures present Ed’s racism as somehow justified may have seemed reasonable to Wertham and other anticomics critics who read the issue in isolation, but such a reading would have been far-fetched to EC’s regular consumers. Captions and dialogue act in tandem with the pictures in “The Whipping” to portray the evils of racism and guide the readers step by step through the warped rationalizations of a bigot. As mentioned previously, the narrator spends the first half of this story chronicling Ed’s fears. “All the way home, his rage had seethed within him,” the caption states after Ed sees his daughter out with Martinez. “He’d kissed her! He of the olive skin and raven hair had dared to touch his white white daughter.”46 Once Ed and his neighbors set out on a night raid to the Martinez home, the narrative voice shifts from a more impersonal description of Ed’s perspective to judge the actions of the mob. What begins as one man’s desperation becomes a collective act of terrorism

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by men clothed anonymously in attire resembling that of the Ku Klux Klan. Here Feldstein’s captions join forces with Wood’s visual representation to transform the hooded white supremacists of “The Whipping” into phantoms of horror. The story breaches the purported boundaries between text and image in ways that comics scholars theorize as an essential trait of the comics form. As Robert C. Harvey explains it, “the concurrent presence in the visual mode of speech as well as action, locale, etc., makes comics what they are, a unique kind of pictorial narrative. In fact, this concurrence, if not interdependence, may actually define the medium.”47 “The Whipping” vividly illustrates this concurrence. Despite Gaines’s insistence on clear genre distinctions, the narrative’s horror tropes make visual and verbal allusions to the kind of supernaturalism that Shock SuspenStories were not supposed to have. Racism is the monster, the insidious fantasy that drives what the narrator describes as “white ghosts in the dark night” to terrorize people whose skin color, religion, or language are different from their own. The men are “phantom figures on a phantom mission, for isn’t the basis of most hatred and intolerance but fantasy.”48 As figures draped in the billowing folds of white break down the Martinez home with ropes, clubs, and sacks in hand, the captions use the kind of figurative language that one might easily expect to find in Tales from the Crypt: “And from the darkness, too, come the screams of the persecuted . . . the anguished cries of pain of those who are hounded down by these fantasies.”49 The shock comic is better understood as what Roberts calls a genre mutation in that it draws on conventions of horror to express and to condemn the social realities of racism.50 The other three stories that appear in Shock SuspenStories #14 further test the limits of Gaines’s claims about the entertaining and the educational. “The Whipping” is followed by “You, Murderer,” a story adapted by Otto Binder that is based on the silent German horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Binder frames the dark tale of an unsuspecting man who is hypnotized into committing murders through EC’s favored second-person perspective—a convention made all the more sinister by the sharp angles and somber tones of Bernard Krigstein’s art. Another story, “And Ye Sow,” uses elements from the EC crime comics. It depicts a wretched, emasculated husband whose attempt to

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take revenge on his cheating wife results in his own demise. Neither of these entertaining stories was written or illustrated to make a point or prove anything other than the thrilling pleasures of the unexpected. But “The Orphan,” the first story in Shock SuspenStories #14, by Feldstein and Jack Kamen, is more difficult to classify. As referenced during the US Senate subcommittee hearings, the story’s snap-ending involves a ten-year-old, blond girl named Lucy Johnson who kills her abusive father and frames her neglectful mother (and her mother’s boyfriend) for the murder. Significantly the bulk of the comic focuses on explicit representations of violence and cruelty against the child protagonist. Lucy’s father hits her at least three times, and her mother’s deception is made all the worse for the way that her smiling face and hugs in public are followed by hateful rejection of her daughter in private. Yet Lucy, with a conspiratorial wink worthy of Tom Sawyer, easily dispenses with her irresponsible parents and starts a new life with a much-kinder, older aunt. Even though child narrators were not unfamiliar to EC, the satisfaction of the shocking twist in “The Orphan” relies on assumptions about childhood innocence—particularly as applied to white children—that clash with the reader’s awareness of troubled marriage and spousal revenge plots. Despite the comic’s implied critique of child abuse, however, Gaines did not categorize “The Orphan” as one of the EC preachies. The story did not protest the harms of negligent parenting as much as it delighted in the forbidden thrills of Lucy’s murderous ingenuity and resourcefulness. In “The Whipping,” the narrator speaks directly to the reader from outside the story, offering a running commentary of how the neighborhood’s racist actions are an affront to human decency. By contrast, Lucy narrates her own tale in “The Orphan” and selectively withholds details about her involvement until the end. Because she makes no effort to rationalize her actions, not verbally at least, Gaines insisted, “No message has been spelled out there. We were not trying to prove anything with that story. None of the captions said anything like ‘If you are unhappy with your step mother, shoot her.’”51 Readers are not directly encouraged to model their own behavior on Lucy’s criminal deeds. Nor is the unhappiness that she experiences framed as a systemic crisis requiring collective action. The story is, in other words, simply “designed to entertain.” Ultimately neither the educational nor the entertaining comics

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that Gaines produced adhere strictly to type. Although “The Orphan” stops short of advocating murder, the story does spotlight one of the recurring themes of EC’s approach in its effort to expose the hidden horrors of the American family. Tight interior spaces predominate the images of the Johnson family’s suffocating domestic setting, isolated and drained of virtue. Shouting is the only way that the adults in Lucy’s household communicate. Honest feelings can only be gleaned from what is overheard behind closed doors or beneath the stairs. In this environment, the boys and girls who were often depicted in EC comics demonstrate a kind of cleverness and understanding that the adults have lost. Their rule breaking is often treated as a necessary means of survival.52 As with most formula fiction, the genre comics that EC made famous relied heavily on the reader’s awareness of these narrative structures, characterizations, and artistic styles. Variations of “The Orphan” can be found in “The Secret” from Haunt of Fear #24 and “The Screaming Woman” from Crime SuspenStories #15. Likewise, readers of “The Whipping” might have recognized plot points from another story, called “Under Cover!,” which was published a year earlier. That narrative also features a white woman being whipped and killed by hooded white supremacists as punishment for “consorting . . . with that trash element” and not her “own kind.”53 Yet Roberts reminds us that an important part of genre competency means being mindful not only of recurring elements but also of the ways in which these systems are constantly in flux. There are preachies, such as “Judgment Day!” and “In Gratitude . . .” that have very few captions and rely on the audience to make inferences from the character’s actions. And it is not uncommon to find social and political critiques in comics that were intended only to provide reading enjoyment. In Frank Nuessel’s analysis of “The Whipping,” he points to a wide spectrum of social issues that the story may unintentionally raise in the process of condemning racism against Mexican Americans, including “child abuse, abuse of women, an inherent sexism in Ed’s paternalistic attitude toward his young adult daughter, and an implicit anti-Catholic stance.”54 Indeed, no matter how deliberately written and formulaic Gaines claimed his comics to be, EC did not earn its reputation by simply churning out the same clichés and stock characters over and over

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again. The company consistently broke its own editorial rules to test the limits of the medium, attracting controversy along with profit. It also earned the trust of readers who welcomed the kind of narrative and aesthetic play that allowed the EC tradition to invent itself with each new story. “Most Children Learn Enough to Know If a Comic Is Sensible” Gaines’s emphasis on the messages that are “spelled out” in the preachies says as much about the changing status of youth culture as it does about EC’s approach to the comics form. Historians such as James Gilbert mark the 1950s as a transitional moment when adolescents were increasingly regarded as consumers and emboldened by mass culture to make decisions about their lifestyles that were independent from their parents. The debates over comic books were intensified by these adult anxieties, with Gilbert noting that the post–World War II fixation on delinquency “represented a projection of uneasiness, a measure of the discomfort that adults felt about the social and cultural changes that touched them too.”55 So when EC’s publisher spoke of children as readers in terms that praised their discerning intelligence rather than their vulnerability and inexperience, his remarks were greeted with tremendous skepticism. In his testimony before the US Senate subcommittee, Gaines coupled assurances about how his comics circumvented the minefields of “unintended messaging” with a much-larger, riskier claim about what EC trusted its readers to know. Gaines reiterated this particular point years later in an interview with Gary Groth: “Our readers can tell when we’re trying to make a point . . . and we signal it and therefore they know we’re trying to teach them something, but normally they know we’re just trying to entertain them.”56 What EC fan-addicts know is at the heart of the cultural critic Robert Warshow’s fascination with his eleven-year-old son’s comic-book obsession in the June 1954 essay “The Study of Man: Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham,” published in Commentary magazine shortly after the hearings. An editorial note describes the piece as “displaying one parent and one child in their cold war over the question of comic books.”57 It also offers a compelling portrait of a young man as an EC reader.

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The elder Warshow is less concerned in his essay about the content of a comic such as Crime SuspenStories—which he favorably compares to the works of Edgar Allan Poe—than he is about the quality of the medium. He complains that the form conveys its messages too plainly, too directly, for children, who must defer pleasure and “learn to wait” in order to value what their efforts have earned. By this logic, “a child’s developing appreciation of the complexity of good literature is surely one of the things that contribute to his eventual acceptance of the complexity of life.” When Warshow’s assessment singles out EC specifically, he counters Gaines’s claims about “deliberate effort” by pointing out the way that EC in particular amplifies the flaws inherent in the “bareness of the comic-book form.” EC, with its “undisciplined imaginativeness and violence,” frustrates the elder Warshow, and despite observations about occasional moments of cleverness, he repeatedly articulates his anxieties through the rhetoric of impulsiveness. Mad and Panic are characterized as “a wild, undisciplined machine-gun attack on American popular culture,” while the horror and crime comics are even more “unrestrained.”58 Juxtaposed with this critique is Warshow’s fascinating study of his son Paul’s reading habits. To explain how and why an “alert, skillful, and self-possessed” young boy could have developed such a fascination for these undisciplined comics, Warshow begins by characterizing his son’s Fan-Addict membership card, shoulder patch, and pin essentially as a fad. The fervor with which the eleven-year-old tracks down issues from month to month are not unlike his “Pogo period” and make him no different than other children of the 1950s immersed in the temptations of mass media and consumer culture. Warshow’s doubts about EC and his fundamental distrust of the comics form falters against his understanding of Paul and the way that his son treats comics as little more than “objects produced for his entertainment.” He admits, “The bloodiest of ax murders apparently does not disturb his sleep or increase the violence of his own impulses. . . . So far as I can judge, he has no inclination to accept as real the comic-book conception of human nature which sees everyone as a potential criminal and every criminal as an absolute criminal.”59 Warshow also notes that the preteen’s preference for EC does not seem to keep him from reading other kinds of books. Yet even as Warshow resists the easy pathologization of Paul as

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a comics reader, he is unable to relinquish the possibility that these stories can thwart his son’s capacity to distinguish between right and wrong. He calculates the number of comics that Paul probably reads each year—three to four stories per issue, ten comics a week, fifteen hundred to two thousand stories a year—and, in the process, wrestles with the idea that such an immersion in comics could be having an impact that parents cannot see. At the heart of Warshow’s concern was a growing midcentury debate over how cultural ideas were transmitted, perhaps subconsciously, to act on the most vulnerable minds. Fears over Cold War–era brainwashing often resonated with concerns about the manipulation of mass media and advertising, particularly when directed at growing numbers of youth consumers. Echoing Herbert Beaser’s line of inquiry from the Senate hearings, Warshow observes, “Almost anything in [Paul’s] life is likely to seem important to me, and I find it hard to accept the idea that there should be one area of his experience, apparently of considerable importance to him, which will have no important consequences. One comic book a week or ten, they must have an effect. How can I be expected to believe that it will be a good one?”60 Warshow agrees with many of Wertham’s points, but he does not see comics as all that unusual from other media. Their sensational content simply intensifies the complexities already present in more respectable, classic children’s literature. Warshow notes, rather wistfully, that the controversial crime and horror comics that he would prefer Paul avoid actually seem to be “better” (as in livelier, more engaging) than the morality tales of the “safer” comics such as Lone Ranger or Superman. These observations prompt him to linger on Wertham’s unwillingness during the hearings or in Seduction to praise anything of value in comic books. Warshow is led to conclude that “Dr. Wertham is largely able to ignore the distinction between bad and ‘good’ because most of us find it hard to conceive of what a ‘good’ comic book might be.”61 In Warshow’s dialogue with his son, however, we see a different standard of quality being put forth and treated with surprising thoughtfulness. Warshow learns from Paul that comics are “stupid sometimes” but that they can also fall into a range of “pretty good” to “really good.” These observations are further affirmed in the letter that the eleven-year-old wrote to Wertham two weeks after the publication of the Commentary piece:

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Dear Dr. Wertham, Thank you very much for your letter. I have read my father’s article and I think it is very good. I don’t agree with all the things in it. I don’t think comics do much harm to children. I don’t think they are all good though. Most children learn enough to know if a comic is sensible. Only a few would take an unlikely story seriously. I don’t take them seriously but I enjoy some of them. Thank you again for your letter. Best wishes, Paul Warshow P.S. I would very much like to meet you.62 Here we see that Paul is an astute consumer: one who has determined in his own mind that the question of harm is different from whether a comic is enjoyable and impactful—in other words, “good.” Paul demonstrates the agency of children as learned readers able to distinguish between the demands of a story that is “sensible” in contrast to one in which the content is unrealistic or “unlikely.” He can hold in tension a range of interpretive views, disagreeing forthrightly with the nation’s foremost anticomics critic on the one hand but concluding with the postscript, “I would very much like to meet you.” Readers such as Warshow’s son are the reason why Gaines could say before a US Senate subcommittee that a severed head is appropriate taste “for a horror comic.” The publisher’s mistake, of course, was assuming that the general public was part of the same community that carried EC membership cards, shoulder patches, and pins. In the article “Why Won’t You Just Read It? Comic Books and Community in the 1950s,” Adler-Kassner explores how comics as a form of mass communication contributed to the formation of a subversive community that excluded parents. She takes the title of her piece from Warshow’s article, noting that for middle-class, American children such as Paul, “comic books were the gateway to a community which, in these parents’ eyes, undermined the goals they had set out for their children.”63 It is clear that Warshow is struggling in his essay to reconcile his parenting goals with the comics’ crude representation of reality. But he is also concerned with the notion that comics have introduced “shared cultural symbols” to his son that he cannot decode. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s concept of the shared meanings and

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values of “imagined communities,” Adler-Kassner studied hundreds of letters from EC readers along with the fan newsletter correspondence in order to demonstrate how much the readers appreciated the space the comics magazine provided to express oppositional interests and enter into a dialogue with the story ideas.64 One thing that Adler-Kassner does not make explicit in her study is the racial and gender demographics of comic-book readers during the 1950s. EC’s audience was made up typically of older children and teenagers who were predominantly white and male—boys such as Paul or a teenage Larry Stark.65 Yet their interests and buying habits were not the only ones that galvanized EC’s reading communities. There were girls, adults, and nonwhite consumers among the millions of readers supporting the comic-book industry as well. Among the few readership surveys completed in these early years, one of the most widespread was a 1943 study by the Market Research Corporation for the publisher Fawcett Comics that found that “95 percent of elementaryaged children read comic books often,” with the percentages declining gradually as the children reached high school.66 More qualitative studies by the educational psychologist Paul Witty in 1941 and 1945 in Illinois reiterated the fact that girls were active comic-book and comic-strip readers, reading titles with less frequency than boys but preferring the same high-ranked series such as Superman, Batman, and Famous Funnies.67 Witty’s study from 1945 with Dorothy Moore focused specifically on black children’s comics-reading habits. This survey found that “the average number of magazines read by Negro children is considerably higher than the average for white children; about eighteen for the Negro group as compared with thirteen for the white group.”68 In other words, black children—boys, in particular—read significantly more comic book titles than their white peers did and, as the study further demonstrated, read them more frequently.69 While black comic book consumers remained outnumbered by their white counterparts, they constituted an especially devoted readership, purchasing and sharing a larger selection of comics. African Americans, particularly those living in urban areas, were most certainly among EC’s audience, and much like girl readers, they constituted an often-overlooked secondary market for the stories Gaines published. Tilley’s extensive research on the civic engagement of comic-book

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readers offers additional clues to the makeup of EC’s audience and their interest in “protesting an idea—that comics might be regulated, that comics might cause harm to readers—rather than some material change.”70 Her study of the letters written to the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency has identified numerous African American readers who wrote in support of EC and other comic-book publishers, many emphasizing the moral lessons conveyed in the stories to counter claims about the medium’s so-called harmful effects. In October 1954, a student named Curtis Meningall Jr. from Livingstone College, a historically black college in North Carolina, wrote to “defend the comic books which are hanging in the balance due to outside pressures.” He expressed his appreciation for comics, including the more mature stories, in which he noted that “violence as read by the reader is looked upon as evil and immoral,” in contrast to what appeared in the daily newspapers.71 Similarly, in a postcard from Newport News, Virginia, a black reader in her early twenties named Cleo Brown writes, “I read all kinds of comics and horror magazines, and I don’t see why it should make any difference after reading them. At the end of each story it shows that good wins over bad no matter how horrible it is.”72 Meningall and Brown took pleasure in the kind of comics that EC made popular. Both share the savvy reading practices of other fanaddicts and emphasize the value of genre competency in their appreciation of the comics. To persuade the US Senate subcommittee, they commend the good and just ends of a violent imaginary, in which seemingly senseless horror is turned around to serve a restorative purpose. It is important, then, to remain attentive to the interpretive nuances that EC’s comics could generate for a diverse readership— including enthusiasts who themselves were subject to the kind of social injustice depicted on the page—even if the stories were plotted with the perspectives of young white readers such as Paul Warshow in mind. Adler-Kassner’s study concludes, “there is no evidence that [children] believed that comic books were leading them away from home and hearth.”73 But in this, the EC preachies strived to be different. Leading white Americans away from the troubling social norms of home and hearth was precisely the point of “The Whipping” and other stories depicting realities that EC hoped its primary audience

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would take very seriously. While Gaines often insisted that entertainment and profit were the company’s only concerns, EC singled out the message stories for their deliberateness with respect not only to the creative labor but also to the uncomfortable conversations that the comics sought to initiate. Designed to “proselytize” and to “combat” intolerance but not to pander, the preachies conscripted the finest tools of the EC tradition, enlisting sensational strategies from across genres to heighten their educational impact. Of course there are more to these comics than the messages that Gaines, Feldstein, and the artists of EC have given us. A clear and careful assessment of the EC preachies must be guided by more than the creator’s intent. Even as we endeavor to counter Wertham’s skips and skims with the Crypt Keeper’s ghoulish pleas for more comprehensive reading practices, the fact remains that Herbert Beaser was right about one thing: “a message can be gotten across without spelling out in that detail.” Chapter 2 considers EC’s efforts to represent African Americans and their struggles during the early years of the civil-rights era. It pays special attention to what is silent and unseen in the preachies in order to add a broader awareness of the period’s social context and the legacy of race in comics. Doing so enables us to better evaluate how these representations succeed or fall short. Stories such as “The Guilty!,” “In Gratitude . . . ,” and “Perimeter!” ultimately prompt the question, What are the messages that blackness communicates in an Entertaining Comic?

CH A P T E R T W O

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Optical illusions of Blackness and embodiment in ec But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. —Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

On the first page of “The Guilty!” (1952), a black man named Aubrey Collins has been arrested for murdering a white woman. As Collins is ushered inside the jail, a mob of white men surrounds the building with raised fists, grimaced faces, and vicious words. From the moment the cigar-chomping Sheriff Dawson calls for his deputy to “Bring the n——r on up!” it is apparent that the town’s representative of law and order is virtually indistinguishable from the vigilantes who want Collins released so that they can “take care of ’im.”1 Not only does the sheriff have to be convinced to lock the jail-house door, but he is disappointed when the mob outside disperses, telling the district attorney, “Whaddya mean? What’s wrong? We know he did it!”2 When a civil-liberties lawyer from out of town arrives to defend Collins, the sheriff takes matters into his own hands, and on the way to the trial, the sheriff forces the black man out of the escorting police car at gunpoint, telling him to run. Later Sheriff Dawson will explain, “I shot him while he was tryin’ to escape!” but in the very next panel,

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the reader learns that the so-called witness, a white man, confessed to the murder just moments before. A final narrative caption makes the story’s message explicit: “Whether Aubrey Collins was innocent or guilty is not important! But for any American to have so little regard for the life and rights of any other American is a debasement of the principles of the Constitution upon which our country is founded!”3 Written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Wallace Wood for the June– July 1952 issue of Shock SuspenStories #3, “The Guilty!” was the first story in the series to focus on antiblack violence and the racial disparities of the modern criminal-justice system. Regrettably, the sheriff ’s brutal disregard for black life may not have been all that shocking when the story appeared, considering that the Fourteenth Amendment’s promises of equal protection and due process were still being regularly denied to African Americans. What did seem to take many readers by surprise, however, was EC’s decision to publish the story at all. Two issues after “The Guilty!” appeared, the entire page of the “Shock Talk” letters column was devoted to the “tremendous amount of mail” the company received on the story, with readers offering observations about the story’s stance against racism or weighing in on the comic’s appropriateness.4 Most letters offered congratulations and encouragement: “I have been reading E.C. Publications ever since they came out, and I have always taken it for granted that they are the best in the business. But after reading Shock SuspenStories #3, I’ve found out something new. You guys have guts! Yes, it takes guts to print a story like ‘The Guilty.’”5 Another writer called the story “outrageous,” explaining, “I am not prejudiced against any race, but the story just shocked me. . . . I realize that it could happen, but I just don’t think it should be printed in a comic book.”6 Included in the column was a letter from an African American reader: “I am colored, and do not object to this kind of story. On the contrary, I wish there were more to show how shameful and horrid prejudice really is, how it is a mar on the beautiful face of America. This story is all too real and true. All America should read it!”7 This chapter examines the way “The Guilty!” and other EC comics illustrate “how shameful and horrid prejudice really is” by analyzing how Aubrey Collins and black male characters—including Hank from “In Gratitude . . .” (Shock SuspenStories #11) and Private J. Matthews

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from “Perimeter!” (Frontline Combat #15)—were used to embody and to complicate the race problem of the early 1950s. These stories make a case for racial justice by appealing to Americans’ civic and religious beliefs. In doing so, they condemn racism as the betrayal of the nation’s democratic ideals, particularly in light of the Korean War and the Truman Doctrine’s positioning of the United States as the international standard-bearer for democracy. These comics also focus our attention on the way that the subjective experiences of African Americans are represented in the EC tradition. On the page, these pictorial narratives often convey the pursuit of justice, equality, and respect through male-gendered norms that affirm the humanity of African Americans as soldiers, family men, and agents of the state.8 And while EC did on occasion develop stories with other racial and ethnic groups, including Native Americans (“Justice!” from Two-Fisted Tales #36) and Mexican Americans (“The Whipping” from Shock SuspenStories #14), more substantial effort was put into the depiction of black characters and the consequences of antiblack racism. What interests are best served by these particular creative and editorial choices? For one thing, the preachies consistently took advantage of the visual and verbal medium of comics to disassociate white normative subjectivity from virtuous qualities such as innocence, courage, and moral authority. Even as the New Trend comics highlight racial injustice, however, they tend to dampen expressions of African American agency, often with the goal of foregrounding the contemptible actions of white characters. Nevertheless, EC’s approach to portraying the complexities of black identity matured in subtle but important ways in the years leading up to the landmark decision to end public-school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. “It Could Have Happened in Your Town!” What was it about a story such as “The Guilty!” that took guts to print? Prior to 1952, black characters held only minor roles in EC comics, typically as sly practitioners of “black magic” from Haiti or the African continent. These characters appeared almost exclusively in the horror comics with such titles as “Voodoo Death!,” “Drawn and Quartered!,” and “Zombie!” Their chilling resolutions tended to mock the arrogance of white travelers who ignored the black primitives’ warnings about magic talismans and forbidden spaces.9 Aubrey Collins intro-

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duces a completely different approach to the representation of blackness: his jailed and murdered body places racism at the center of “The Guilty!” and compels EC readers to grapple with the “all too real and true” existence of racial terrorism in modern America. Fans who preferred to isolate the ghouls of EC from their larger social contexts would probably have been unsettled by the stark realism of Shock SuspenStories and the genre’s dogged refusal to broker an excuse or an escape from the dark side of the American racial experience. Captions in “The Guilty!” directly challenge readers, for instance, to consider how their own lives intersect with the cruelty and intolerance illustrated on the page. Despite the visual cues that seem to locate Sheriff Dawson’s town in the South, the comic’s opening line insists, “This shameful story might have taken place anywhere in the United States!” and a later line exclaims, “It could have happened in your town!” This move effectively nationalizes the racial conflict while also making the implications devastatingly personal. To be sure, the problems that “The Guilty!” and other EC preachies were addressing had already been making newspaper headlines in the United States. Amid the praise for Jackie Robinson’s home runs and Ralph Bunche’s Nobel Peace Prize, the accounts of bombings, voter suppression, housing discrimination, grass-roots civil-rights protest, and the stubborn opposition of the southern Dixiecrats were becoming more urgent and increasingly visible nationally and abroad. With racism being criticized as the “black” Achilles heel of American democracy by Cold War allies and opponents alike, President Harry Truman kept civil-rights initiatives at the top of his agenda after World War II.10 In 1948, he issued an executive order to effectively desegregate the armed services, and his administration supported a series of landmark cases involving the rights of African Americans to purchase land and to challenge segregation in schools and railroad dining cars.11 These cases slowly set the stage for overturning the “separate but equal” edict of the US Supreme Court. Even a young reader picking up Shock SuspenStories #3 (which happened to come out just months before the 1952 presidential election) would have been aware that, as a New York Times editorial declared, “civil rights is an issue for both major parties.”12 While the federal government was beginning to act, the everyday indignities that had plagued African Americans since the end of

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Reconstruction continued unchecked. Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral-history project documents the ordinary lived experiences of African Americans under Jim Crow through interviews with nearly thirteen hundred black southerners. In the project’s companion book, the editors take note of the lessons afforded by these personal stories: First is an understanding of the dailiness of the terror blacks experience at the hands of capricious whites—the man who told of his brother being killed in the middle of the night because he had not sufficiently deferred in the presence of a white man, another story of an African American being dragged to his death behind a horse-drawn wagon, or a pregnant wife having her womb slit, with both mother and child killed, because her husband allegedly had offended a white woman. From lynching to being denied the right to be called “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” to having car or school buses intentionally hit puddles of water to splash black people walking, there was neither escape from, nor redress for, the ubiquitous, arbitrary, and cruel reality of senseless white power.13 Along with being forced to negotiate these unspoken codes of social behavior, many African Americans felt a deep-seated fear and distrust of law enforcement. This fear is underscored in “The Guilty!” Like many law-enforcement officers all over the country, the fictional Sheriff Dawson uses his position of authority to criminalize black mobility and control expressions of assertiveness or dissent. The historian Leon Litwack explains that “the differences between the courtroom and the lynch mob were not always clear in the New South. Nor in the eyes of black men and women were there discernible differences between a speedy trial and mob justice, between lawless lynchers and lawless judges, sheriffs, constables, policemen, wardens, and prison guards.”14 The publisher and writer Russ Cochran suggests that Gaines and Feldstein, in their effort to tackle these systemic injustices, found a model for their preachies in the acclaimed message films (or “race problem pictures”) of the era, including Pinky, Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave, and Intruder in the Dust.15 Some of the scenes that appear in condensed form in “The Guilty!” resonate in particular with Intruder in the Dust, directed by Clarence Brown and adapted

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from William Faulkner’s 1948 novel about a black Mississippi farmer named Lucas Beauchamp, who is wrongfully accused of murdering a white man. The comic visually echoes one of the film’s most chilling moments, when the townspeople gather outside the jail and call for Lucas’s death.16 Donald Bogle sums up the film’s significance in this way: “Tough-minded and complex, Intruder in the Dust unearthed, among a number of things, a somber piece of Americana: a black man on trial has little chance for justice in our country, said the film, more than twenty years before such statements were fashionable.”17 In the film’s hopeful conclusion, Lucas is set free. With the help of the young, white protagonist, Chick Mallison, the black man lives to see the real murderer jailed and returns home unharmed. The fact that the actor playing Lucas, Juano Hernandez, had to remain segregated from the cast during filming in Mississippi indicates just how rare and aspirational such a film was in 1949.18 Once Intruder in the Dust was released, Hernandez received high praise for the dignity, solemnity, and resolve that he brought to the role, which ultimately earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Observers at the time called him a “new Negro” in the film industry, a figure too daring and too refined to play submissive roles typically reserved for blacks, such as the “janitor or shoe shine boys.”19 In Bogle’s study of African Americans in film, he too singles out Hernandez’s groundbreaking performances as a cinematic prototype for the “defiantly proud black man.” Though this assertiveness quickly became overshadowed by the more sensitive and youthful openness of Sidney Poitier, Bogle insists that Hernandez stood apart, describing his manner as “aristocratic” and comparing his stature and expressiveness to that of Paul Robeson.20 The emphasis that observers placed on Hernandez’s physical bearing in his depiction of Lucas Beauchamp offers a valuable point of entry into Wood’s artistic choices for the “The Guilty!” and the “new Negroes” of EC. In fact, the way Aubrey Collins appears on the comics page warrants close attention, particularly for an American comic. During a time when minstrel caricatures continued to dominate mass representations of blackness in everything from songs and board games to soap advertisements, comic art was often the most egregious offender. Newspaper strips, editorial cartoons, and comic books frequently relied on stereotypical figures such as the Coon, the Mammy,

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and the Black Brute to embody the full spectrum of nonwhite subjectivity. When the EC New Trend line was launched in the late 1940s, two of the more prominent black characters in Golden Age comics— Steamboat from Captain Marvel and Ebony White from the Sunday-supplement comic book The Spirit—had only recently been discontinued. Both featured the pitch-black skin, oversized balloon lips, bulging eyes, and drawling vernacular of the Sambo. The comics scholar Brian Cremins explains that the removal of Captain Marvel’s black valet, Steamboat, was made in response to an appeal by junior high school students to Fawcett Comics. When the buffoonish caricature first appeared in 1942, his presence helped to affirm the relative “power and social capital” acquired by Billy Batson as the young white protagonist learned to transform into the superhero Captain Marvel.21 Steamboat was dropped three years later after a group of multiracial students from New York, called the Youth-builders, visited Fawcett’s executive editor, Will Lieberson, to make the case: “This is not the Negro race, but your one-and-a-half-million readers will think it so.”22 While such victories and the fleeting efforts of mainstream publishers to attract more black readers were major steps, black caricatures still populated the landscape of Golden Age comics in demeaning roles, from the “pickaninnies” played for laughs in comic strips to the cannibalistic savages of jungle comics. Even EC’s own horror stories drew on racial types when representing non-American blacks, for instance, in the case of Johnny Craig’s illustrations of the evil Haitian witch doctors, each stripped to the waist and wearing gold armbands and hooped earrings. “Whether Aubrey Collins Was Innocent or Guilty Is Not Important!” By contrast, in “The Guilty!” Aubrey Collins is portrayed in defiance of racial typology. He is a lean African American man of average height, dressed plainly in cuffed blue jeans and a white shirt. Colorist Marie Severin adds medium-brown tones to the heavily inked figure, with a slightly darker shade for the tight curls of his hair (figure 6). His body is contoured in the deep shadows and expressive lines that distinguish Wood’s style but does not appear ominous; captions follow suit by describing the way “the sunlight gleamed on his perspiration-covered

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Figure 6. “The Guilty!” from Shock SuspenStories #3 (1952)

brown skin.”23 In the monochromatic blue scenes that emphasize his facial features, the eyelids, nose, and lips are delineated without exaggeration. Collins is not featured prominently in every scene, but when he does appear, he is drawn as realistically as white characters. Importantly, Wood uses visual anchors in the comic to ensure the easy recognition of individual white speakers and to aid in their character development. The heavy-jowled Sheriff Dawson puffs a cigar in nearly every scene, for example, seemingly to indicate his unscrupulous approach to the law. The two erudite lawyers wear glasses, and the fact that there appear to be both businessmen (in suits) and farmers (in overalls) among the angry white mob suggests that, in this story, the privileges of whiteness cut across socioeconomic classes. The strategy of employing visual cues to signal personality and social leanings, the cartoonist and critic Will Eisner suggests, “requires a familiarity with the audience and a recognition that each society has its own ingrown set of accepted stereotypes.”24 Among characters depicted through these class and occupational clichés, Aubrey Collins is nondescript, almost generic in a way that indicates an effort on Wood’s part to underscore the character’s basic

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humanity and to elicit sympathy.25 Of course, his dark skin is itself coded and culturally overdetermined; from Aubrey’s first appearance, his skin marks deeply entrenched beliefs about his identity. His blackness, as the visual theorist W.  J.  T. Mitchell notes, is assumed to be the “transparently readable sign” of his character, particularly for the white men with rifles and fists who refuse to treat Collins as anything other than a murderous Black Brute.26 A phenotypically realistic image of an African American man was therefore crucial in conveying this comic’s message to 1950s consumers. Wood and Severin make Collins’s blackness easy to see but difficult to read. The character walks forthrightly through the angry crowd, and even when handcuffed and frightened, his posture and grave expression aspire to the “quiet dignity” so reminiscent of Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust.27 There are significant differences between the two characters, however; whereas Lucas is defiant, the protagonist of “The Guilty!” is much more forbearing. When Collins is spit on by one of the townspeople, his face turns slightly to the side but remains aloft and solemn in the panel’s foreground despite the white faces grimacing around him. The story’s efforts to place pictured realities at odds with social assumptions comes to a head once the district attorney declares the accused black man to be “innocent as a baby.” The one thing that Aubrey Collins does not do, however, is speak. Visually he is a sympathetic figure, but without a voice in this comic, the depth of his individuality remains slight. We see him in the background of several scenes. His eyes are attentive and discerning as he listens to the sheriff and the lawyers discuss his fate, but he is isolated by his silence from the narrative’s primary action. For one brief moment, when the district attorney raises the issue of the importance of a fair trial because “there’s a man’s life a stake,” Wood frames the conversation from Collins’s perspective, and we see through his eyes; the brown fists clenching the bars briefly become our own. What if we had been given access to Collins’s thoughts in this moment? If he had been allowed to speak, what would he have said? How would the story have been different? The concluding scene, in which Collins realizes that he is being set up by the sheriff, provides another opportunity to learn more about the accused, to see and hear him act on behalf of his own self-interest. Unfortunately, Feldstein mutes the black man’s solitary act of protest

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Figure 7. “The Guilty!” from Shock SuspenStories #3 (1952)

in the narrative captions: “Collins got to his feet! He stared at the gun for a moment, shaking his head!”28 It is left to Wood to articulate the panic of these final, terrifying moments through the twist and arc of Collins’s body as it catches the sheriff ’s bullet and breaks through the center border of a stunning three-panel sequence (figure 7). The scene’s keen pacing is accelerated by frenetic auditory registers, sounds that range from the pouring rain to the shouts of “run!” and the gun’s fatal “blam!” Collins, on the other hand, appears to be suspended from the rest of the page in a separate dimension. His wordless pantomimes may be an efficient way to convey physical actions that “transcend cultural boundaries,”29 but the strategy also weakens the story’s efforts to humanize him as an individual. That the all-caps auditory cues are privileged over Collins’s speech further diminishes his status. As he collapses into the mud and bleeds to death, Collins does not even cry out. Collins is what the critic Suat Tong Ng would describe as “the

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typical EC African American.”30 Ng argues that from all the black male characters developed by Gaines and Feldstein, there emerges “a silent, passive individual; an innocent without voice or passion in the face of society’s racism.” He sees evidence of the publisher’s failures in the relentless editorial sermonizing of stories that focus more on “sympathetic martyrs” than “angry, forceful activists.” There is little doubt that Collins is a scapegoat characterized mostly by his victimization as a black male. But whereas Ng ascribes EC’s creative decisions to “intellectual laziness,” I see calculations of risk in the context of a racial advocacy that cautiously sets EC apart from other comics and popular-culture texts of the period.31 Consider, for instance, how “The Guilty!” compares to a 1946 issue of The Challenger, a small-press comic-book series that “pledged to fight race prejudice, discrimination, and all other forms of fascism in North America.”32 The lead story in issue #3 also revolves around a black man falsely accused of murder, but it focuses almost exclusively on the crime-solving efforts of the white title character against the city’s antiunion, race-baiting power brokers. To encourage readers to model the actions of the white detective, the back matter directly invites youth to sign the “Challenger Pledge” by fighting fascism and bigotry. Alternatively, proactive African and African American characters are central to the comic published by Orrin C. Evans in 1947 called All-Negro Comics. But in contrast to The Challenger, the stories Evans published were much more circumspect about addressing racial inequality. For Ace Harlem and Lion Man in All-Negro Comics, success was about “glorifying” positive black achievement in tales produced for and by African Americans.33 Reading “The Guilty!” in the context of these other stories prompts us to ask what was at stake ideologically in Feldstein and Wood’s creative choices, including the pacing, perspective, and story structure, and in the tensions between the images and the narrative captions. For one thing—as the comic’s title indicates—the story is not really about Aubrey Collins and his guilt but about Sheriff Dawson’s. The primary purpose of “The Guilty!” is to do what law enforcement will not do: affirm the value of due process in American society. By featuring images that portray Collins as sympathetically humble and compliant, the plot directs its urgency to the question of what will happen to the black man, in Litwack’s words, “at the hands of

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capricious whites.”34 As the sheriff continues to lend dangerous legitimacy to the mob’s rush to judgment, the comic encourages readers to ask if there is indeed a difference between “lawless lynchers and lawless judges.”35 Once the trial date arrives, Dawson is much more concerned about whether the lawyer will “make a fool” out of him than he is about justice being served.36 As a result, the comic largely ignores the entrenched social consequences of murder and rape accusations against black men in favor of captions that chastise the sheriff and spell out that the real crime here is the debasement of constitutional principles. When our narrator declares that “whether Aubrey Collins was innocent or guilty is not important,” the value of black life is set aside in order to emphasize white Americans who put their own lives at risk by failing to follow the law.37 EC is part of the much-larger history of the struggle for African Americans to earn recognition in artistic representation as more than phantoms of white fear, even among whites with seemingly progressive intentions. This is a history of contradiction, one in which Captain Marvel’s Steamboat—a character Fawcett claimed was created specifically for Negro readers38—exists right alongside Lucas Beauchamp’s “defiantly proud black man.” It includes the efforts of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry—African American writers, poets, and playwrights who began interrogating the logic of white supremacy in a manner that pulled readers deeper into the complexities of black life in 1950s America. Mainstream comic books were still figuring out how to have these conversations. National, Timely, Dell, Fawcett, and other major publishers concerned with alienating white readers, parents, librarians, and distributors often limited their discussions of racism and social justice to nonfictional historical biographies and sports comics. By the time that “The Guilty!” was published, however, EC had cultivated a community of young, predominantly white, oppositional readers willing to engage a story that forthrightly addressed the racial violence and discrimination perpetuated by the people in power. “A Perfectly Sutured Image/Text” Feldstein and Wood took the strategies they initiated in “The Guilty!” a step further in “In Gratitude . . . ,” a message story that demonstrates how EC’s approach to African American representation progressed

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over time. Published in the October–November 1953 issue of Shock SuspenStories #11, “In Gratitude . . .” follows the injured Korean War veteran Joey Norris after he returns to his hometown of Centerville for a hero’s welcome. As he enjoys his first home-cooked meal and prepares for a rally to be held in his honor, Joey tells his parents that he would like to visit the grave of a fellow soldier named Hank, whose actions on the battlefield saved his life. Because Hank had no relatives to receive his body, Joey requested that he be buried in the Norris family’s plot. Over the course of the story, the reader learns that Joey’s comrade was interred elsewhere because of his race. Hank was African American, and Joey’s parents were pressured by their neighbors not to bury him in Fairlawn Cemetery, where presumably the dead are whites only.39 In the process of condemning the treatment of the African American war hero Hank, “In Gratitude . . .” exposes the false notion that skin color inherently marks behavior or correlates with specific beliefs. The comic also targets the absurdity of America’s segregated home front by once again undermining allegedly fixed and self-evident assumptions about race. Words and images conspire in the story to transform the racial designations of black and white into abstractions that are as illegible to viewers as they are to Joey Norris’s confused parents. This is, in part, because we never actually see or hear Hank directly in the comic; much like Aubrey Collins in “The Guilty!,” his voice is filtered through white characters, and his physical appearance is mistaken for that of a white man. What readers must grapple with instead is the reality of Hank’s corpse, exploded into bits and pieces by the shrapnel of a grenade that, the narrator tells us, “didn’t know its color . . . didn’t care if it was white or black.”40 By arguing Hank’s worth through his death and, more specifically, his dismemberment—a common trope in EC’s horror and crime comics—the story takes advantage of the grisly shock of violence to jar the social constructs that the community insists on affixing even to the soldier’s torn skin. It is Joey’s memory that gathers Hank together again, as he attests in the letters he wrote to his parents about his friend’s camaraderie and self-sacrifice. Joey returns with his own injury, wearing a prosthetic arm that also serves as a symbol of his moral and social transformation as a white veteran, but Hank’s body is the narrative’s highest manifestation of patriotism and brotherhood.

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Since Feldstein and Wood withhold the reference to Hank’s racial identity until the story’s midpoint, the comic’s strategy may also leave some readers puzzled as to why anyone would be reluctant to honor his service.41 Mrs. Norris, for one, regards the omission in Joey’s letters as purposefully misleading. She associated the range of positive attributes that Hank exemplified with whiteness. Her pleas for forgiveness turn to resentment as she accuses her son of deceiving them about Hank (figure 8): “All those letters you wrote, Joey! You never mentioned it! It wasn’t fair! We grew to love Hank from your letters!” She describes Joey’s recollection of moments in which he and Hank worked alongside each other and engaged in difficult missions: “When you wrote about that patrol you were sent on, we could see you both . . . tramping through the mud together.”42 In these moments, the illustrations shift to a series of flashbacks washed in the blue colors of smoke and the red hue of explosives. During the combat scenes, Wood depicts Hank as physically indistinguishable from the white men; indeed, all the helmeted soldiers resemble one another, with the same hard jaw and heavy brow. Joey’s recollections are the only space in which Hank speaks. On those three occasions, his silence and passivity disappear, and the two friends converse as equals.43 Readers are likewise invited to see and hear through Mr. and Mrs. Norris’s field of vision as they interpret Hank, in Joey’s “raceless” prose, as unquestionably white. As Mitchell states, The assumption is that “blackness” is a transparently readable sign of racial identity, a perfectly sutured image/text. Race is what can be seen (and therefore named) in skin color, facial features, hair, etc. Whiteness, by contrast, is invisible, unmarked; it has no racial identity, but is equated with a normative subjectivity and humanity from which “race” is a visible deviation. It’s not merely a question of analogy, then, between social and semiotic stereotypes of the other, but of mutual interarticulation. That is why forms of resistance to these stereotypes so often take the form of disruptions at the level of representation, perception, and semiosis.44 The subversive messages of both “The Guilty!” and “In Gratitude  .  .  .” are visible in the multilevel disruptions of stereotype

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Figure 8. “In Gratitude . . .” from Shock SuspenStories #11 (1953)

described by Mitchell. The death of Aubrey Collins, the silent man whose innocence is at odds with his skin color, embodies the deeply flawed assumption of blackness as a “perfectly sutured image/text.” The soldier’s death in “In Gratitude . . .” decouples the image-text relation

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even more extensively by unmarking Hank’s otherness and equating his identity with a normative (white) subjectivity. The story’s emphasis on secondhand visual perception, along with Joey’s re-membering of Hank solely through written accounts, are also important in Feldstein and Wood’s strategic use of the comics form’s shock genre. Mrs. Norris would not have been the only one gasping, “We pictured him so different, Joey! When you wrote about him . . . we pictured him . . . well . . .”45 The sentence is left for the EC reader to finish. White readers, in particular, were asked to grapple with their own assumptions about race and humanity in the context of Joey’s larger question: “What did he die for? What did I give my arm for?”46 Likewise, the decision to set “In Gratitude . . .” against the backdrop of the Korean War is important because it highlights the persistence of racist practices even after the July 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement had been signed. The historian Angelika Kruger-Kahloula notes that “the Korean and the Vietnam wars brought home, with the bodies of soldiers killed in action, the realization that people good enough to die for their country were not even good enough to be buried in a place of their choice.”47 Less than two years before Shock SuspenStories #11 was published, for instance, a restricted cemetery in Phoenix, Arizona, made headlines for allowing the burial of a young African American war veteran whose body had remained on a mortuary slab for over a month while the cemetery’s authorities deliberated.48 Such travesties could have easily taken place in EC’s fictitious Centerville or, for that matter, in Tales from the Crypt. Through Hank’s story, “In Gratitude . . .” corroborates the relevance of Executive Order 9981, issued by President Truman in 1948 to guarantee “equality of treatment and opportunity” in the armed services. As the historian Mary Dudziak points out, Truman turned to executive orders and encouraged the US Justice Department to file amicus curiae briefs for civil-rights cases when his efforts to usher legislation through Congress repeatedly failed. While critics accused Truman of forcing unilateral changes on the “American way of life,” his administration often justified these actions in the interest of foreign policy. Dudziak explains, “At a time when the United States hoped to reshape the postwar world in its own image, the international attention given to racial segregation was troublesome and embarrassing. The focus of American foreign policy was to promote democracy and to ‘contain’

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communism, but the international focus on U.S. racial problems meant that the image of American democracy was tarnished. The apparent contradictions between American political ideology and American practice led to particular foreign relations problems with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Soviet Union capitalized on this weakness, using the race issue prominently in anti-American propaganda.”49 Global leadership demanded that the United States address this rift between the principle and the practice of democracy in order to serve as a compelling advocate for social justice abroad. As a result, a strategic domestic civil-rights agenda became an implicit part of the Truman Doctrine—that is, the vow to aid democratic nations under threat of communism. To quote the president’s own words, “If we wish to inspire the people of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy, if we wish to restore hope to those who have already lost their civil liberties, if we wish to fulfill the promise that is ours, we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy. We know the way. We need only the will.”50 “In Gratitude . . .” lends support to this approach by juxtaposing the overseas defense of democratic ideals with the dismantling of racial boundaries that treat African Americans as second-class citizens. Joey models the Truman Doctrine in his appreciation for his kinship with Hank, remarking at one point, “we ate together . . . slept together . . . laughed together . . . cried together . . . We fought for democracy together.”51 Joey’s approach to racial equality can even be likened to his gradual adjustment to his prosthetic arm, which he regards not as disability but as difference (figure 9). When his mother marvels over the ease with which he uses the metal clamp to eat, Joey remarks, “What, Ma? Oh! This? Naw! I’m used to it now. In the beginning it was tough.”52 The adjustment to a racially integrated body politic, however, proves to be too hard a challenge for his parents and their neighbors. It is Joey’s outrage at the white community’s prejudice that constitutes the climactic shock of the story. Turning his back on his own family and, by extension, the readers who shared their attitudes was not what was expected from the town’s decorated “soldier-hero.” The story certainly sparked intense debate on EC’s letters page. Prominently featured in the next issue’s “Shock Talk” column was a letter from A/3c Fisher, an air-force serviceman stationed in Biloxi,

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Figure 9. “In Gratitude . . .” from Shock SuspenStories #11 (1953)

Mississippi: “I was reading your Oct.–Nov. edition of Shock SuspenStories. It was very good until I read a story about a soldier’s black buddy. This story stinks the way they wrote it and I’d like for the person who wrote it to sleep, eat, and live with blacks or niggers. I’m in service, and I would not care to have a nigger eat at the same table with me, or anybody else with self-respect that I know. The niggers in my outfit, eat, sleep, and stay with themselves. And that is the way it will stay without a riot.”53 Fisher’s challenge to the story’s accuracy and sincerity prompted responses from other readers that were printed in subsequent Shock SuspenStories issues. Among the responders were members of the armed forces, including one from the 3505th Pilot Training Squadron from a base in nearby Greenville, Mississippi, who called Fisher’s letter “shocking, nasty, and highly ignorant” and insisted that Fisher’s views did not represent the air force’s “or even his own outfit for that matter.”54 “I’ll Bother You!” The ideas that circulate through “The Guilty!” and “In Gratitude . . .” help us to evaluate EC’s creative engagement with racism and black representation. Hank and Aubrey Collins are much more than stereotyped minstrels, but neither are they dynamic characters. Their nobility is designed to do little more than prove their worth as citizens, while their tragic deaths only further the growth of white characters. These stock characteristics are reinforced in other EC preachies, including “Slave Ship” (Weird Fantasy #8) and “Blood Brothers” (Shock SuspenStories #13) in which stoic, silent black men anchor the plot.

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Yet if we limit the scope of our analysis to black speech and action— or simply to the messages contained in the captions—we may overlook subtler artistic choices and narrative strategies that convey agency, complexity, and depth in EC’s take on racial strife. The message stories are most effective when they call attention to the way blackness acts as an unstable image/text, a fraught sociohistorical signifier that is misread and misrecognized in American society with devastating consequences. Rather than creating well-developed stories about black life and experience, EC uses the comics form to productively complicate received ideas about racial otherness for a predominantly white, adolescent readership, often through optical cues that “unmark” race in black characters. Such disruptions are not merely figurative. Stories such as “In Gratitude . . .” tear bodies into unrecognizable pieces, conceal faces behind the guise of normative subjectivity, and dare readers to question what they are seeing with their own eyes. However, an African American soldier named Private J. Matthews suggests one final example that breaks with the EC tradition. Matthews’s active participation and his outspoken presence drives the central message even when he is overshadowed by the comic’s white heroic figure. The story “Perimeter!” appeared in the last issue of Frontline Combat, published in January 1954, before Gaines discontinued the series because of declining postwar sales. Whereas most of the scripts for the EC preachies were written by Feldstein (and cowritten with Gaines), issue #15 of Frontline Combat was penciled, inked, and written by Wood and colored by Severin under the editorial direction of Harvey Kurtzman. “Perimeter!” is not the first of EC’s war comics to address difficult social problems. As the scholar Leonard Rifas notes, Kurtzman developed a strong reputation that distinguished the two EC series he edited—Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales—from the typical American war comic that “ignored or softened those truths about war that society regards as unsuitable for children, that the military regards as discouraging for enlistment or morale, or that readers find boring.”55 Kurtzman focused less on the heroics of World War II and more on the “Stalemate War” in Korea. He also wrote and oversaw the production of more realistic stories that did not shy away from the serious consequences of battle.56 Two years before the Frontline Combat story I discuss here appeared, Kurtzman addressed the folly

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of America’s segregated army in “Bunker!” for Two-Fisted Tales #30 by depicting two separate black and white platoons arguing over who should get credit for taking the same hill. Wood’s approach in “Perimeter!” follows Kurtzman’s lead in its narrative complexity, while it also draws on the visual strategies that he implemented as the illustrator in Feldstein’s Shock SuspenStories. In the comic’s opening sequence, the narrator highlights the different national and cultural backgrounds of the soldiers battling against North Korea. Among the Americans, there is “a mixture of all the nationalities and racial origins in the world, all wishing they were home, but doing their job.”57 The unit is tired and restless, and morale is low (figure 10). When a white soldier named Miller wonders aloud why they are fighting these “gooks,” Private Matthews looks up from reading his Bible and interrupts with, “They’re Koreans, Miller, Koreans!” Miller tries to brush off the correction by saying, “Aaah, ya bother me, Matthews!” but the other man is insistent: “I’ll bother you! If Han and his ROKs heard you, what would they think . . .”58 Their frustrated sergeant, a white man named Tex, breaks up the argument. As he walks away grumbling about “mixed outfits,” the reader knows that he is not referring to the infantrymen from the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the South who fight alongside the Americans but to his own racially integrated platoon. Nevertheless, Tex maintains a neutral stance and even refuses to be baited into cosigning Miller’s racist remark: “You’re a southerner! You hate ’em too!”59 The comics scholars David Albright and Christopher Hayton single out scenes such as this to emphasize the problematic ways in which Miller stereotypes everyone in the story on the basis of difference. They state, “He repeatedly refers to the Sergeant and Southerners in general as rebels, stereotyping them with the expectation that Tex must be a racist if he hails from the South, as well as using the disrespectful term ‘gooks’ in blanket referral to Koreans.”60 As a result, Miller’s attitude and his growing frustration with the impasse in Korea serve as the initial source of conflict in the story. Nettled by dwindling resources, the rain, and the ruthless enemy, Miller starts “cracking up” and continues to rebuff Matthews’s efforts to calm his fears. After nightfall, another devastating round of mortar fire scatters the soldiers, who are unable to hold the line against North Korea’s Chinese allies. The narrative focus shifts at that point to Tex,

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Figure 10. “Perimeter!” from Frontline Combat #15 (1954)

who stays behind once he discovers a badly injured, English-speaking man in the dark crying out. We will later discover that the wounded man is Private Matthews, but at that point, neither the white sergeant nor the reader can see or hear the black man clearly. Tex, driven solely by his need to protect a fellow soldier, spends the hours until daylight defending the two of them and uses up all of his ammunition until he is forced to fight the enemy in visually dramatic, hand-to-hand combat. Miller and the rest of the unit find the exhausted pair the next morning. One soldier is awed by the number of dead bodies littered around Tex’s hiding place; others express admiration for the sergeant’s determination to rescue the wounded soldier. Miller, however, is incredulous. “Is that why you stayed, Tex? To save him?” he asks. “You stayed out there in the dark to rescue Matt! You stayed out there to

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rescue a #@*;^ boy!” In response, Tex thrusts the Bible that Matthews had been reading into Miller’s hands and says, “You need that more’n anyone else around here!” The comic’s final panel leaves the reader looking over Miller’s shoulder at a verse from Malachi 2:10: “Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us?”61 In Gerald Early’s critical observations on “Perimeter!,” he takes special note of Matthews’s appearance with three other soldiers on the cover of Frontline Combat #15 (figure 11) as a “startling moment in American comics,” explaining, “This was highly unusual. Blacks were almost never seen on the covers of comic books in the 1940s and 1950s—the heyday of comics—unless they were depicted as jungle natives or as comic caricatures. . . . This character is in an integrated unit; the other soldiers on the cover are white. He is not a comic caricature; he is drawn as realistically as the other men. And he is the subject of that issue’s lead story.”62 My research further indicates that Frontline Combat #15 is the only EC New Trend comic ever to feature a heroic black character on the cover. Wood’s image is a rare testament to Matthews’s value in the story as an individual whose aspirations, fears, and complex relationships with other characters are indispensable to the plot’s development. Albright and Hayton describe Matthews simply as “an ordinary, responsible, principled male caught up in a war that’s difficult to comprehend.”63 Their discussion highlights just how uncommon such quotidian features are for black comic-book characters. At the same time, they note that Matthews distinguishes himself by being “willing to stand up for what’s right. This includes challenging insults to others, while tolerating personal attacks against himself, and placing the lives of his fellow soldiers before his own.”64 It is also important to note that the black man in “Perimeter!” survives his tale. This is unusual, given how expendable the lives of EC’s African American characters can be. When compared to what Ng describes as the “sympathetic martyrs” of Shock SuspenStories, Matthews carries much stronger echoes of Juano Hernandez in Intruder in the Dust. Early also points out that the comic followed the lead of other popular depictions of racial integration in the armed forces, such as the 1952 film Red Ball Express.65 The black figure that Wood creates demonstrates confidence and expresses empathy as an equal. Frequently pictured at the center of the three main characters or in the foreground, he speaks often and demands mutual respect among

Figure 11. “Perimeter!” from Frontline Combat #15 (1954)

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his fellow soldiers. He fights as part of the unit in the combat scenes that are a staple of war comics. Yet unlike Hank of “In Gratitude . . . ,” Matthews does not convey the value of his life through death; he does not leap on a grenade to save others but struggles to survive alongside them. The Bible he carries, rather than being used to model Christ-like humility or passivity, is for his own personal use, to shore up his inner resources in times of crisis. If, as his superior officer argues, “Matt’s book tells him why we’re here” in Korea, then the belief system that propels his view of justice may make him the one black EC character (outside of the Great Galactic Republic) who most closely resembles a “forceful activist.”66 Of course, alongside Matthews is Tex. The sergeant is one of EC’s white soldier-heroes who invite explicit reader identification with the comic’s fan base by embodying a familiar mode of ingenuity and grit. Just as noteworthy, however, is the way that Tex responds to Miller’s refusal to accept comfort from a black soldier. The following exchange occurs after Miller breaks down in tears during an ambush by the Chinese: Matthews: Relax, Miller! It’s gonna be all right, fella! Miller: Yeah? Then how come you’re always reading that Bible? You know we’re gonna die! Tex: That’s enough, soldier! Matt’s book tells him why we’re here! Miller: Yeah? And does his book tell him you’ll accept him if we get back? Does it tell him he . . . Tex: All right! At ease, Miller!67 On the perimeter, far removed from the United States, Tex is depicted as an officer who puts the mission first and evaluates the capabilities of his unit without any consideration to color. Yet Miller’s question about acceptance, though crass and mean-spirited, is an invitation to Tex to think critically about the implications of his own attitudes beyond the battlefield. It is telling, then, that with the command “All right! At ease, Miller!” the white sergeant does not answer and keeps deeper reflection at bay. When the next panel’s mortar blast sends the men scrambling for cover, the narrative barrels forward with no clear assertion from Tex that the life-threatening urgency of white and black cooperation abroad will translate into civic cooperation back home.

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Figure 12. “Perimeter!” from Frontline Combat #15 (1954)

The argument introduces a productive tension into the narrative and adds nuance to Tex’s role as an authority figure. Indeed, once Tex finds the injured soldier left behind, “Perimeter!” is poised to become the white man’s story, with the sergeant as the valiant hero and the black man’s prone body serving as an opportune object lesson. When night falls, Severin depicts the darkness through deep, monochromatic blue colors and repurposes her coloring strategy from “In Gratitude . . .” to obscure the skin color of the scene’s participants. For all the reader knows, Tex could have been rescuing Miller or an ROK translator. But even during these “color-blind” scenes, the relationship between the two soldiers retains a lively measure of complexity, such as the power dynamics still at work when the caption describes “Tex and his burden” or the way in which the Bible acts as a proxy for Matthews’s beliefs once he is wounded. The story suggests that Matthews gave the sergeant the Bible when he was found (“m’done . . . send this . . . my folks”).68 At the end of the story, after combat is over, Tex removes this same book from his jacket to read from it. In these moments, the once-physical burden of the traumatized black body has been internalized by the white character as an even greater moral responsibility. Crucial here is the fact that Tex has been identified as a southerner and that he uses his authority as sergeant to listen and lead, even when he is unsure of his own stance. The lesson he has learned during the harrowing night is reinforced by the final transfer of the Bible and its message of spiritual kinship to the angry bigot, Miller. Whereas

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Feldstein’s stories take advantage of more generic settings and character types, Wood uses the specific circumstances of the Korean War and the integration of the US military overseas to stage an act of domestic reconciliation. Private J. Matthews, Hank, and Aubrey Collins are the faces of EC’s evolving racial imagination, one that extends from the panels and pages of stories to the paratextual discourse of cover images and letters columns. These male characters bridge the cruel everyday realities of post–World War II segregation with the fitful starts and stops of the federal civil-rights initiatives that took place in the early 1950s. They also reveal the company’s enterprising range of critical attitudes and aesthetic approaches to blackness as a social construct with real consequences and effects. With measures such as Executive Order 9981 already in place, the aim of these stories is not necessarily to advocate for more civil-rights legislation but to demonstrate why African Americans need legal protections in the first place. Such a strategy does not always result in multidimensional representations of the black experience, but, as we will explore in chapter 3, it does have blistering implications for white Americans who refuse to heed the US Constitution or the biblical principles of brotherly love by promoting race hatred.

CH A P T E R T H R E E

“OH GOD . . . SOB! . . . WHaT HaVe i DONe . . . ?”

Shame, Mob rule, and the affective realities of ec Justice I’m crying my eyes out for the poor nigger after reading Wood’s (Feldstein’s) latest pro-negro hogwash in Feb.–March edition of S.S. You expect me to swallow that? . . . What I learned about the negro I learned while in the army and most of it stunk. . . . I don’t associate with them or have them live in my neighborhood. Live and let live, but let them live some where else. After reading “Blood Brothers,” I showed it to a Negro friend of mine. When he read it, tears came to his eyes. Keep publishing stories like that. They will do a lot of good for a lot of people. —two letters to the editor, Shock SuspenStories #15 (1954)

The people of Centerville applaud and cheer when the white Korean War veteran Joey Norris steps to the podium at the welcome rally that ends “In Gratitude . . .” from Shock SuspenStories #11. With the mayor, Joey’s parents, and their neighbors proudly looking on, Joey somberly describes his experience “defending freedom and equality” overseas before pausing to pay tribute to the black soldier, his buddy Hank, who died saving him. Joey stares into the attentive faces in the town hall when he speaks of his comrade in arms, but his voice grows more forceful as he recalls that in spite of Hank’s sacrifice, the man’s skin color still was not “good enough” for him to be buried in their local cemetery.1 The comic’s visual perspective shifts to an elevated view of Joey speaking on a stage draped in the colors of the American flag. Then it sweeps down to focus closer and closer on his grim expression. At the borderless panel that ends the sequence, the uniformed soldier

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glares directly at the reader, now a proxy for the stunned audience, and declares, “What did he die for? What did I give my arm for? You say you’re proud of me. Well, I’m not proud of you. I’m ashamed! I’m ashamed of you . . . and for you!” In response, the crowd silently exits the auditorium. “Sheepishly,” the narrator describes, the men and women of Centerville lower their eyes and walk out one by one until every seat in the hall is empty. It is a picture of the weeping soldier that concludes the story, but Joey’s tears alone are not quite as devastating as seeing the people of his community so chastened in their retreat, faces stony and humbled before the judgment of the town’s cherished “soldier-hero.”2 Shame is the face of justice in the EC preachies. With few exceptions, the message comics drew deeply on individual and collective acts of public shaming and stressed the sentimental invocation of related emotions such as disgrace, humiliation, and guilt in their “plea to improve social standards.”3 While chapter 2’s analysis of African American representation considered how EC discursively framed the urgent race problems of the 1950s, this chapter targets plot resolutions and proposed solutions, focusing on the means through which racism and other early Cold War–era social issues were confronted in image and text. After returning briefly to “In Gratitude . . . ,” I take a closer look at “Blood Brothers,” “The Patriots!,” “Hate!,” “A Kind of Justice,” and “Master Race” in order to ask, Where in the preachies does the real work of combating racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, and red-baiting begin? What are the consequences for the characters and the communities that use fear and hate to disrespect, ostracize, and harm others? Are tears and the wisdom of scripture enough, or will a kick to the head do? And what did EC expect of the readers who took these pleas to heart? From the outset, the coercive use of shame in EC’s stories calls into question the limits of subjectively experienced emotion as an impetus for social change. One would hope that the townspeople’s respect for Joey in “In Gratitude . . .” will eventually lead them to reconsider their views on racial integration, but the story closes with little indication of what will happen to the next black person who arrives in Centerville. Whether Joey will pack up and leave home for good or work to change it is anyone’s guess. What lingers instead are the bowed head and tears, that visceral thump of shame.

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The emphasis on affective emotion here and throughout the preachies is part of EC’s larger creative strategy to persuade readers about the need for social justice in ways that are more intimate and more lasting than physical pain or criminal punishment. Shame is used to situate single acts of wrongdoing within larger institutional networks of white supremacy and xenophobia and, ultimately, to condemn the systemic reach of oppression that manifests itself in the everyday life of EC’s readers. The educational and the entertaining dimensions of Bill Gaines’s company emphatically overlap to focus on “another tradition at E.C . . . emotion.”4 My previous discussion highlighted particular types of characters that EC employed as individual models for readers to emulate or reject, not unlike the heroes and villains readers are accustomed to seeing on the pages of mainstream comic books. Soldiers such as Joey (or Tex from “Perimeter!”) provide examples of strong moral and ethical behavior, for instance, while Sheriff Dawson’s racism and deceit make him a cautionary foe in “The Guilty!” But the shame experienced in these stories implicates larger white communities and deepens the collective ramifications of the narrative resolution—a fitting strategy, given the critical role that shame plays “in establishing and regulating social bonds.”5 The social psychologists Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger’s extensive research on the emotional world associates shame with an awareness of the self that is profoundly relational: “Shame arises in situations of self-consciousness, seeing oneself through the viewpoint of others.”6 In turn, the physical, psychological, and cultural aspects of shame enact measures of social control (or selfregulation) that guide our actions; when deployed didactically, shame can prompt changes in behavior that range from outer restitution to an inner transformation of consciousness. Scheff and Retzinger further juxtapose shame and pride as two sides of the same coin, describing them as “virtually ubiquitous” signals that convey the strength of social bonds.7 On the pages of “In Gratitude . . . ,” the praise lavished on Joey affirms Centerville’s collective validation of his identity on the basis of his sacrifice abroad. Wood’s illustration of the many faces at the welcome rally are the physical manifestation of their social connection. As Scheff and Retzinger put it, “pride is the sign of an intact bond; shame is the sign of a threatened one.”8 Variants of these two social emotions push and

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pull at each other throughout the story, destabilize Joey’s relationship with his parents and his neighbors, and compromise his obligation to Hank. In order for these negative judgments to make a difference, the parties involved must already be “emotionally close” and inextricably dependent on one another. The psychoanalyst Helen Lewis notes, “In order for shame to occur, there must be a relationship between the self and the other in which the self cares about the other’s evaluation.”9 We see this dynamic play out on two levels when Mr. and Mrs. Norris fumble and plead with Joey about the difficulty of honoring his request due to the harassment and phone calls from neighbors that made them feel as if “the whole town was on [their] necks.” Shame compels their confession of wrongdoing and their attempts at restitution by purchasing Hank the best plot they could afford in another cemetery instead.10 In Joey’s efforts to pay tribute to Hank’s sacrifice, he is similarly torn between maintaining his community’s respect and refusing to cosign their bigoted attitudes. His struggle can be best described through what Salman Akhtar identifies as the five components of shame: “(1) collapse of self-esteem, (2) feeling of humiliation, (3) rupture of selfcontinuity, whereby what one was, in one’s mind, a moment ago is experientially lost, (4) sense of isolation and standing apart from the group, and (5) feeling of being watched by critical others.”11 Feldstein and Wood track the slow collapse of Joey’s self-esteem and humiliation through the first half of “In Gratitude . . .” as the narrative progresses from the Korean War veteran smiling at the dinner table to the moment when we see him sitting alone in the back seat of his parents’ car: “They drove to the town hall in silence. Joey just sat, staring at his gleaming steel clamp.”12 Once the mayor beckons Joey onstage, the rupture of his self-continuity is complete. With his declaration, “I’m ashamed of you . . . and for you!” (figure 13), Joey breaks their social bond in deference not only to Hank’s civil rights but also to the greater democratic principles represented by the steel clamp he raises into the air as he says, “I gave my right hand defending freedom and equality. And I was proud of it . . . I was proud, that is, until today.”13 Likewise, the townspeople’s response to Joey’s speech brings the visual cues of shame to the forefront. Although the crowd speaks no words in the eight-panel sequence that ends the story, shame spreads

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Figure 13. “In Gratitude . . .” from Shock SuspenStories #11 (1953)

like a contagion through the bodies of each individual listening to Joey. All look away and take the slow walk out of the hall. Charles Darwin’s pioneering study On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1899) characterizes such physical reactions in this way:

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“Under a keen sense of shame there is a strong desire for concealment. We turn away the whole body, more especially the face, which we endeavour in some manner to hide. An ashamed person can hardly endure to meet the gaze of those present, so that he almost invariably casts down his eyes or looks askant.”14 In place of the welcoming faces of friends and neighbors that greeted Joey when he arrived in Centerville are the people who pressured and threatened his parents. Wood’s illustration of their bodies shifts to reflect their sudden desire for concealment as they finally see themselves condemned through Joey’s tearful eyes. Despite his neighbors’ so-called good intentions, their effort to maintain the status quo reveals much more than personal moral failings; their actions have deepened the already-fragile rift between the principle and the practice of American democracy. White readers are implicated in the story’s approach too. Would Joey’s words be enough to truly change the white-supremacist belief systems that sustain their own households, neighborhood associations, and businesses? Confronted with America’s shame, are they willing to stand alone on the stage with the soldier-hero, or is their seat already reserved among the chastised townspeople below? “Must Pain Be the Only Teacher? Can’t We Learn without Pain?” The invocation of shame and threatened social bonds in the EC preachies suggests that publisher Bill Gaines and head writer Al Feldstein were aware that the formal antidiscrimination measures unfolding after World War II would be more effective when accompanied by a deeper transformation in the consciousness of white Americans. For EC readers who were unconvinced by the shock comics’ appeals to democratic principles and anticontainment policies, the emphasis on affect made the case for civil rights an internal matter with external consequences. Of course, these kinds of narrative and aesthetic choices have their own history in American popular culture. EC relied on what scholars of the sentimental tradition refer to as “the language of tears” to register the collective costs of social and political intolerance in literature.15 Among the most widely discussed expressions of this approach are the works of nineteenth-century women writers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Elizabeth Stuart

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Phelps, who infused already-established codes of sentimentality in their domestic fiction to empathetically close the distance between their readers and the problems of society. For instance, in a discussion of the 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jane Tompkins notes that Stowe’s antislavery opus dramatized weeping as a “sign of redemption” that served as the first and most important step in dismantling the institution of American slavery through Christianity. Though today’s observers may dismiss these moments as melodramatic excess, Tompkins argues that Stowe viewed tears as a small emblem that was hardly sufficient to convey the much more substantial spiritual transformation taking place within.16 Shirley Samuels further explains the benefits and drawbacks of such sentimental appeals in a way that speaks more broadly to the expectations of the genre: “The reform literature associated with sentimentality works as a set of rules for how to ‘feel right,’ privileging compassion in calibrating and adjusting the sensations of the reader in finely tuned and predictable responses to what is viewed or read. The discomfort of sentimentality comes from what can be a coerced or artifactual emotional response—being forced to feel what it feels like—a response that raises questions about the moral and political status of the works.”17 To meet similar aims, EC developed its own rules for incorporating the earnest moralizing that shores up the resolutions of the message stories while maintaining the kind of ironic distance that would distinguish the “preachies” from actual preaching. For instance, the Bible that Private J. Matthews carries and shares with his white comrades in Wallace Wood’s “Perimeter!” points to the influence of Christian virtue, yet explicit religious overtures were rare in EC. Instead, Gaines and Feldstein favored the blatantly unsentimental variations of eyefor-an-eye punishment more commonly associated with the Old Testament. By the time the Shock SuspenStories series debuted in 1952, EC was already well known for unscrupulous revenge fantasies, particularly in horror and crime comics, which ended abruptly with devastating acts of retribution. Justice was achieved through the thrill of seeing unashamed and mean-spirited protagonists brought low by the unexpected consequences of their deeds. EC’s snap-endings relied on degenerates who refused shame and, in so doing, refused the bonds of social virtue in favor of amassing personal power, wealth, or security. As issue after issue made clear, no one was supposed to weep for

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the dead in an EC comic. Gaines’s biographer Frank Jacobs points out, “This was formula, of course, but the readers ate it up.”18 Among the examples he cites are the vindictive seafood-restaurant owner who ends up split open and broiled alive like his lobsters in “Half-Baked!” from Tales from the Crypt #40 and “The Neat Job!” from Shock SuspenStories #1, in which a man obsessed with neatness is dismembered by his wife, who meticulously sorts his organs in little jars. In an interview with the Comics Journal, Gaines referred to these vindictive ironies as “the EC way”: EC stories differed from a lot of stories in comics because virtue did not have to triumph. Although our stories were really quite moral, and a lot of people have written on that. If somebody did something really bad, he usually “got it.” And of course, the EC way was he got it the same way he gave it. Some kid—and this is like a classic between Al and I, we just laugh about it—some kid walked in, he was kind of a simple kid, he walked into the office, and said, “Uhhh, ya stories gimme da same idea . . .” “What?” “All ya stories, dey gimme da same idea. You sharpen a pencil, a pencil sharpens ya head.” And he was right. That was the way it was: you sharpen a pencil, a pencil sharpens your head. You broil live lobsters; you end up getting broiled alive. This kind of thing, just to take an example. And we did have this kind of morality that somebody got back what they gave.19 Atomic Age comic-book readers were already primed for the blunt instruments of these moral dictates by the time Gaines and Feldstein began experimenting with the preachies. But for EC to persuade its readers to “feel right” about more specific social and political issues, it would have to figure out a new approach that combined the distinctive rules of the EC way with a different kind of emotional investment, one more grounded in the social dynamics of pride and shame. Could EC readers remain entertained by a story that was more concerned with reform than revenge? Retribution means something quite different when the grisly scalding of “Half-Baked!” is replaced with the language of tears. The 1952 story “Hate!” from Shock SuspenStories #5 offers an early example of EC “calibrating and adjusting the sensations of the reader”

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to focus the narrative on the larger implications of injustice rather than on the fleeting thrills of retaliation. Through the story’s second-person perspective, the “you” is John Smith—a proud, white, American family man and churchgoer who takes part in a campaign to terrorize a new Jewish family that has moved into the neighborhood. What begins as anonymous hate speech escalates to late-night beatings and finally to arson, until John and his accomplices watch the couple leap from their burning home to their deaths. An added shock comes at the story’s midpoint, when his dismayed mother reveals (within listening distance of a fellow neighbor) that John himself was adopted from Jewish parents. Shortly after, John becomes the new target of the community’s prejudice. As the reader experiences the harassment from John’s point of view, the narrative pushes against misconceptions about ethnic and religious identity by undermining the assurances of whiteness as a self-evident, protected status. With the single revelation of Jewish heritage from a trusted source, anyone—even John Smith, even you—can be cast out.20 One of creative elements that distinguishes “Hate!” is the perspective through which the story’s extended meditations on prejudice, shame, and disgrace are communicated. The captions use a narrative technique often reserved in EC for indexing the terror-filled thoughts of criminals and monsters (e.g., the walking corpse in “Reflection of Death!” from Tales from the Crypt #23). In this instance, however, the narration draws readers into the mind of an anti-Semitic home owner struggling to understand both his outrage and his uncertainty. “You hate them, don’t you John?” the caption asks and, in the process, exposes John’s flawed logic and the evasions of his thoughts: “He wears the same kind of clothes . . . eats the same kind of food . . . but he’s a Jew!” With images of John’s actions unfolding alongside this uncomfortable interrogation, readers are compelled to reflect on the nature and meaning of bigotry as something that is learned. The narrator poses the key question, “When did you first learn to hate, John?”21 Significantly, the story does not end with John’s cries and tears of shame upon his first exposure to his Jewish heritage. “Hate!” provides us with an opportunity to see how such a massive loss of entitlement impacts the subconscious of a man who has never considered himself anything but white: “Are you different, John? Are you different, now? Do you feel any different? Do you look any different?” (figure 14).22

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Figure 14. “Hate!” from Shock SuspenStories #5 (1952)

Visually the strategy echoes the destabilization of race in “In Gratitude . . . ,” “Perimeter!,” and “Judgment Day!” Though nothing about John Smith has changed visibly on the page, the perception of his identity has been judged unworthy enough to break the social bonds with his longtime friends. Feeling remorseful about his earlier role in the Jewish couple’s death, John even cries out for the Lord’s forgiveness. And he argues with his neighbors over the questions he could never find the strength to answer himself. Arms thrown wide open, he calls out, “Charlie! It’s John! The same John! Is there anything different about me?” and later, “Can’t you see? Can’t you see how wrong we are . . . how wrong we’ve been?”23 In true EC fashion, John reaps what he sows as the story’s antagonist. But it is the reader, as his narrative surrogates, who are ignored, harassed, and painfully beaten by the neighbors until the borders of the last panel drip red with blood: “Hate is deep, John! Hate is imbedded! Where do we learn it? Who teaches it to us? How can it be untaught? . . . The beating is painful, isn’t it John? Is it your punishment? Must pain be the only teacher? Can’t we learn without pain? Can’t we learn to love . . . instead of hate? You’re learning now, aren’t you? The kicking . . . the swearing . . . it’s teaching you . . . but the others! When will they learn?”24 “Hate!” is among the most straightforward of the message stories and appears, at first glance, to adhere rather closely to the major conventions of the EC tradition. Here Feldstein and Wood strive to balance the entertaining and the educational, combining the startling ethnic slurs and earnest messages about prejudice in the captions with

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vivid images of scenes such as the deathly house fire. As with other preachies, the story’s focus is not on the minority characters or the hate crimes exacted on them but on how the white perpetrators justify and cope with their immoral actions. With this perspective in mind, then, the narrator’s observations about pain are particularly instructive. For despite the beating that leaves John’s face bloodied and swollen, the narrator’s closing comments clearly mark the limitations of the lessons taught through physical pain, lessons that cannot extend beyond this single body in crisis to penetrate the belief systems of white America. Pain, in this sense, is actually counterproductive as a form of punishment, leaving the interior experience of shame to emerge as the more beneficial teaching tool. As much as kicking and swearing may satisfy the urge to see that the culprit “got it,” this particular story suggests that the routine comeuppance of the EC way is not enough to change the larger ideology of white, patriarchal supremacy. Feldstein’s narrator articulates, through these closing panels, the central challenge of all social-protest comics in their struggle against hate: Where do we learn it? Who teaches it to us? How can it be untaught? “They Will Do a Lot of Good for a Lot of People” Gaines and Feldstein wrote several scripts for Shock SuspenStories over its three-and-a-half-year run that recycled the dramatic reversalof-identity plot twist from “Hate!” “The Whipping,” discussed earlier in chapter 1, offers one variation of the narrative strategy in its depiction of a white family man who leads a nighttime raid against a young Mexican American man and mistakenly kills his own daughter. Another version of this plot twist, in the story “Blood Brothers” from the February–March 1954 issue of Shock SuspenStories #13, further demonstrates how deeply EC invested in the social hazards of shame, exchanging corporal punishment for public humiliation. The comic also calls our attention to the cognitive implications of EC’s visual representation of shame and contrition as a challenge to white power structures. In “Blood Brothers,” a white protagonist named Sid is distraught over learning that a longtime neighbor and friend, Henry Williams, is “part Negro” despite his Caucasian appearance. Unable to stomach the idea of living next door to a man whose grandmother was black, Sid

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Figure 15. “Blood Brothers” from Shock SuspenStories #13 (1954)

tells his wife, “With him living here, and Jed Martin thinking of selling his place to colored folks . . . why . . . why, the neighborhood’s going to change! Our kids will be playing with colored kids. [. . .] I’m not going to let that happen, Ella. I put a lot of money and work and sweat into this place. I’m not going to see it go down the drain.”25 Sid does his best to force the Williams family out of the neighborhood, bullying Henry to the point that the innocent man is so overwhelmed by terror that he kills himself. As Henry’s body is being wheeled into the morgue wagon, Sid unapologetically defends his actions to the coroner, Old Doc Falk: “Henry had Negro blood in him, Doc! Can’t you understand?” The older man responds, “There’s no such thing as Negro blood, Sid. All human blood is the same.”26 He goes on to chastise Sid by recounting a story from the early days of his practice when a young white boy involved in a farming accident received an emergency transfusion from an African American farmhand. The coroner points then to a scar on Sid’s arm and says, “You were that boy, Sid! George’s blood saved your life. ‘Negro blood,’ pumped into your veins, snatched you from the jaws of death!” (figure 15). Doc Falk retreats with a grimace, leaving Sid in the final panel hunched over, weeping, and saying, “Oh God . . . sob! . . . what have I done . . . ?”27 Sid’s bowed head, slumped shoulders, and tears are, of course, the all-too-familiar signs that shame’s self-regulating functions are working according to EC’s standards. These reactive gestures broadcast the shame affect as the body’s defenses are broken down, visually undermining the authority of white people who espouse racist attitudes. The

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scholar Karin Kukkonen, in her cognitive analysis of the comics form, emphasizes how the actions we see on the page “relate to [our] own bodily experience of the world.” The connection between our physical “body schema” and the activity being represented can impact how we understand what is happening in the story and how we interpret the power dynamics between characters. She explains, “When we see characters do something in a panel, the processes in our brains unfold something like an imitation of these postures in motorsensory systems which prepare the action (but do not lead us to actually perform it), and we feel an echo of the character’s experience.”28 When these motorsensory systems are taken into account, the visual depiction of shame experiences among white Americans becomes crucial—much like the more dignified postures of Aubrey Collins, Private J. Matthews, and other African Americans characters—in driving the strong coercive tug at the heart of the preachies. The consistent illustration of these actions offers more evidence of the serial-reading practices that extend beyond what the EC captions spell out to the pictorial dimensions of the page and the reactions that the narrative drawings generate within the reader’s own body. This chapter opens with letters to EC from two readers who respond in very different ways to the motorsensory echoes of the characters’ experiences in “Blood Brothers.” The first letter, from an army soldier, reads Sid’s tears as nothing short of manipulative. He takes offense, recalling Samuels’s analysis of sentimental fiction, to “being forced to feel what it feels like.” With the first letter writer’s exasperated comment, “I’m crying my eyes out for the poor nigger,” he adamantly denies the culpability conveyed by Sid’s chastised posture, expressing frustration with “Wood’s (Feldstein’s) latest pro-negro hogwash.” Not only does his letter cosign Sid’s earlier views on the necessity of housing segregation, but it also betrays a deeper anxiety about internalizing EC’s message. (Or as he puts it, “You expect me to swallow that?”)29 The second letter, on the other hand, praises the story’s ability to generate empathetic tears in a “Negro friend.” Whether these tears are prompted by the story’s depiction of racism or relief at its condemnation, implied in the letter’s observations is a desire to validate the ideological and emotional thrust behind EC’s approach. The black friend’s affective response is enough evidence for the second letter writer that the preachies were doing “a lot of good for a lot of people.”30

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Good, in this sense, is linked to the powerful feelings the story engenders in white and black readers alike. Yet when we consider the consequences of hate in “Blood Brothers,” it is important to point out that nowhere in the comic does it appear that Sid will suffer criminal penalties for the part he plays in Henry’s death. The old trusted friend to whom he confesses is a coroner, not a detective. If we keep the lessons of “Hate!” in mind—that pain should not be the only teacher—the tears that fall down Sid’s cheeks suggest remorse as an alternative. He now realizes that the racial phantom he spent so much time constructing inside the minds of his neighbors has been living beneath his own skin. He has cycled through Akhtar’s five components of shame and expresses feelings of social isolation, loss of self, and the judgment of others.31 The culmination of this trauma comes when Wood depicts the doctor lifting the white man’s right arm to indicate the entry point of the blood transfusion; the image mirrors the extended left arm of the black farmworker who donated the blood to Sid as a child⁠.32 It is the unexpected embodiment of the Other—a category of being defined against the so-called universal standard of white, middle-class, heterosexual men—that triggers the strongest flood of tears, not to mention the cruelest irony of the title’s pun on kinship. We would do well here to listen to James Baldwin in his 1949 critique of the legacy of sentimentalism in social realism, when he cautions against the deceptive “thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such as book at all.”33 The tragedy that moves readers to tears in “Blood Brothers” will likely prompt them to think more carefully about society’s deeply entrenched rationale for dehumanizing others. However, it is also worth considering what it means that Sid’s punishment for murdering a black man is to be turned into one. In a discussion of shame and race, the sociologist Melissa HarrisPerry makes a point to distinguish between “reintegrative shaming,”34 the kind of shame used to reform behavior and strengthen social bonds,⁠ and the “stigmatizing” shame of blackness that leaves the subject irrevocably marginalized. She explains that “Jim Crow insisted that black people assume a physical posture of shame in all of their dealings with whites. African Americans were expected to slump, hang their heads, avoid eye contact, and avoid bumping or jostling whites in public.”35 Importantly, Feldstein and Wood ennoble the so-called Negro in

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“Blood Brothers” by depicting him without these markers. Once Henry is accused of concealing his true racial identity as a black man, he does not plead or cower as if he has done anything wrong, and he does not flee his home. When asked why he did not say something sooner, Henry simply (and naively) replies, “I didn’t think it was important, Sid!”36 Henry does not physically appear any different than the other white characters in the story. Multiple images of his face and profile emphasize the wavy, brown hair that falls across his forehead, and the actual color of his skin is no different from the neighborhood milkman’s. As a result, “Blood Brothers” uses the false notion of “Negro blood” to problematize the optics of race in ways similar to message stories such as “In Gratitude . . .” and “Perimeter!” It is only Sid’s white gaze that marks Henry’s blackness in the story, yet the stigma that Henry experiences makes him hypervisible. We see further evidence of this type of stigmatizing shame in the story’s climactic moment when Sid openly burns a cross on Henry’s front lawn. Sid, dramatically exposing his ignorance, tells Doc Falk, “I saw Henry’s face at the window, staring out at the dancing flames! Can you imagine?! Even though he had Negro blood in his veins, his face was ashen white.”37 Severin enacts her own skillful manipulation of color to assert a different message. She makes Sid appear demonic in red and orange hues beside the shadowy, grimacing picture of Henry. Likewise, the yellow imprint of the burning cross reflected on Henry’s chest holds a visual analogy to Christian persecution in tension with the striking image of white supremacy and hate. In the case of “Jim Crow’s tentacles, reaching into all arenas of black life,” Harris-Perry explains that the stigma of race “asserted that black people were malignant, that they should be ashamed of who they are, and that whites needed to be protected from unwanted exposure to blackness.”38 Shortly after the startling images of the burning cross bear witness to the psychological trauma of racism, Henry commits suicide. “Blood Brothers” makes a point to detail each step that Sid takes to isolate Henry from the privileges of living as a white man. Sid uses scare tactics to enlist the help of others, including Henry’s employer, the bank where he applies for a loan, and the stores that sell his family’s food. Sid tells the grocer, “If you want to deal with colored folks, that’s okay with me, only I’ll take my business elsewhere.”39 Not only does he make sure that Henry’s son becomes an outcast among the neighborhood

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children, but his actions also prevent Henry’s wife from receiving medical care; and she too dies as a result. These scenes, illustrated through confessional flashback, make it clear that Henry’s suicide is the result of a collective effort overseen directly by Sid, who is often depicted in the background deliberating with his arms folded. Sid’s accusations galvanize this white community’s fears so comprehensively and with such ease that his attack further underscores the need for legal protections for African Americans when assaulted by systemic discrimination. Beyond Henry’s feeble attempt to intervene—“Sid, I’d like to talk to you”40—the so-called Negro man has no recourse to stop the destruction of his family and his livelihood by an outraged white neighbor. “This Shameful Story Might Have Taken Place Anywhere in the United States!” The transfer of the stigmatizing shame of blackness to Sid, an allAmerican white man, is the shocking twist that enables EC’s unsparing critique of a bigger target: the communities that empower people like Sid in the first place. In “Blood Brothers,” Sid’s concerned neighbors, as well as the actions of other mass gatherings in EC’s representational economy, are critical to the publisher’s message about mob rule. Extralegal lynch mobs were fixtures in its crime stories, such as “The Guilty!,” “Under Cover!,” and “A Kind of Justice,” in which white men bypass due process by surrounding jails or convening after dark to demand blood. Just as insidious, however, were the white families who gathered openly to preserve a way of life that vilified difference. From the postwar welcome-home rallies and the holiday street parades to the impromptu meetings of suburban home owners under neighborhood streetlamps, EC was deeply critical of crowds that used fear and ignorance (or silence and indifference) to sanction acts of intolerance in the name of tradition. Only children and the military appear to be exempt from this practice, as these groups were the ones often positioned to criticize the white mob’s provincialism. The more anonymous or self-righteous the gathering, the more the message stories emphasized the visual signifiers of a disorderly throng swept under by base, unregulated emotions. Consider the white spectators assembled to watch a military parade in “The Patriots!” from Shock SuspenStories #2 who end up beating and killing a Korean War veteran for not removing his hat to salute the

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American flag. Unaware that a combat injury left the stranger blind and disfigured, the men standing around him read his unresponsive silence as suspicious, labeling him a “sourpuss” before escalating to labels such as “Commie,” “dirty red,” and “subversive.”41 Nearly every panel that Jack Davis illustrates in “The Patriots!” is full to bursting with masses of people standing in clusters on the sidelines as they transform from a cheering crowd to a vicious mob. The opening splash panel foreshadows the ironic dissonance between the comic’s title and an image of the war veteran (dressed in red bow tie, white shirt, and blue jacket) being pummeled by bare-knuckle fists and a woman’s purse. The story further singles out three white men in the crowd who comment, “Look at his nose! He must be a foreigner!” and, later, “Yeah! His skin’s kinda dark, too! An’ his hair  .  .  .”42 Once the stranger has been differentiated as an Other—as a non-American and/ or a person of color—he has no place in this group of so-called patriots, no rights that a mob is bound to respect. And yet contrary to the notion that individuals are more susceptible to engaging in this kind of antisocial behavior when part of a crowd, social psychologists argue that the participants are actually constrained in other ways by the norms and “hierarchies of command” within the group dynamic. Even in relatively unstructured groups, “group norms are inferred from the comments and actions of those seen as typical group members.”43 We see this dynamic play out in the way the parade spectators in “The Patriots!” goad each other on. Also common are scenes in which a lone member of a group, having rallied around a collective white-supremacist identity, dares to voice concerns about whether his or her actions are going too far, only to have these objections silenced. (“I don’t know! That’s pretty rough!” John says when his neighbors decide to set the home of the Jewish family ablaze in “Hate!”44 Or during the fatal beating in the “The Whipping,” one of the participants is slapped across the face for simply exclaiming, “Alright, Ed! That’s enough!”)45 Gaines and Feldstein consistently invoked the vigilantism of mob rule as evidence of the pervasiveness of American racism, and they made a point to relocate the iconography of summary justice associated with southern hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to the growing suburban enclaves across the nation. The stories dramatize the attitudes that led to the exclusion of black, Jewish, and other nonwhite

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residents from small midwestern towns and postwar planned communities along the East Coast, such as Levittown in Long Island, New York. The Levitt family began constructing the sprawling residential community in 1947 to meet the needs of returning World War II veterans, and they included, as part of the first rental lease agreement, a clause requiring that “the tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.” In a move that echoes Sid’s sentiments in “Blood Brothers,” two families were evicted from Levittown in those early years simply for inviting black children to play in their homes.46 The community continued to prohibit people of color from renting or buying, even after the Federal Housing Administrative ordered such restrictive covenants to be removed. By the time Shock SuspenStories began appearing on newsstands in 1952, Levittown had leased a home to its first African American family, only to evict them from the community of seventy thousand residents one year later. Such restrictions were not unique to the Long Island development; they were integral to the reassurances of safety and comfort in segregated communities and sundown towns across the country⁠.47 EC called attention to these trends repeatedly by giving towns generic names such as “Centerville” in its comics and by declaring, as the narrator does in “The Guilty!,” that “this shameful story might have taken place anywhere in the United States!”48 “Blood Brothers” and “The Whipping” associated restrictive covenants with the burning of crosses and public flogging. Stories such as “Under Cover!” pointed out that perpetrators were becoming even more crafty, wearing different “hoods” to legitimize their hate. At the end of that story, when the members of a white-supremacist hate group pose as FBI agents in order to silence a reporter, the narrator states, “Safe behind their masks of prejudice, these hooded peddlers of racial, religious, and political hatred operate today! Mind you, they are shrewd and ruthless men such as those in our story! How long can we stay ‘cool’ and indifferent to this threat to our democratic way of life?”49 Whether manifested through lease agreements, night riders wearing bedsheets, or a group of suspicious onlookers at a parade, the collective body of white-supremacist ideology emerges in the EC message stories as America’s greatest obstacle to justice for all. In place of physical pain and the gruesome retribution of the EC way, the primary

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vehicle of judgment in the preachies is the sentimental invocation of shame, an emotion that, in its effort to control social behavior, was seen by many readers as doing a lot of good. Crucial too are the lone white voices of reason and wisdom that punctuate these tales, for instance, Doc Falk from “Blood Brothers” or Tex from “Perimeter!” With these voices, even when the EC stories end in devastation, the narrative is able to model a call to action. After all, there was evidence, even in Levittown, that not everyone felt the same way as people like Sid. One of the white families evicted from the community for hosting an interracial play group refused to leave “until the Levitts signed their first lease with a Negro family.” With the support of the NAACP, they sued the housing development, and “just as in Stuyvesant Town, Parkchester, and several other projects, activists turned the eviction into a civil rights protest.”50 Surely Gaines and Feldstein hoped that a few of their readers would be among those who were protesting. Ultimately, the most chilling rebuke of the mob takes place in stories that make explicit connections between vigilante justice and the state. Appearing in Shock SuspenStories #16 and scripted by Carl Wessler, “A Kind of Justice” is the rare EC crime story to offer a detailed and sympathetic representation of a woman’s experience in the aftermath of sexual assault.⁠51 In the opening splash panel of the comic, a sixteenyear-old girl named Shirley is crying on the floor of a shack; her arm shields her face as she cowers at the words from the unknown attacker beyond the panel frame: “You tell anybody . . . and I’ll kill you!”52 The reader is later told that a man had confronted her while she waited at the bus stop, and then “he’d forced her to the old shack by the quarry. She’d pleaded and screamed. And now it was over. But it would never be over for her .  .  . because she’d never forget.” In contrast to other crime comics of the period, Reed Crandall’s illustrations of the young white woman focus less on her body and more on the anguish on her face and her bowed head. After Shirley returns home, her mother expresses concern and offers comfort, while her father plays the role of “angry lion . . . the outraged father” and even threatens to beat her at one point for not revealing the name of the rapist.53 Once Shirley gives a statement to law enforcement, the story shifts to the efforts of Sheriff Judson and his deputy in their search for suspects. At an all-night diner, they end up arresting a suspicious young white man named Eddie from Detroit, a quick-tempered beatnik who

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loudly proclaims his innocence. Eddie initially holds his own against the tag-team interrogation of the sheriff as the level-headed authority and the deputy as the hothead. But outside the jail, a mob led by Shirley’s father is growing: “The mob had started to gather early, and more men kept coming all the time. Eddie Nichols couldn’t see them, but he could almost tell how many there were by the ominous crescendo of their muttering voices. He had the impression of a pack of baying hounds with the scene of blood in their nostrils . . . wild dogs closing in for the kill.”54 Wessler uses the term wild repeatedly in captions that identify the mob in various animalistic terms. In another instance, a “storm-tossed wave” characterizes the crowd’s uncontrollable nature as more than just an impediment to due process. Even the sheriff claims to be helpless to intervene: “reason .  .  . with a mob like that, Eddie? It’d be like talking to a stone wall.”55 In turn, the shouting and pounding on the jailhouse doors provides the officers with the urgency they need to pressure Eddie into conceding guilt. The seven-panel grid box on the page shifts at this point to a wide-angle view of Sheriff Judson waving the signed confession before a crowd that has transformed into a “roaring bellowing mass of humanity.” They are “revenge-hungry” as they barge en masse into the jail, “the wild unreasoning mob, unashamed of its hate-filled passion.”56 Especially chilling are the images of the contorted faces and arms as the attackers wield metal pipes, broken glass, and fists with “laughter and hoarse cries of delight.”57 When the mob gets hold of Eddie and beats him to death, the implication here is that such violent means could never justify this end—this “kind of justice”—even if the prisoner committed the crime. The twist, of course, is that Eddie did not. The last panel shows Sheriff Judson escorting Shirley home with a menacing expression on his face as he reminds her, “You were smart not to talk, Shirley! Remember! You tell anybody . . . and I’ll kill you!”58 It is likely that Feldstein, who did not write “A Kind of Justice,” would not have classified this shock comic as one of the preachies. The second slot of Shock SuspenStories #16 was occupied by an anticommunist story, “The Hazing,” a subject that was much more common among EC’s message stories. Nevertheless, the focus on the fair and reasonable administration of the law in “A Kind of Justice,” along with other recurring features, places the story squarely among the socialprotest comics that EC produced. And on nearly every page, Wessler

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and Crandall emphasize the shame and trauma that the young woman suffers as a rape victim in order to condemn the mob’s actions. This is particularly important given the manner in which EC, in the tradition of popular crime comics of the genre, often depicted women characters; those who were not being subjected to all manner of violence were stereotyped as selfish, nagging wives (“One Man’s Poison”) or neglectful mothers (“The Orphan”). Physically the placement of young adult women on the covers and pages of EC reinforces their objectification, as the artists tend to accentuate their well-developed breasts, hips, and legs and to turn their bodies toward the reader’s gaze. By contrast, Shirley is framed by tropes of innocence as someone’s teenage daughter, but more than protection, what she requires is clearheaded consolation. The captions detail her inner struggle when she is “too ashamed” to be seen or to speak, and they make it clear that the town’s men of authority are prone to hasty judgments that only make the situation worse.59 When news of the assault spreads, the narrator points out that “the men looked differently at Shirley and she felt what they were thinking, and she hated them, and her father too.” When her father ignores her tears and insists that she be taken to the jail to identify her rapist, her mother says, “Why does she have to go down there and parade her shame!?”60 Outside the jail, Shirley’s public humiliation is communicated visually by the way her body is illustrated at the center of the unruly mob; one arm is being pulled by her father, another yanked by the sheriff (figure 16). She is forced “to relive her

Figure 16. “A Kind of Justice” from Shock SuspenStories #16 (1954)

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experience,” as the narrator states, and remains in danger from the very men who claim to be interested in her well-being.61 The means through which violence is justified and carried out in “A Kind of Justice” echoes the warped logic and temperament of the vigilantes who populated the 1950s EC preachies, maintaining a culture of American conformity with mob rule and offering a window into the worst of humanity. Eddie’s experience with corrupt law enforcement echoes that of Aubrey Collins, the African American character killed by Sheriff Dawson in “The Guilty!” for a crime he did not commit. It is not the white man’s race that makes the crowd in “A Kind of Justice” suspicious but rather his status as an antiestablishment outsider. And unlike the black man who is not allowed in “The Guilty!” to be heard speaking (or thinking), Eddie’s character is more developed, and he puts up more of a fight before his death. Nevertheless, both innocent men lose their lives while the culprits go free. Both comics make clear that for vulnerable members of society, there is little hope for restitution when the establishment behaves no better than criminals. There is perhaps no clearer evidence of EC’s editorial edict that “virtue did not have to triumph.”62 “First before Small Groups . . . Then before Crowds . . . and Finally before Multitudes” The March–April 1955 story “Master Race” by Feldstein and the artist Bernard Krigstein brings together nearly all the narrative and aesthetic features discussed in this chapter and expands the inferences about affective emotion drawn from cognitive analysis and social psychology. Set a decade after World War II in the United States, the story is told from the second-person perspective of a former Nazi officer named Carl Reissman and chronicles his vain attempt to flee the memory of his war crimes after a chance encounter on the subway with a man who appears to be a concentration-camp survivor. The expectation that some form of retribution awaits Reissman is offset by the same dilemma Feldstein grappled with three years prior in “Hate!” about how such deeply held animosity can be unlearned. But in stark contrast to that earlier comic’s philosophical deliberations, “Master Race” arrives at a different, less compromising answer. Reissman is recognized by a grim man dressed in black and tries to run away after the subway-train doors open. The former commandant,

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haunted by his decisive role in so much death and suffering, panics on the subway platform and stumbles into the path of an oncoming train. When asked what happened, the man who watched silently as Reissman plummeted to this death denies any knowledge and grimly replies, “He was a perfect stranger.”63 Originally written for Crime SuspenStories #26, “Master Race” did not appear in print until the first issue of Impact, one of the series that Gaines launched as part of EC’s short-lived New Direction line. The series received little attention in 1955, but observers have since credited Krigstein’s innovative artwork and design as the principal reason why the story now ranks among EC’s best. And with good reason: after receiving Feldstein’s scripted springboards, Krigstein, a Jewish, New York–born artist, asked for permission to expand the story and spent a month splicing and rearranging the panels into an eight-page narrative unlike any that EC had published before. Krigstein incorporates elements of Futurism and pop art into the comic, as Santiago Garcia notes, and even includes wordless sequences in an effort to decompress the copious text of Feldstein’s captions and to add a more complex sense of pacing to the visual narrative.64 Krigstein takes advantage of the train interiors and windows to ink thin, clean lines that convey both physical movement and internal contemplation, while heavy shadows transfer grim faces of indifference among the subway riders into the crumpled rage of the Nazis. Art Spiegelman, in his extensive close reading of the story with John Benson and David Kasakove, further emphasizes Krigstein’s restraint in his use of stark, minimalist aesthetics to depict the violent atrocities of the war. Freeing himself from the “excesses” of the EC tradition, Krigstein’s experimental approach was regarded by admirers such as Spiegelman as “one of the finest stories ever to appear in the comics form.”65 Other critics, such as Martin Jukovsky, praise the comic on the basis of the period in which Impact #1 was published. Jukovsky notes in his introduction to Russ Cochran’s authorized reprint of the story that “when EC published ‘Master Race’ in 1955, there was little in the mass media about the murder by the Nazis of millions of Jews, Gypsies, political oppositionists and homosexuals.” Jukovsky cites as examples the importance of postwar photographs and early memoirs such as Olga Lenyel’s Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz in bringing the

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details of the Holocaust to the attention of an American public that “just found it all too hard to believe.”66 EC took a risk in making more than an implied reference to the Holocaust by visualizing the increasingly violent means of oppression that the Nazis used, from book burnings and public beatings to the gas chambers, medical experiments, and mass graves. Risky, too, was the image of the concentration-camp survivor as a pursuing avenger, a merciless specter of death in black. For Krigstein, the subject matter required him to unravel the visual conventions of the EC tradition as carefully as the prescripted pages in order to reassemble the story into a more nuanced variation of a familiar plot, rife with ambiguity. And yet the distinctive moral compass that Feldstein developed with his artists over dozens and dozens of stories remains in place. In later years, Feldstein remarked that “[Krigstein] really improved the story. The story was good, but he improved the art end of the story so much that I thought we were really breaking new ground. He was right in the end.”67 Fans who purchased Impact #1 may have recognized a number of narrative strategies from EC’s pre-Code comics. The narrow focalization of the story’s second-person perspective leads readers into assuming that Reissman is the refugee from Belsen Concentration Camp rather than its commander. The move echoes the reversal-of-identity plot in “Hate!,” “Blood Brothers,” and “Perimeter!” by fostering a more sympathetic reader identification before the surprise reveal. Once Reissman’s role has been clarified, however, the ambivalence with which he describes his introduction to Nazi propaganda becomes more complicated: “Remember the sickening feeling you had . . . The revulsion and nausea you felt as you trudged home? . . . There were others like you, Carl . . . Others who were sick and revolted and nauseated at the screaming proposals of this little man. But they couldn’t stop the tide, could they, Carl?”68 With such foreboding questions directed not at the Jewish people but at the man whose job it was to carry out the threat, the story underscores the complex social and moral negotiations of the masses and the sway of a heinous message hidden behind the rhetoric of purity, safety, and tradition. Feldstein’s words call attention to the progression of Hitler’s influence, “first before small groups, . . . then before crowds, . . . and finally before multitudes.”69 Krigstein couples these sentiments

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Figure 17. “Master Race” from Impact #1 (1955)

with distilled images of the angry crowds of citizens and soldiers, but he also places between them a lone, narrow panel that singles out Reissman staggering and clutching his stomach (figure 17). As the story continues, the narrative captions use the now-familiar metaphor of a tidal wave to signify Hitler’s influence—hate that flows, sweeps, and pulls against the will of a single individual. Here Spiegelman usefully notes the provocative juxtaposition between the discourse of wildness and the “coldly efficient and orderly” aesthetic that Krigstein adopts to communicate the regimented power of the Nazi regime, right down to the setting’s architectural structures.70 As an integral part of that regime, Reissman continues to be held responsible, with the narrator asking at one point, “What happened to you, Carl? When were you caught up in this tide?”71 And so if, as Helen Lewis maintains, “shame is the vicarious experience of the other’s negative evaluation,”72 then there is little doubt that shame is what hounds the protagonist from the moment he hears the “scream of a little man with wild eyes and black hair and a small black moustache” ten years earlier and refuses to heed the “revulsion” that Hitler’s hateful words first aroused in him.73 Indeed, the crushing guilt that manifests itself through Reissman’s behavior is not illustrated with Wallace Wood’s sentimental “sob!” and slumped shoulders, although the character does emit a desperate “choke!” when subject to his pursuer’s gaze. Instead, it manifests itself through the memories he revisits as flashback scenes that intensify the shame experience. The reflections detailed in Feldstein’s captions are made all the more

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urgent by the self-incriminating questions that continue to cast doubt on Reissman’s decisions ten years earlier. In one particularly unnerving panel that brings to mind Joey’s accusation from “In Gratitude . . . ,” Reissman recalls the refugee’s warning at the war’s end: “Someday, I’ll get you, Reissman!” Spiegelman observes that “the Man’s vengeful stare is directed squarely, not only at Reissman, but as the reader as well. The reader is no longer a detached observer as he has been throughout the flashback; Reissman’s guilt is now his guilt.”74 The implications of the curse go far beyond a single wrongdoer to address a society made up of individuals, each wrestling with his or her own conscience. Jukovsky, in his analysis, repeatedly mentions how the comic emphasizes the actions of ordinary citizens. Not only the nameless people holding their noses against the horrifying smell of the ovens but also the “drab, ordinary-looking” Reissman run counter to popular assumptions about the Third Reich as being run by archvillians: “Nazis did not necessarily resemble Count Dracula or Dr. Sivana. They looked more like Reissman, the German man-in-the-street.”75 What ultimately connects “Master Race” to EC’s message stories is the way that it indicts the silence and fear of the ordinary person— the perfect stranger—without ever losing sight of the state-sanctioned actions of a mob that once stretched to multitudes. Reissman’s shocking death at the end stands apart from the snap-ending of “Blood Brothers” in that Krigstein measures the pacing of the final page so that readers may savor the fantasy of the commandant’s fatal stumble over the course of an eleven-panel sequence. There is a special irony here for early 1950s readers in the aftermath of World War II and the Nuremberg Trials when, according to Kathrin Bower, “expectations that the law would or could mete out appropriate punishment to the perpetrators of the Holocaust were greatly diminished.”76 In turn, Feldstein and Krigstein do not portray Reissman’s pursuer as finding any relief or comfort in their story’s gruesome resolution. The gaunt figure of the concentration-camp survivor continues to remind the reader of all that has been lost when, in the final panel, he turns his back and fades farther into the darkness. “Master Race” bears witness to the moments in which the self-righteous pleas for retribution are not enough. In EC’s social-protest comics, shame chastens society from the

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inside out; the writers and artists used the emotional burdens of affect to accomplish what the law would not. Yet the shame experiences as represented in these shock comics further reveal the difficulty of maintaining the presumption of fairness at the barbed, bloody heart of the EC way. Characters such as Sheriff Judson belong in jail for sexual assault. Sid owes Henry’s son restitution for making him an orphan. The men, women, and children whom Carl Reissman persecuted deserved to live. But perhaps this kind of justice is the stuff of science fiction, rather than a Shock SuspenStory. During a time when humanity’s faith in itself was so badly shaken, from the Cold War’s razor-edged suspicions to the choke hold of Jim Crow, who would want to buy an EC comic that fantasizes about hope?

CH A P T E R F O U R

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ec’s invisible Man and the Jim crow future of “Judgment Day!” So you see little Negro Batmen flying around Harlem just as you see little white Batmen flying around Sutton Place. It is in the blood. But while the white child who is taken with these fantasies has many opportunities for working them into real life situations, too often the Negro child is unable to do so. This leads the Negro child who identifies with the heroes and outlaws of fantasy to feel frustrated and to feel that society has designated him the outlaw, for he is treated as one. Thus his sense of being outside the law is not simply a matter of fantasy, it is a reality based on the incontrovertible fact of race. —Ralph Ellison Look at the head I just did. That’s a black guy. —Joe Orlando

Explanations vary as to exactly why the Comics Code Authority (CCA) denied Entertaining Comics permission to republish the story “Judgment Day!” in a 1956 issue of Incredible Science Fiction. The lone image of a black astronaut in the story’s final panel clearly concerned Charles F. Murphy, the New York magistrate hired by the Comics Magazine Association of America to ensure that all the comic books carrying the organization’s seal of approval adhered to strict guidelines of decency and good taste. Murphy had instituted the CCA’s self-regulatory Code for Editorial Matter in 1954 to enforce these guidelines in the aftermath of the US Senate’s investigation into the relationship between comics and juvenile delinquency that took place that same year.1 Included among the Comics Code’s provisions against the depiction

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of gore, kidnapping, and the size of the words crime and horror on the cover was a clause declaring that “ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.”2 The statute was developed to deter the disparaging, stereotypical representations of minorities. Comic art had long relied on crude caricatures of black people and other marginalized groups, from the slapstick humor of late-nineteenth-century Irish Catholic immigrants to World War II–era Japanese villains. It was for this reason that the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, in his well-known critique of the comic-book industry during the 1940s and 1950s, often singled out imperial “jungle” comics for their stock depiction of savage black primitives preying on innocent whites. According to Gabriel Mendes, “Wertham was suggesting that crime comic books were manuals for the promotion of stereotypes that engendered low self-esteem among black children, as well as antiblack sentiment and action among whites.”3 Without stricter regulation, Wertham argued, these comics would continue to foster “race hatred” among young American readers.4 But Murphy’s rationale to EC was much more ambiguous: “No. You can’t have a Negro.” According to David Hajdu’s interview with editor Al Feldstein, Murphy reviewed all of EC’s stories himself. For “Judgment Day!,” Feldstein describes watching the Code administrator read each page “impassively” before he paused at the last panel and offered his verdict. This is the exchange that followed: I said, “Why not?” He said, “You can’t have a Negro.” I said, “Where in the Code does it say that I can’t depict a Negro?” He said, “I say you can’t have a Negro.” I said, “That’s the point of the whole story.”5 Without CCA approval, wholesale distributors across the country would be reluctant to carry the comic book, ensuring that the issue featuring “Judgment Day!” would never reach the hands of readers. As Feldstein explained it in 1955, “they wanted a white man.”6 EC’s publisher, Bill Gaines, responded by threatening a lawsuit and vowing to hold a press conference that would publicly embarrass the Comics Code Authority and its decision. This led Murphy to reconsider

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but only on the condition that illustrator Joe Orlando remove the perspiration from the black character’s face. “We had to take the perspiration off his forehead,” Gaines stated. “Swear to God. That’s what the code said. No sweat on this man’s face.”7 Whereas initially it was the character’s blackness that rendered the comic unacceptable, Murphy’s pointed request shifted the issue to the last panel’s meaning—to the significance, that is, of the visual indices on the surface of the character’s black skin.8 Gaines angrily refused to comply, and by some accounts, the publisher’s outrage “got [the story] through” the Code review. Other sources indicate that the story was never really approved at all.9 Nevertheless, the CCA’s coveted seal was affixed to Incredible Science Fiction #33, with “Judgment Day!” appearing as the last story, unchanged. Even paraphrased, the suggestiveness of Murphy’s proprietary remarks to Feldstein—“You can’t have a Negro”—is almost too rich to ignore (would that we had the aid of EC’s Leroy lettering to know where to place the stress on that line).10 EC’s principled stance against censorship in the wake of this incident has been well documented by Hajdu and Nyberg, who also consider the creative and economic fallout of the Comics Code in shuttering one of America’s most successful independent comic-book publishers at the height of its popularity. By 1991, even Gaines seemed to have tired of rehashing the infamous rejection of EC’s fictional black astronaut. When asked to offer his take on the CCA’s objection, the publisher kindly replied, “I have no idea what their objection was. I think they were just a bunch of fucking idiots, that’s what their objection was.”11 Murphy’s decision aside, this chapter focuses squarely on the intricacies of the world that “Judgment Day!” builds and takes up Feldstein’s challenge to better understand “the point of the whole story,” specifically the way that the comic uses the speculative to denounce Jim Crow. To convey such a powerful visual and verbal antiracist message, the comic complicates questions about social identity, technology, and the idealization of progress by departing from the social realism of Shock SuspenStories. The narrative bears the familiar conventions of the EC way, while taking part in the strategies adopted by other literary and cultural productions of the early 1950s, particularly the works of Ray Bradbury and, less directly, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It also relies on subtle tropes of anthropological discovery that

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recall science fiction’s engagement with a kind of colonial discourse that risks undermining the story’s progressive aims. Nevertheless, as readers inside and outside EC’s traditional fan communities suggest, the comic offers a remarkable glimpse into the fear, anxiety, and hope of a country wrestling with the enormity of its own social transformation. “Judgment Day!” captured the attention of EC readers long before the implementation of the Comics Code, when it was first published in Weird Fantasy #18 in 1953. The futuristic tale follows Tarlton, a helmeted astronaut from Earth, as he inspects the industrial and governmental institutions of Cybrinia, the “Planet of Mechanical Life.”12 As he is ushered into the robot-assembly plants and surrounding neighborhoods, he learns that the androids with the orange-metal sheathings get preferential treatment and have implemented a system of discriminatory practices against the androids with blue sheathings— a system that bears a strong resemblance to the racial segregation of midcentury America. The blue robots are confined to a “seedy section” of the city; they also use segregated charging stations and sit at the back of the bus.13 “Their choices of endeavor are limited,” Tarlton points out to his orange robot guide, despite the fact that all the robots are made of the same component units and each is constructed from Earth’s “original design.”14 Disappointed by the flawed logic of Cybrinia’s social hierarchy, Tarlton determines that the planet is not yet ready to join the Great Galactic Republic. He goes on to reveal that Earth, too, had suffered from similar problems in the past, “but when mankind on Earth learned to live together, real progress first began.”15 Readers see Tarlton’s face for the first time when he returns to his rocket: “And inside the ship, the man removed his space helmet and shook his head, and the instrument lights made the beads of perspiration on his dark skin twinkle like distant stars . . . the end.”16 For six of the story’s seven pages, we do not know that the protagonist of “Judgment Day!” is black, nor do we fully grasp what blackness is meant to signify in this imagined future. What we do understand, up until this point, is that Tarlton is a man of unquestioned power. He has the expertise and physical fitness to travel through space and has been entrusted with the responsibility to evaluate the Cybrinians. For the blue and orange robots that herald his arrival and await his assessment, he also holds an honored place as “a representative of [their]

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original creators.”17 As the narrative invites EC’s predominantly white readership to match these features of respectability to the face beneath the helmet, one thing becomes clear: the color of Tarlton’s skin and “the beads of perspiration” are not the sole reason why this comic ranks among EC’s most dangerous undertakings. At issue here is his authority, the tremendous influence and clarity of his vision as ambassador of “the wonders and greatness of Earth.”18 Once Tarlton’s racial identity is revealed, the full weight of the story’s judgment falls on the shoulders of readers—those of us who, like the CCA administrator, may be unable to “see” a black person in the narrative frame. An unsettling realization may even linger after our own disoriented pause at the last panel. What kind of face were we expecting? Have our assumptions about humanity’s many colored “sheathings” disqualified us from being part of Tarlton’s noble vision of the future too? “The Comics Are Not Too Far Behind the Pulps in Well-Plotted Stories, Believe It or Not!” Ironically, the series in which “Judgment Day!” appeared was among the least profitable of EC’s New Trend line. The science-fiction titles, which also included Weird Science and the consolidated Weird ScienceFantasy, trailed behind the horror and suspense comics in popularity. Still, Gaines was an avid reader of the science-fiction pulp magazines— such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Weird Tales—that began circulating after World War I and continued through the 1940s and 1950s. He often remarked how much he and Feldstein enjoyed plotting stories about aliens and the unknown, noting at one point, “We loved it so much, we kept publishing it even at a loss.”19 Gaines also boasted of his company’s relationship with widely read science-fiction writers such as Otto Binder and Ray Bradbury, whose works had long been a staple of American popular fiction by the time EC entered the glutted market. Bradbury permitted EC to adapt several of his short stories, including “There Will Come Soft Rains” (Weird Fantasy #17), “The Million Year Picnic” (Weird Fantasy #21), and “The Silent Towns” (Weird Fantasy #22), that had been collected, alongside others, in his 1950 book The Martian Chronicles. Along with the pulps that capitalized on Atomic Age anxiety and a renewed interest in space travel, the decade saw the release of films such as The Day the Earth

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Stood Still (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953), and The War of the Worlds (1954). As a testament to the public’s growing fascination with outer space, reports of UFO sightings from US citizens reached a decade peak of over fifteen hundred in 1952, the year before “Judgment Day!” was originally published.20 EC strived to incorporate kernels of hard science in the tradition of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, but as the series titles indicate, the plots Gaines and Feldstein developed tended to foreground the “weird.” This particular subgenre favors the bizarre, the strange, and the cosmic, often for macabre affect. The World War II–era pulp Startling Stories offers a fitting parallel to EC’s approach, given the way the magazine advanced a trend in which science-fiction writers borrowed freely from weird fiction and other genres, such as the adventure and hero pulps, to develop more entertaining and innovative stories. “It was here that science fiction began to stray into science fantasy,” the historian Mike Ashley says of Startling Stories, “into the realms of what Hugo Gernsback always regarded as ‘fairy tales’ and not true science fiction.”21 Likewise, another late-1930s pulp, Unknown, incorporated more verisimilitude in its stories and “treated fantasy as an everyday occurrence.” Many of these hybrid-genre stories also featured a sense of levity that contrasted with the weird’s darker moods and “[led] to a clever and satisfying jolt from reality which made the reader view the world afresh.”22 This infusion of the weird into science fiction and fantasy resulted in EC plots about aliens disguised as American industrialists, about the dangers of technology gone awry, and about power-hungry scientists manipulating the natural world for personal gain. Otto Binder, in a 1952 letter to Sam Moskowitz, conceded that the stories he had been writing for comics were “simplified and corny.” Still, he recommended that the science-fiction editor “pick up a copy of weird fantasy or weird science comics sometime and read them. . . . The comics are not too far behind the pulps in well-plotted stories, believe it or not!”⁠23 In EC, the hubris of humanity clashes with the temptations of forbidden knowledge in new temporal and spatial dimensions. A scientist who attempts to reverse the aging process so that he can marry a younger woman (“Second Childhood” from Weird Fantasy #4) is helpless to stop the experimental treatment from turning him into an infant. In other instances, when Earth reaches out amicably, the

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creatures of the universe respond with their own brand of recalcitrance. A prime example comes from “He Walked among Us” from Weird Science #13. In this story, an explorer from the earthly Galactic Exploration Authority travels to a distant planet, where his advanced technology helps to feed and heal the impoverished humanoid aliens. The explorer is later killed by alien leaders who regard his “miracles” of science as blasphemy, and in the centuries that follow, his deeds become the basis for a new religion. Not surprisingly, however, the world of tomorrow in the sciencefiction pulps tended to be populated by white people who lived in societies where cultural differences among human beings were considered irrelevant. The science-fiction scholar Isiah Lavender explains, “For most of its history, sf has considered itself a ‘colorblind’ genre, either blithely portraying a future free from racial struggle (not seeming to notice that this harmony is accomplished by eliminating nonwhite people) or else projecting racial anxieties onto the body of the alien without seeming to notice that the humanity united against this external threat is suspiciously monochrome.”24 Among white science-fiction writers publishing after World War II, EC favorite Ray Bradbury stood apart in this respect by explicitly representing antiblack racism and segregation in three stories published between 1945 and 1951. Two of Bradbury’s stories take place against the backdrop of the exploration of Mars. “Way in the Middle of the Air” (The Martian Chronicles, 1950) depicts a mass exodus of African Americans from a small southern town and focuses on the moments when they leave behind their possessions to board their rocket. “The Other Foot” (The Illustrated Man, 1951) picks up after the black people have settled on Mars twenty years later, when a third world war’s atom bombs have sent Earth’s remaining white population looking for refuge in space. A group of young black “Martian” children and their mother, Hattie Johnson, regard the arrival of a white explorer as a curiosity in “The Other Foot,” but their father, Willie, greets the prospect of white refugees with fear and bitterness. He leads the effort for every black man to gather his guns, to post segregated signs that assign whites to the rear of the streetcars, and to support laws against intermarriage in order to punish their former oppressors.25 Yet when the white man steps out of the ship, he is weary and contrite, saying, “We destroyed

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everything and ruined everything, like the fools that we were, and the fools that we are.” He speaks on behalf of the people now struggling to survive on Earth, declaring, “Before God we admit our stupidity and our evilness.”26 When the white man asks for help and offers to prove his worth, Willie voices his own longing for a fresh start. Central to these stories by Bradbury is the complete breakdown and destruction of American society, indeed all civilization on Earth, as evidence of humanity’s folly and as foundation for its redemption. Only by wiping the slate clean through cataclysmic outer-space “separation, not segregation,”27 can the conditions be met for social, psychological, and material equality. Significantly, the transformation in “The Other Foot” does not necessitate the complete disavowal of the past, nor do the black characters ignore their shared memories of racial trauma. Bradbury’s story takes the time to index towns, industries, and institutions that no longer exist after the nuclear blast. Willie recalls with ease the acts of racial violence that his family experienced on Earth, but his anger wanes with each new assurance of the power structure’s collapse: the racists are dead; even the tree where his father was lynched has burned to the ground. This destruction, coupled with the white astronaut’s repentance, opens up an unprecedented opportunity. “The time for being fools is over. We got to be something else except fools,” Willie concludes. “Now the white man’s as lonely as we’ve always been. He’s got no home now, just like we didn’t have one for so long. Now everything’s even. We can start all over again, on the same level.”28 This yearning for home, belonging, and fairness is not uncharacteristic of the utopian landscapes of science fiction, but the incorporation of contemporary social issues adds a new element. Lavender points out that “Bradbury is one of the very few authors in sf who dared to consider the effects and consequences of race in America at a time when racism was largely sanctioned by the culture.”29 Given Bradbury’s approach to science fiction and his interest in using it to provoke a reconsideration of racial norms, post–World War II containment culture, and the destructive use of nuclear science, it is not surprising to learn how deeply Feldstein admired his work. The EC editor told one interviewer, “I was very impressed with Ray Bradbury. I read Dark Carnival and The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, and whatever else I could get a hold of Bradbury’s at the

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time. I was very impressed with his writing style and I tried to emulate it, I think, in the comic style.”30 Despite these progressive aspirations, the “structured absence”⁠31 of people of color remained the norm in EC’s science-fiction comics. Figures of authority and knowledge, from lifelong inventors and adventurers to the merely curious, typically affirmed whiteness as standard in this genre. Once readers closed a copy of Shock SuspenStories or Two-Fisted Tales and picked up a Weird Science mag, where virtually all human characters were white, they were not expecting to find the kind of stories that addressed racial violence, housing discrimination, and other social problems of the day.⁠32 And yet predating the Shock SuspenStories preachies is an often-overlooked story called “The Slave Ship,” which marks EC’s earliest experiment with race and social-protest comics through science fiction. “Suppose These Creatures Were Bringing Us Back to Their Planet as Slaves” “The Slave Ship” was scripted by Feldstein and illustrated by George Roussos for the July–August 1951 issue of Weird Fantasy #8. The story takes place in 1839, over three decades after the United States abolished the importation of enslaved Africans (but not the domestic slave trade or the practice of chattel slavery in the United States). With the transatlantic trade outlawed, Captain Jorkin, the protagonist, knows that he is committing a crime as he and his crew prepare to shove dozens of “gleaming black natives” from the African coast below deck, remarking, “They’ll bring a pretty penny in the States!” (figure 18).33 The Africans protest their treatment by singing and chanting in a language that none of the crew understands—“toom bah toom bah . . . vahna tambah!”—until Jorkin whips them into silence.34 Once the ship gets close to the United States, a patrolling Coast Guard vessel spurs the central conflict. The captain, finding that his gambit has failed, orders his first mate to tie the human cargo to an anchor and dump them overboard. Roussos depicts clusters of enslaved men and women with dark-purple skin and dour expressions; all are virtually naked except for the chains connected to their necks. A single panel captures the “screaming line” of their black bodies as they tumble to their deaths in the ocean.35 Up until this point, “The Slave Ship” bears the familiar tropes of

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Figure 18. “Slave Ship” from Weird Fantasy #8 (1951)

the ruthless captain who sees the preservation of human life as a mere obstacle to his quest for profit and power on the high seas.36⁠ The night after Captain Jorkin has jettisoned the slaves, however, Feldstein introduces an alien-invasion element to argue against human bondage.

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When the ship is accosted by a spacecraft piloted by aliens with six eyes, long-haired bodies, and slimy tentacles for hands, it is the white men who are captured and chained together this time, unable to communicate with their captors. The crew is slow to make the connection, which allows Feldstein’s narrator to elaborate on the tragic similarities between the abductions (figure 19). The high-tech instruments that the aliens use to discipline the sailors feel “like a lash!” Their human prayers to the Christian God are met with violence, which leads a member of the crew to remark about one of the aliens, “It’s angry! It wants us to shut up!”37 Eventually a second space vessel approaches; the aliens respond to this by opening the ship’s air lock. The retributive justice so common to the EC tradition makes its appearance. Jorkin stutters, “Suppose . . . suppose these creatures were bringing us back to their planet as slaves . . . And suppose that craft our there is . . . like our coast-guard!” In the final panels, the screaming crew is tossed out of the spaceship, and the line of their bodies duplicates the chained slaves. This time it is Jorkin and his men who disintegrate with small bursts in the vacuum of outer space.38 The figurative merging of the transatlantic slave ship and the interplanetary spaceship overlays the alien encounter with the narrative reversal that EC frequently relied on to prompt a moral crisis in white Americans. In the preachies, racist white men are shaken by the unexpected discovery of Jewish parentage (“Hate!”) or a life-saving transfusion of blood from an African American man (“Blood Brothers”).

Figure 19. “Slave Ship” from Weird Fantasy #8 (1951)

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“The Slave Ship” turns white enslavers into human chattel. Further, this science-fiction turn invites comparisons to the reversal contained in H. G. Wells’s late-nineteenth-century invasion novel, The War of the Worlds. As the science-fiction scholar John Reider notes, “Wells switches the position of his white Western narrator from its accustomed dominant, colonizing one to that of the dominated indigenous inhabitant of the colonized land.”39 However, whereas Wells compared his fictional Martian invasion to Europe’s treatment of the aboriginal Tasmanians of Australia, the Weird Fantasy story singles out the cruelty of a ship captain whose abductions of African people are driven by his personal greed. Still, “The Slave Ship” is one of the few EC comics to grapple explicitly with the realities of slavery through speculative fiction during a time when the mainstream comics that dealt with race focused on heroic black figures, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.40 The opening splash panel of the sleek metal rocket soaring alongside the sails of the nineteenth-century schooner imagines a clash of temporal moments that would not have been out of place among EC’s sciencefiction offerings. But the comic’s recognition of the forgotten millions of enslaved blacks who did not survive the transatlantic Middle Passage makes the story unique. By pairing this historical atrocity with the actions of a technologically advanced alien society, EC reckons with the brutal legacy of white hegemony through the otherworldly vengeance of the weird. Two years later, Feldstein called on a similar kind of juxtaposition to bring an antiracist message closer to home. “We the Machines inside the Machine” Joe Orlando, the artist for “Judgment Day!,” contributed to nearly every EC New Trend series, but his penciling and inking talents were best showcased in the science-fiction titles. After the Italian immigrant and US Army veteran became a regular staff artist at EC in 1951, there was not an issue of Weird Science or Weird Fantasy published without one of his illustrated stories. His line work was known for its precision and craftsmanship; the expressiveness of his characters and their movements was typically set against elaborate landscapes, from the intricate machinery of a space lab to the wild and dense vegetation of a distant planet. His art was often favorably compared to Wallace Wood’s, and the two collaborated early in Orlando’s comics career at

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Avon Comics, Fox, and Youthful Magazines.41 “Judgment Day!,” however, marked a turning point in his maturity as an EC artist with his own distinctive style. Reflecting on his experience illustrating the story’s main character, Orlando describes his friendly competition with Wood: “I remember I really felt elated because I’d just done ‘Judgment Day’ and I rendered a black man at the end of the story, a really great head. When Wally saw that he called me up because he had just done a story with a black person. I said his was just a white person with dark color. ‘Look at the head I just did. That’s a black guy.’ And Wally had to admit that and he cursed me out.”42 Orlando’s boastful observation about Tarlton’s head is a useful starting place for thinking about the tactical use of realism and fantasy in portraying the black man’s character in the story. Orlando’s approach departs significantly from Wood’s illustrations of black people in EC’s most well-known social-protest comics. As I discuss in chapters 2 and 3, “In Gratitude . . .” and “Blood Brothers” grapple with the concept of blackness in the white imagination—a point Wood often emphasizes through racially indeterminate images of African Americans who are “mistaken” for white. There is something to Orlando’s point: the African American man falsely accused of murder in “The Guilty!” does appear very much like a “white person with dark color,” particularly when compared to the other characters. Whether intended or not, the visual choices of Wood’s comics align with Feldstein’s script to unmark the stigma of Otherness and counter more stereotypical representations of black people. Orlando’s illustration of Tarlton’s face, on the other hand, more accurately reflects the features of a man of African descent in the texture of his hair, the physical rendering of his lips and nose, his deeply set eyes, and his cheekbones. Daniel Yezbick remarks that “his facial features are quite handsome and thankfully, hardly a cartoon caricature of established African American icons. . . . He is, rather, an utterly innocuous Black man of the future, for whom the usual daily struggle of prejudice and preconceptions has been somewhat reversed.”43 Tarlton’s face is the focus of the last panel, positioned generously in the foreground against the ship’s machinery so that there is no mistaking him. Placing this image of a “real” black guy in a story about a futuristic robot planet is an important strategic choice. Seeing Tarlton clearly

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Figure 20. “Judgment Day!” from Weird Fantasy #18 (1953)

as a man of color aids in creating the shock of the story’s twist ending, but it also signals a temporal dislocation that is reminiscent of the visual pairing of the schooner and the alien rocket in “The Slave Ship.” If Feldstein can be said to use the robots in “Judgment Day!” to similarly analogize a sociotechnological confrontation between the mistakes of the past and the retribution of the future, then Tarlton

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signifies another possibility: an alternative strain of transmission in which history does not repeat itself. Much like the children of Bradbury’s black Martians, Tarlton appears to be generations removed from the realities of racial oppression, though close enough to be aware of its legacy. In short, he sees a version of himself in the orange and the blue androids; he recognizes the dangerous hegemony at work in their society. Orlando’s emphasis on an aesthetics of accuracy in illustrating Tarlton helps to make this point, and ironically enough, so do the figurative gestures of Feldstein’s script that compare the perspiration of the character’s black flesh to the twinkle of distant stars. This twinkling—its unique combination of labor and light—invites us to pay closer attention to the first six pages of the story, in which Tarlton is actually more machine than man. Indeed, the protagonist of “Judgment Day!” inhabits more than one bodily space in the narrative. When the comic first introduces Tarlton, he is housed in an elaborate red suit made up of metal instruments, gears, tubes, and pockets so that no part of his skin is visible (figure 20). He wears a utility belt around his waist, and deceptively white gloves cover his hands. His head is likewise encased in two layers of metal and glass. This mechanized attire allows him to breathe, and it protects his body; while in the process, it ensures that he can listen, be heard, and view others without being fully seen himself. His suit is also significant because at no point in the comic do the Cybrinian robots see Tarlton without it. In fact, readers are not given any indication that the robots have ever seen Tarlton’s human form (though they clearly know that he is from Earth, where humans reside). The suit that functions as a technological enhancement for the astronaut therefore doubles as an unwitting means of disguise. Yezbick also notes that as Tarlton’s “second skin,” his suit can “mask social codes and individual assumptions associated with his actual organic epidermis.”44 Such concealment allows us to draw conclusions from the fact that the exterior helmet of Tarlton’s visor is orange and the interior casing is blue, given how much value the robots place on the two colors. Through image and text, the astronaut straddles a number of material and ideological structures, both as a (post)human whose organic systems are enhanced by machines and also as a person whose voice and intellect are disengaged from the physicality of his “really great head.”

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We can better understand this sequential play with race, hybrid identity, and the machines of visibility by looking at “Judgment Day!” in conversation with Ralph Ellison’s existential meditation on the African American condition in his 1952 novel Invisible Man. The novel’s emphasis on post–World War II race relations offers additional insight into aspects of Tarlton’s character that the Weird Fantasy comic renders indirectly—or, rather, conceptually—through visual inferences and suggestive interactions. The unnamed African American protagonist in Ellison’s story spends his youth aspiring to be a race man, a model of black uplift and social responsibility in the vein of the former slave and celebrated Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington. Speaking in the first person, the Invisible Man confesses that in his early years, he believed that “humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress.”45 Amid his efforts to prove that black people are just as good as whites, he slowly begins to question whether his choices—tangled up with matters of tradition, conformity, and belonging—are truly his own. EC readers may have been more familiar with H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man than with Ellison’s, but the black, Oklahoma-born author was no stranger to comics. As Jean Christophe Cloutier’s research makes clear, Ellison’s allusions to comics in his published and unpublished writing suggest that he valued the form for the way it incorporated heroic archetypes and mythic structures into a complex vision of everyday life.46 He remained ambivalent, however, about the longterm impact of comic-book reading on the aspirations of young people. Cloutier’s analysis of Invisible Man suggests that Ellison believed that comics imagined modes of individuality and leadership that the United States made inaccessible to African Americans. Ellison reaffirmed these views in a 1966 essay on “Harlem’s America” in New Leader about the “Negro Batmen flying around Harlem,” quoted at the start of this chapter.47 The images of possibility and disillusionment that Ellison articulates in the New Leader essay through superhero comics play out in Invisible Man through the protagonist’s discovery of his own “outlaw” status in increasingly surreal ways. The novel charts the overlapping cycles of his growing self-awareness by using what the political theorist Danielle Allen describes as “ritualistic moments of social interaction” to stage the absurdities of American racial performance.48 In one

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early example, the Invisible Man’s academic success is rewarded at a social gathering of the town’s most prominent white leaders with a scholarship to an all-black state college. Before he can receive the gift, he is blindfolded and forced into a boxing ring with other young black men to entertain the gathering in a battle royal. Ellison’s protagonist learns how to maneuver within these systems of power and hegemonic spectacle once he discovers his “invisibility,” or the idea that as a black person in America, he exists only as a series of projected fears and desires in the minds of others: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”49 Taking his cues from African American folk tricksters, the Invisible Man transforms his anguish into a plan of action, a strategy that enables him to see from behind society’s blindfolds and use the masks of his race, class, gender, and sexual identity for subversive means. With an awareness of his invisibility comes the realization of just how much his ambitions have been endangered by people—white and black—who willfully choose blindness in order to maintain the status quo. Ellison’s protagonist matures with each encounter and acquires a heightened sense of critical perception that has him pushing against the boundaries of law and respectability (much like Br’er Rabbit or Batman). He reflects, “I learned in time though that it is possible to carry on a fight against them without their realizing it.”50 The small victories that his trickster’s acuity earns him along the way serve as proof that “it is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.”51 The Invisible Man’s short-lived job in a paint factory sparks another ritualistic moment in the narrative that alerts him to the advantages of being unseen. Liberty Paints specializes in producing a brand of pure “Optic White” paint that is used to cover important institutions, such as national monuments in Washington, DC.52 When the Invisible Man joins the dozens of employees who manufacture and ship the paint, he soon discovers that an elderly, uneducated black man named Lucius Brockway is the one who controls its quality. Brockway has been with the company since the beginning, after being hired by the founder

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and patriarch, “Old Man” Sparland. Now Brockway alone oversees the furnaces of oils and resins that form the paint’s base from his seat of power in the basement. He boasts, “Ain’t a continental thing that happens down here that ain’t as iffen I done put my black hands into it! Them machines just do the cooking, these here hands right here do the sweeting.”53 Brockway is constantly on guard against the new young engineers who think they can do a better job, and he becomes so protective of his status that he eventually accuses Ellison’s protagonist of sabotaging the machinery. Before an explosion sends the Invisible Man to the hospital, Brockway offers him a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the internal workings of the factory, declaring, “They got all this machinery, but that ain’t everything; we the machines inside the machine.”54 The scene in Liberty Paints abounds with images that invoke relational signs of mastery and domination, where the addition of a black presence makes whiteness stronger and brighter. As Brockway’s speech shifts from the exertions of his hands to describe the factory’s operations on a larger scale, the Old Man’s machines act as a figurative emblem of the American experiment. Lavender reminds us that “mechanical metaphors”⁠55 such as the kind that Brockway uses have long enabled creative writers and artists to highlight how race has functioned historically “as a labor-based technology, whereby black human beings, coded as natural machines, were used to generate wealth.”56 Ultimately, the encounter with Brockway makes the Invisible Man newly aware of the unacknowledged labor of black hands everywhere—the we on which the “good strong base” of white supremacy stands. In the process, he also realizes that there are limits to the control that “they” have. The more Ellison’s protagonist stumbles against “the incontrovertible fact of race,” the more he learns to embrace his status as an outlaw on the inside, one who can use his position to dismantle the machine from within. “Do You Know Who I Am?” The optical illusions of race that Ellison explores in his novel would be right at home in the EC preachies, where Gaines, Feldstein, and EC’s artists frequently used the comics medium to emphasize the unreliability of visual perception, particularly in stories that interrogate the stigmatizing shame of blackness. It is not difficult to project the Invis-

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ible Man’s “bodiless head” or his “disembodied voice” onto Orlando’s futuristic representation of the black protagonist in “Judgment Day!” Much more challenging, however, is the question of self-awareness: to what extent do the “mirrors of hard, distorting glass” that mark the condition of Ellison’s protagonist also characterize Tarlton’s experience? Whether the comic book’s black astronaut suffers the crisis of invisibility within the social structures of the Great Galactic Republic is not readily apparent. There is a difference between being physically unseen—as when Tarlton’s face is concealed beneath his helmet—and being misperceived by what Ellison refers to as society’s “inner eye.” The comic further gives the impression that Tarlton lacks the wily strain of vigilantism that animates the Invisible Man in his underground fight against the status quo. In fact, for all intents and purposes, Tarlton is the status quo. He interacts with the robots as the science-fiction story’s avatar of hegemonic world building. “Do you know who I am?” he asks an orange Cybrinian upon arrival. With a bow, the robot dutifully replies, “You are Tarlton .  .  . from Earth! You are a representative of our original creators! If you find that we are ready, all of the wonders and greatness of Earth will be ours.”57 When Tarlton goes on to invoke the hope that led humans of “thousands of years ago” to seed the distant planet, it is with a singular goal: that these android descendants would use their knowledge of Earth’s society to reproduce according to an external standard of worthiness and accomplishment. Tarlton is genuinely eager to see Cybrinia’s progress in this regard, and his inquiries are made to appear all the more sincere and altruistic when coupled with his personable counsel. More than simply an inspector who is just doing his job, he is a statesman of the Great Galactic Republic. The extent to which Tarlton may also function as a renegade within the system is a question that prompts us to take a closer look at his decision-making power. While EC’s black protagonist may not seem to be the kind of change agent that the Invisible Man aspires to become, the comic invests deeply in the authority of Tarlton’s “outlaw” experience, often through small gestures that are nonetheless essential to the cunning trick that “Judgment Day!” plays on its readers. The comic opens with vignettes of anthropological discovery not unlike other EC tales about scientists who attempt to engineer artificial

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Figure 21. “Judgment Day!” from Weird Fantasy #18 (1953)

life.58 Shortly after Tarlton arrives on Cybrinia, an orange robot escorts him on a tour of Capitol City that begins with a look at their manufacturing industry and political organization (figure 21). He is taken for a ride on a sleek mobile car called the “N-R-E Phord,” and they drive through the crowds of cheering orange robots past the city’s House of Delegates. Tarlton is pleased to note that the robots have achieved “twentieth-century level” progress and nods approvingly at their decision to govern under democratic rule.59 Though his face is concealed, his voice registers a high degree of agency as he catalogs what he sees, asks probing questions, and offers his opinion. The planet’s gleaming metal city acts as a kind of petri dish for Earth’s astounding experiment, and Tarlton is the lead scientist. At the same time, the model for Tarlton’s interaction with a synthetic future can also be found in imperial narratives, a staple of the sciencefiction genre. This imperial strategy, Reider explains, compartmentalizes geography and space into time in order to create “stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.”60 What may initially appear to be a technologically superior robot society in “Judgment Day!” is, in this light, a nascent civilization that requires substantial growth and development to reach the full potential of the Great Galactic Republic. In spite of the visual and verbal expressions of futurity—the discussions of internal units and alloys, the images of recharging stations—these robots are the most primitive of machines: mechanized primitives. In turn, Tarlton is positioned as the head of

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the colony’s rule. The narrative makes clear, after all, that he is a judge, not an ambassador. Orlando’s visual choices aid in this effort. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the features of the Cybrinian robots look like the ceremonial headpieces and jewelry of the East African Maasai, whose lands in Kenya and Tanzania were under British colonial rule at the time of the comic’s publication. The attire of these sub-Saharan African people incorporates colorful concentric designs that appear to be simplified into the metal neck rings and ridged heads of Orlando’s robots. The outer sheathing of the Cybrinian body has also been shaped to resemble the loincloth and exposed legs that recall caricatured images of nonwhites in the exoticized, warm climates of Africa, India, and South America. Likewise, Tarlton’s paternalistic attitudes and the deferential manner of his orange-robot translator (or native companion) are suggestive of popular jungle-comics tropes. Readers are encouraged, through the visual orientation that privileges Tarlton’s point of view, not only to identify with the voice hidden behind his reflective helmet but also to adopt the colonial gaze through which he measures the robots’ progress. Reider notes that this gaze “distributes knowledge and power to the subject who looks, while denying or minimizing access to power for its object, the one looked at.”61 The appearance of the half-human, half-mechanical bodies of the robotic Other invokes the incomplete evolutionary status of their society, while Tarlton’s superior intellect is reinforced by the fact that visually he is all head (and brain) atop a highly advanced prosthetic space suit. He views Earth’s greatness in terms of ownership, even as he offers to include Cybrinia within that vision: “The universe will be yours too.”62 As a result, what Feldstein described as the story’s “straight plea for racial tolerance” becomes even more complicated when the critique is enabled by the use of imperial tropes and primitive anthropological fantasies.63 Yet something unusual happens as Tarlton passes through Capitol City. Once he learns that a particular building is the robot-assembly plant, he says, “Stop here. I would like to see it.”64 It is this unscheduled stop that leads him to the parts department, where he first notices only orange robots being constructed. He takes special note of the design structures, the sheathing process, and the final step that places all robots in an “educator,” where “all knowledge available to [their]

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society” is downloaded into their mechanical brains. The Great Galactic Republic representative interrupts the tour with another question: “Where is the blue robot assembly plant?”65 He refuses his robot guide’s offer to return to the car, preferring to walk and, later, to take public transportation in order to see a different side of Cybrinia. Though his orange guide speaks matter-of-factly about the practice of segregating the inferior robots in Blue Town, Tarlton is portrayed as deliberating carefully over what he is being told. Even the presence of ellipses in his printed speech indicates a measure of contemplation as he asks for clarification. “You . . . differentiate between blue robots and orange robots?” he asks, and when the robot tells him to sit at the front on the bus rather than in the blue section, he says, “Oh! Yes! I see . . .”66 By having Tarlton take the initiative of redirecting the inspection, Feldstein and Orlando demonstrate the character’s unequivocal interest in how the construction of the robots’ identity impacts the opportunities available to them. Much like Ellison’s scenes at the battle royal and at Liberty Paints, the comic is pieced together by a series of “ritualistic moments of social interaction”67 that slowly expose the networks of power, access, and scarcity that have been constructed to regulate Cybrinian life. As a result, over the course of the narrative, Tarlton’s praise becomes less effusive. At first he sees that the original designs are still being used for the alloy skeleton of the robots and remarks, “Naturally!” as if the course being followed is the only acceptable one. But consider how this enthusiastic response has shifted to a more subjective standard of measurement by the time he is made aware of the “orange only” recharging station: “Similar to a restaurant for humans, I see . . .”68 A more foreboding tone emerges as it becomes clear to Tarlton that the planet of mechanical life has inherited something much more disturbing than designer cars from its twentieth-century ancestors. Once Tarlton reaches Blue Town, he has taken charge of the tour completely. The astronaut asks his orange guide to accompany him into the assembly plant where the so-called inferior blue robots are made. “Have you ever been in the blue plant?” he asks (figure 22). The robot admits to knowing very little about Blue Town. Tarlton replies, “Come in with me. I want you to. It might prove interesting.” Once inside the disenfranchised space, Tarlton continues to exert his authority by pointing out the details that the contrite orange-robot

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Figure 22. “Judgment Day!” from Weird Fantasy #18 (1953)

representative would rather ignore: “Notice the internal units, my friend. The same designs, the original designs. No improvement! No difference! Exactly like yours!”69 Later, when Tarlton points out that the robots are indistinguishable beneath their metal coverings, the comic also makes room for the blue robots to speak, as one asserts, “The sheathings make that difference to the orange robots, Tarlton! . . . It limits us to menial jobs . . . sends us to the rear of mobile-buses . . . places us in different recharging stations . . .”70 Though the Cybrinian androids had been left to themselves for centuries, which implies a degree of free will, their society has nevertheless inherited a deep legacy of prejudice that readers in 1953 would have found familiar. Just as important is the fact that Tarlton is no stranger to it either. Ultimately, then, “Judgment Day!” has much more in common with Invisible Man than symbolic reveries of sight and semblance. Both narratives emphasize the value of recognition as a requisite part of meaningful social change. “Responsibility rests upon recognition,” declares Ellison’s protagonist, “and recognition is a form of agreement.”71 Thanks to Tarlton’s unscheduled tour, the privileged class of Cybrinia cannot look away from the conditions of the oppressed or the absurdities of racial prejudice, even when, as the orange robot claims, these problems “existed long before I was made!”72 Upon Tarlton’s departure, he changes the planet’s mission to focus less on far-flung, external standards of a thousand years ago and more on the androids’ obligations to one another. When his guide asks, “Why Tarlton? Why aren’t we ready?” the astronaut replies, “Ask yourself that, my friend!

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Tell your fellow robots to ask themselves that question!” Tarlton charges those who are in power with the responsibility to see and to listen in a different way in order to achieve mutual understanding. To make the stakes of Cybrinia’s postracial experiment clear, Tarlton even shares a more personal connection: Robot: Is . . . Is there any hope, Tarlton? For us? Tarlton: Of course there is! Of course there’s hope for you, my friend. For a while, on Earth, it looked like there was no hope! But when mankind on Earth learned to live together, real progress first began. The universe was suddenly ours. Robot: . . . And when we learn to live together . . . Tarlton: The universe will be yours too! Good-bye, my friend!73 The story’s hopefulness is in striking contrast to the EC preachies that rely heavily on shame to condemn racist behavior. Instead of the orange robot slumping his shoulders with guilt and humiliation, his arm is extended high in farewell. Tarlton uses his own planet’s cautionary tale to convince the robots of what they can accomplish, while the removal of his helmet (and the reader’s reaction to it) provides the evidence of that struggle. Once Tarlton’s blackness has been revealed (figure 23), his measured deliberations and unscheduled stops during the tour take on new meaning. So too does the haste with which he leaves Cybrinia once he has delivered his judgment. The caption states that the robot “hurried” to keep up, and again as they retreat through Blue Town,

Figure 23. “Judgment Day!” from Weird Fantasy #18 (1953)

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“Tarlton moved fast. The robot clanked after him.”74 We are told that, safe inside the ship, the man “shook his head,” though few clues reveal whether this is simply a physical gesture or a move shot through with relief, disappointment, or pity. Trickster or no, Tarlton has used his authority over Cybrinia and his own relationship to a history of discrimination to spark a change from inside the machine. And it is finally, in the undeniable image of his face, that we can begin to understand, as Feldstein once argued to the Comics Code Authority’s administrator, “the whole point of the story.” An accompanying caption in the last panel describes the way the instrument lights within the ship transform the astronaut’s exertions—the perspiration on his human face—into “distant stars.” Against their illumination, his dark skin becomes an expression of space itself and the embodiment of human potential. “The Lure of Color and Fantasy with Educational Propaganda” Black characters appeared on the pages of EC throughout the New Trend line’s five-year run, but, as I discuss in chapter 2, these figures embody the silent victimization and shame of American racism: they are typically acted on and seldom speak for themselves. Feldstein’s script attempts to break dramatically from this tradition in “Judgment Day!” Tarlton is all voice. Nevertheless, it is also important to recognize the circumspect narrative strategies at work in Feldstein and Orlando’s attempt to wriggle free from the coded signifiers of the black body. Tarlton is portrayed as speaking with confidence and moral clarity only when his words are presumed to originate from a white man’s perspective in a technologically posthuman form. He remains completely silent after the reveal, when the less ambiguous racial identity of his human face is put on display. When subjected to the reader’s gaze, a muted Tarlton runs the risk of being disempowered by a host of denigrating assumptions about blackness as a “perfectly sutured image/text.”75 He is, in other words, more invisible as a man with black skin than he was beneath a suit of metal gears and glass. Consider the effortless self-assurance of Tarlton’s commands and the bounty of inclusiveness that the Great Galactic Republic offered when the helmeted astronaut vowed to the Cybrinians, “our glory will become yours.” What added nuances of meaning do readers hear once these

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sentiments are uttered from Orlando’s fully realized and unmistakable “black guy”? The unmasking of Tarlton is not for the Cybrinians, who never see his skin color and have presumably no tools to interpret it. Tarlton’s unmasking cleverly redirects the narrative to the reader, who is the sole witness to Tarlton’s disclosure of his racial signifiers and the sole person capable of interpreting them. The comic book’s tactical maneuvers thus serve as a useful measure of EC’s relationship with its readers and further demonstrate how the company leveraged progressive antiracist messages against audience expectation. Here again Ellison offers a critical point of comparison, given his own decision to use first-person limited narration in Invisible Man. As Lucas E. Morel explains, “It is no accident that as Invisible Man narrates his memoirs, he does not announce at the outset that he is black. The references to race come indirectly, dawning upon the reader as the narrator tells how others have reacted to his presence. By first engaging the minds of his readers, and not their physical eyes, Invisible Man (and, one infers, Ralph Ellison) attempts to make this connection to readers who might not otherwise listen to, or be persuaded by, an unemployed but library-bred and college-educated black youth.”76 To be sure, Ellison’s readers differed from EC’s younger audience, which was made up mostly (but not exclusively) of white male adolescents. Yet the two creative works share the dilemma of how to give their black male protagonist “a respectful hearing.” Both respond by turning the character’s marginalized status into a vehicle of self-revelation, whether surrounded by the twinkling lights of outer space or the phosphorescent bulbs of an underground basement outside Harlem. From this perspective, the final panel of “Judgment Day!” acts as a visual articulation of Invisible Man’s own parting confession to the reader: “What else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”77 Other EC stories enlist trusted white surrogates to facilitate a sympathetic response, such as the elderly white lawyers and doctors of “The Guilty!” and “Blood Brothers” or the white soldier-heroes of “In Gratitude  .  .  .” and “Perimeter!” In “Judgment Day!,” Feldstein and Orlando establish Tarlton’s authority by taking advantage of an easily recognizable character type in science fiction—the astronaut—as

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a figure whose technical knowledge and authority presupposes whiteness. To further engage the minds of readers, Feldstein’s script limits visual access to Tarlton in ways that were often reserved for out-ofsight narrators to heighten the surprise twist upon reveal.78 But EC fan-addicts took notice when Tarlton moved in and around the story as more than a plot device. Once Tarlton’s face was retroactively inserted by the reader into the earlier panels of the futuristic narrative, an even more personal and deeply incriminating judgment awaited white Americans who refused to speak up against segregation in their time. Readers who were surprised by the astronaut’s so-called mistaken racial identity might have been prompted to complain, much like the white mother from “In Gratitude . . .” who was stunned to learn that her son had befriended a black soldier during the Korean War: “You never mentioned it! It wasn’t fair!”79 The letters selected for the “Cosmic Correspondence” column of Weird Fantasy #20 suggest that fans felt more appreciative than angry, however. Alongside the one complaint that the company claimed to have received, editors printed letters of admiration from across the country that praised EC for the “guts” it took to print “Judgment Day!” A reader from New York City complimented EC for “turning a delicate problem into a shocking document of justice,” while one from San Francisco pointed out, “It shows how prejudice is just a bunch of baloney.”80 Highlighted off to the side, a request from a school principal for thirty-five copies for his students provided evidence of the story’s value in educating young people. And perhaps an even more significant testament to Feldstein’s efforts as a writer was a special note of congratulations from Ray Bradbury himself, who wrote, “I realize you have been battling, in the sea of comics, to try to do better things. You have certainly succeeded in judgment day, which should be required reading for every man, woman, and child in the United States. You’ve done a splendid thing here, and deserve the highest commendation.”81 Another well-known EC reader and fan critic, Larry Stark, expressed appreciation for the story’s introspective prompting. “The horribly accurate picture of the human race is drawn with bold, unmistakable strokes,” he wrote. “It is a yarn that first convinces you of its believability, and then begins to tell you the truth about yourself in just as believable terms.”82 Stark signals a key point here—that

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the truth telling of “Judgment Day!” is primarily intended for people who have been shielded from the realities that Tarlton must judge, even as they benefit from its privileges. As a result, many white readers applauded the comic for putting science-fiction tropes to good use by demonstrating the absurdity of Jim Crow. “Judgment Day!” may be the only EC science-fiction comic to feature a black protagonist; however, the themes that the Weird Fantasy story raises about race and discrimination continued to circulate through the science-fiction titles in a more metaphorical fashion. This was especially the case in the merged series Weird Science-Fantasy that published stories such as “The Teacher from Mars,” “Close Shave,” and the “Adam Link” robot series from 1954 to 1955. Otto Binder and Reed Crandall’s “Close Shave” is a passing narrative that depicts ape-like aliens whose oppression in the twenty-fifth century is represented as part of a larger continuum: “Bigots! Intolerant idiots! It’s the same old story! Witch hunts . . . anti-semitism . . . racial intolerance . . . pogroms . . . political intolerance . . . Earth has always fallen ill with these diseases! And now this . . .”83 In “The Teacher from Mars,” Feldstein adapted the 1941 story by Eando Binder (a pseudonym for Otto and Earl Binder) with art by Orlando.84 Not only does the plot condemn the xenophobic taunts and pranks of young, white, American students against their Martian-immigrant teacher, but the story includes a domesticservice robot named Oscar, whose blue sheathing and ridged head resembles the blue robots of Cybrinia (figure 24).85 Of course, black readers also picked up copies of Weird Fantasy, just as they did all of EC’s titles. What makes the reception of “Judgment

Figure 24. “The Teacher from Mars” from Weird Science-Fantasy #24 (1954)

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Day!” unique is that it became the focus of a February 7, 1953, editorial in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful African American–owned newspapers in the country. Featured prominently on the editorial page under the headline “Comics and Propaganda,” the newspaper’s commentary offered a detailed plot summary of the comic that included the social failings of Cybrinian society along with the “dramatic and thrilling climax” of Tarlton’s reveal.86 Worth mentioning too is the editors’ lead-in that describes comic books as having “greater mass appeal than most other types of literature and their influence, particularly upon young minds, is infinite.” Therefore, “when an unusual strip appears which cleverly combines the lure of color and fantasy with educational propaganda, it is worthy of special citation.”87 The praise of EC’s cleverness places the comic’s choices in conversation with anticomic proponents going as far back as Sterling North and Stanley J. Kunitz. What the Defender editorial board describes as the “lure of color and fantasy” to educate young black children directly counters the anxieties that Kunitz expressed about the overindulgent pleasures of a medium that through its lurid and dangerous storytelling acted as a “highly colored enemy.”88 The Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and other black newspapers regularly hired their own staff cartoonists to produce comics strips and single-panel editorial comics about the social problems that black people faced during the segregation era. That the EC comic managed to earn the respect of the Defender board is significant, as is the editorial’s affirmation of the medium’s capacity to convey complex and demanding ideas to the public. The newspaper’s appreciation of comics as a productive lure may also explain why the two-column analysis of “Judgment Day!” holds such a prominent place in the 1953 editorial. Receiving much less attention was another announcement printed in the bottom corner of the paper: “Ralph Ellison wins National Book Awa rd.”89 Ellison’s Invisible Man went on to be canonized as one of the great American novels of the twentieth century, but it is also clear that the representation of race and racism in “Judgment Day!” constitutes a watershed moment in 1950s popular culture as well.

CO N CL U S IO N

“HeNce We See JUSTice TriUMPH!” Several months after Weird Fantasy #18 appeared on newsstands in 1953, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall led the second round of arguments before the US Supreme Court for the plaintiffs grouped under Brown v. Board of Education. Once the Court began deliberations, Marshall took the opportunity to give speeches around the country to generate public support and to help raise funds for the NAACP’s operations.1 In his remarks at Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Alabama, Marshall singled out the distinct challenges that awaited black youth in the racially integrated world of tomorrow. He set forth an image of the future as a place where African American students should no longer be satisfied, as his generation once had, with being simply “the best Negro in whatever outfit in which [they] were going—teaching, medicine, law, or whatever else”: “Whether we like it or not, the students in this room today are going to graduate into a community that is becoming more and more integrated.” He warned the students who might lead this future, “You are not only going to have to be good; you are going to have to be a little better than that.”2 Marshall, who later became the first African American to serve on the Court, combined the familiar rhetoric of nineteenth-century racial uplift with the NAACP’s strategy to focus litigation efforts on the unequal status of separate educational facilities. His speech, given shortly before the Brown decision was delivered in May 1954, emphasized that once the laws allowing for racial segregation in schools were changed, a much-harder task lay ahead. In contrast to those who hoped for a single solution—such as the EC fan from Vancouver who wondered after reading “Judgment Day!” if “perhaps a ‘Tarlton’ visiting

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US, would set things straight”—Marshall placed his confidence in the young people who would work to make sure the legal changes took effect.3 The systematic integration of schools and colleges was a priority, Marshall told the gathering at Tuskegee, “so that when your education is completed, you will be able to go into your communities and work toward breaking down residential segregation and segregated transportation; to break down Jim Crow in your town.”4 Curtis Meningall Jr. from Salisbury, North Carolina, was among the many African American college students who took Marshall’s message to heart. Meningall served his country for three years in the Air Force, and in 1954, he was elected as Livingstone College’s freshmanclass president.5 The letter he wrote to the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to defend the comic-book industry suggests that Meningall knew that the reach of Marshall’s charge could extend to popular media—to film and television and even to a fictitious black astronaut’s efforts to integrate the planet of mechanical life in a science-fiction comic. “The said named books are quite relaxing educational and vital to our American literature as a whole,” he wrote in October 1954. Though many of these books are fictitious, many are based on true to life everyday facts. Anyone can pick up a newspaper and read about violence every day. All stories in these books do not portray violence. What novel that is a best seller can boast non violence? Violence as read by the reader is looked upon as evil and immoral. Hence we see Justice triumph! And are pleased. While overseas these books served as food, medicines, morale builders to those at barren places. Please note that the readers of those magazines under fire are young adults. The literature is of such that elementary students have difficulty reading. And even if looked at by some it parallels with movies, TV shows, and novels.6 In Meningall’s letter, the entertaining and the educational work in tandem. He calls on the language of bodily nourishment and inner growth to movingly describe the appreciation that he and his fellow service members had for comics “as food, medicines, morale builders.” Publications such as ECs were targeted to young adults, he

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reminds the subcommittee, but what is valued in the stories above all is the triumph of justice—the only term he emphatically underlines in his handwritten message to the most powerful governing body in the nation. It may be difficult to fully appreciate how comics during the Atomic Age successfully took part in the fight for civil rights in the manner that Meningall describes. A city newsstand in the early 1950s that was willing to stock an issue of Negro Romance or a sports comic with Jackie Robinson on the cover would have also sold imperial titles such as Jungle Comics that vilified people of color and newspapers featuring the final appearances of Ebony White’s buffoonish antics in The Spirit. Popular representations in comics such as these reflected the difficult transformation of social attitudes that had been developing long before World War II. When Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein began to use the comics of their New Trend line to address contentious issues such as racial and ethnic discrimination, the preachies plundered the creative strategies and genre-specific traits of the EC way to offer their own version of Thurgood Marshall’s call to action. EC’s late-1940s predecessor Picture Stories of American History, with its textbook-style aesthetics, could not have sustained the complexity of Tarlton’s message, nor could it be cultivated in young white readers by merely asking them to sign a pledge against prejudice on the comic book’s last page. The preachies attempted to facilitate a different kind of social and political interaction. To advocate for a fair and equitable society could mean challenging the moral authority of parents and closed-minded communities or even standing up against the nation’s unjust laws. And everywhere on the pages of EC’s socialprotest comics are reminders that this fight for justice is a continuing challenge. The stories make clear that maintaining the benefits of progress is as important as obtaining them in the first place. The fact that the hero in “Judgment Day!” continues to insist on Marshall’s charge “to break down Jim Crow in your town” a thousand years in the future is the comic’s most effective way of suggesting that Tarlton’s hope must be accompanied by vigilance—by a self-determined, everrenewing struggle against hate, fear, and complacency, no matter how long it takes. When arrows A and B of this study’s “fold-in” come together, we understand the broad appeal of EC’s socially engaged storytelling

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experience for those who were trying to navigate what Ralph Ellison described in the 1950s as our “comic-book world.”7 Through the snapendings, the second-person perspectives, and the retributive justice of the Shock SuspenStory, we recognize the demands for a deeper individual and collective accounting from white readers. But we also see the faces and hear the voices of African American EC fans such as Curtis Meningall Jr. more clearly. We see too a profound legacy of diversity—of genre, of ideology, and of audience—that refutes the persistent misconception that stories about race, gender, and social justice in the American comic book industry are rare or unwelcome. Gaines’s company helped to usher the mid-twentieth-century debates over the social function of art into mainstream comic books. Just as importantly, EC opened up a space among the monsters and aliens for every reader to act as an accomplice in the struggle for civil rights and to demonstrate that even the most disposable ephemera of American popular culture can have a lasting impact.

A P P E N DI X

aNNOTaTiONS Of KeY ec TiTLeS “Abe Lincoln!,” by Harvey Kurtzman (w) and Jack Davis (a), in Frontline Combat #9 (November–December 1952): An elderly black man narrates this biography of Abraham Lincoln that focuses on his family life in the Midwest and his compassion for animals and people, before concluding with the 1861 battle at Fort Sumter. The story appeared as the first story in a special “Civil War Issue.” “The Bath,” by Jack Oleck (w) and Bernard Krigstein (a), in Tales from the Crypt #42 (June–July 1954): A Brazilian slave rebels against his owner by filling his daily bath with flesh-eating piranhas. “Blood Brothers,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), in Shock SuspenStories #13 (February–March 1954): A white family man named Sid terrorizes his suburban neighbor Henry for having black ancestry, despite his Caucasian appearance. After Henry commits suicide, the elderly coroner refutes the existence of “Negro blood” and denounces Sid’s biological racism by revealing that Sid once received a blood transfusion from a black farmhand as a child. “Close Shave,” by Otto Binder (w) and Reed Crandall (a), in Weird Science-Fantasy #27 (January–February 1955): In this science-fiction comic, a white woman named Vida Orkney discovers that her fiancé, Jay, only appears to be human but is actually part of an alien race of hairy, ape-like creatures called Ganymedes that are mistreated and discriminated against on Earth. Unwilling to abandon Jay, Vida claims that she too is passing as human and resigns herself to living as a fugitive in order to marry the man she loves. “A Country at the Crossroads,” by Jerry Coleman (w) and Allen Simon (a), in Pictures Stories from American History #4 (Summer 1947): The events leading up to the Civil War are documented in this early EC comic, published under the direction of Max Gaines. It includes scenes of antebellum slavery, debates over the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the secession of the southern states. “The Guilty!,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), in Shock SuspenStories #3 (June–July 1952): A black man named Aubrey Collins, who has been falsely

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accused of murdering a white woman, is protected from the town’s lynch mob, only to be killed by the sheriff. “Hate!,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), in Shock SuspenStories #5 (October–November 1952): John Smith, a white man, harasses a new Jewish couple in his neighborhood, only to discover that he is adopted and that his own biological parents are Jewish. As a result, John becomes the new target of the community’s ire and is beaten by the people he once considered his friends. “In Gratitude . . . ,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), in Shock SuspenStories #11 (October–November 1953): Joey Norris, a white Korean War vet, returns home, eager to pay his respects to a fellow black soldier named Hank who sacrificed his life to protect their unit. Once Joey realizes that his hometown prohibited the body from being buried in the Norris family cemetery due to Hank’s race, Joey makes a shocking speech at the welcome-home rally, condemning their bigotry. “Judgment Day!,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Joe Orlando (a), in Weird Fantasy #18 (March–April 1953) and reprinted in Incredible Science Fiction #33 (January– February 1956): Set thousands of years in the future, a black astronaut named Tarlton is sent by the Great Galactic Republic to inspect a distant planet of mechanical life and observes a system of rampant segregation and prejudice among the society of orange and blue robots. Tarlton’s face (and his racial identity) is not revealed until the story’s last panel. “A Kind of Justice,” by Carl Wessler (w) and Reed Crandall (a), in Shock SuspenStories #16 (August–September 1954): A small community resorts to mob violence after a young white man from out of town has been charged with sexually assaulting a sixteen-year-old white girl named Shirley. After the accused man is murdered, the story reveals that the sheriff escorting Shirley home is the rapist. “Master Race,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Bernard Krigstein (a), in Impact #1 (March–April 1955): The story is told after World War II in the United States from the second-person perspective of a former Nazi officer named Carl Reissman. It chronicles his vain attempt to flee the memory of his war crimes after a chance encounter on the subway with a man who appears to be a concentration-camp survivor. “The Orphan,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Jack Kamen (a), in Shock SuspenStories #14 (April–May 1954): Ten-year-old Lucy Johnson kills her abusive father and frames her neglectful mother (and her mother’s boyfriend) for the murder. “The Patriots!,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Jack Davis (a), in Shock SuspenStories #2 (April–May 1952): A white man who refuses to salute the American flag at a military parade is fatally beaten by a group of onlookers who discover, after his death, that he was a blind Korean War veteran. “Perimeter!,” by Wallace Wood, in Frontline Combat #15 (January 1954): The story

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takes place during the Korean War, when a demoralized racially integrated platoon becomes separated by mortar fire after nightfall. Private J. Matthews, a friendly and honorable black soldier, is rescued by his white sergeant and protected until morning, despite the taunts of another, racist white member of the platoon. “Reflection of Death!,” by Al Feldstein, in Tales from the Crypt #23 (April–May 1951): Told from the second-person perspective, the main character believes he has survived a car accident and asks for help, only to be rejected in horror by friends and strangers who see him as a walking dead skeleton. He wakes up in the car as if from a nightmare and relives the accident all over again. “Slave Ship,” by Carl Wessler (w) and Graham Ingels, (a) in Piracy #3 (February–March 1955): A white Yankee farmer, who has been forced to work on a slave ship, helps the group of enslaved Africans below deck to escape. After the mutiny, the farmer orders the ship to return to Africa. “The Slave Ship,” by Al Feldstein (w) and George Roussos (a), in Weird Fantasy #8 (July–August 1951): A nineteenth-century slave ship dumps an illegal cargo of enslaved Africans into the ocean after being spotted by the Coast Guard. Shortly after, the ship’s captain and crew are beaten and stolen by an alien spaceship that, when similarly threatened, launches the humans to their deaths in the vacuum of space. “The Teacher from Mars,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Joe Orlando (a), in Weird Science-Fantasy #24 (June 1954): A Martian immigrant named Mun Zeerohs, who has been hired to teach at a Chicago boys’ prep school, is teased and harassed by his students until they learn that the Martian’s own son was killed sacrificing his life for an Earthman. This comic is based on a science-fiction story by Eando Binder. “Under Cover!,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), in Shock SuspenStories #6 (December–January 1953): A newspaper reporter named Samuel Masters witnesses a woman being flogged and killed by a “hooded gang” for not “stay[ing] with [her] own kind.” When he attempts to report the murder, he is killed by men from the vigilante group who were impersonating the FBI. “The Whipping,” by Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), in Shock SuspenStories #14 (April–May 1954): A white family man named Ed recruits his neighbors to join him in attacking a young Mexican American man who has been dating his daughter. Hiding behind bedsheets at night, the mob breaks into the outsider’s home and mistakenly beats Ed’s own daughter to death.

NOTES

Introduction 1. John Benson, ed., “The Transcripts: 1972 EC Convention,” Squa Tront 8 (1978): 22. 2. Al Feldstein and Joe Orlando, “Judgment Day!,” in Weird Fantasy #18 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, March–April 1953), 7. To verify the creator credits for each EC title cited in this study, I referenced two main sources: Tales of Terror: The EC Companion (2000), edited by Fred Von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, which has been updated since the 1950s in consultation with EC staff; and the Grand Comics Database, an online index founded in 1994 by Bob Klein and Tim Stroup and continually updated for accuracy, at www. comics.org. 3. See Ray Bradbury, letter to the “Cosmic Correspondence” column, in Weird Fantasy #20 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, July–August 1953); and J. B. Kenny, letter to the “Cosmic Correspondence” column, in Weird Fantasy #20. 4. “Comics and Propaganda,” Chicago Defender, February 17, 1953. 5. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), ix–xi. See also Lary May, introduction to Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1–16; Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 53–76. 6. Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (New York: Bonanza Books, 1971), 62. 7. The Challenger #3 (New York: Interfaith, September 1946). 8. All-Negro Comics #1 (Philadelphia: Orrin C. Evans, June 1947). Also noteworthy are the ways in which newspapers cartoonists in the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the New York Amsterdam News addressed contemporary social problems for audiences made up primarily of African American

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

NOTe S TO PaG eS 7–9

readers. See also Tim Jackson, Pioneering Cartoonists of Color (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016). See “Wonder Woman of History: Sojourner Truth,” in Wonder Woman #13 (New York: National Comics, 1945); and Negro Heroes #1 (New York: Parents’ Magazine Press, 1947). Beck refers here to the decision of Fawcett executive editor Will Lieberson to remove Captain Marvel’s caricatured African American sidekick, Steamboat, from the comic after complaints from readers. For more information on Steamboat, see chapter 2. C. C. Beck, in P. C. Hamerlinck, “I’ll Never Forget C. C. Beck (1979),” in Fawcett Companion: The Best of FCA (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows, 2001), 138. For more on “Johnny Everyman,” see David L. Albright and Christopher J. Hayden, “The Military Vanguard for Desegregation: Civil Rights Era War Comics and Racial Integration,” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 6, no. 2 (2012), www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v6_2/hayton_albright/. Al Feldstein, interview by S. C. Ringgenberg, in The Comics Journal Library: The EC Artists: Part 1, edited by Michael Dean (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013), 64. The comics historian Tim Jackson suggests that racial discrimination prevented Evans from securing enough newsprint to publish a second issue of All-Negro Comics (Pioneering Cartoonists of Color, 80.) No African Americans or other creators of color were employed full-time by EC. Gaines and his lead editors, Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman, were all born to Jewish families in New York. EC also employed the Italian immigrant Joe Orlando and one southerner from Atlanta, Jack Davis. The colorist Marie Severin, a New Yorker with Irish heritage, was the only woman on EC’s staff. Gerald Early, “Race, Art, and Integration: The Image of the African American Soldier in Popular Culture During the Korean War,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 57, no. 1 (2003): 36. Examples of commentary in popular magazines that raised alarms about the impact of the medium on children’s behavior include Judith Crist, “Horror in the Nursery,” Collier’s, March 27, 1948, 22–23, 95–97; T. E. Murphy, “The Face of Violence,” Reader’s Digest, November 1954, 54–56; and John B. Sheerin, “Crime Comics Must Go!,” Catholic World, June 1954, 161–65. Joe Mancini, Tony Mancini, and Dick Mazzaglia, letter to the “Cosmic Correspondence” column, in Weird Fantasy #20. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 139. Bradford W. Wright, “Tales from the American Crypt: EC and the Culture

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

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of the Cold War, 1950–1954,” in Inside the World of Comic Books, ed. Jeffery Klaehn (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2007), 22–23. Nicky Wright, The Classic Era of American Comics (London: Prion Books, 2000), 12. Frank Jacobs, The Mad World of William M. Gaines (New Yorks: Bantam Books, 1973), 57–58. Ibid., 58–59. Wright, Classic Era, 154. See also Jacobs, Mad World, 59. David Hajdu notes that Gaines followed through on a pledge to donate the profits from Picture Stories from the Bible to “religious organizations that supported the series.” See David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 73. Fred Von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, Tales of Terror! The EC Companion (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 10. Jerry Coleman (w) and Allen Simon (a), “A Country at the Crossroads,” in Pictures Stories from American History #4 (New York: School Comics, Summer 1947), 4. Ibid. Daniels, Comix, 62. See Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, “Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein: An Interview,” Monster Times, May 31, 1972, 30. “Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots,” Writer’s Digest, February 1954, reprinted in Von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, 191–92. Ibid., 191. Jacobs, Mad World, 64. Bill Gaines, interview by Dwight Decker and Gary Groth, May 1983, in The Comics Journal Library: The EC Artists: Part 2, ed. Michael Dean (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2016), 11, 13. Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 31. Ted White, “An Introduction to EC Comics,” in The Comics Journal Library: The EC Artists: Part 1, ed. Michael Dean (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013), 8. Wright, Classic Era, 176. Feldstein, interview by Ringgenberg, 74. Wright, Classic Era, 186. The Atomic Age of Comics (1949–56) is characterized by the decline of superhero comics during the industry’s “Golden Age” and the increasing popularity of other storytelling genres—including crime, horror, romance, western, and science fiction—in the years following World War II and the nuclear arms

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39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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race prompted by the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The comics historian Jess Nevins cites the cancellation of several prominent superhero titles in 1949 as the start of this transitional period, with others marking the years following the formation of the Comics Code Authority and the return of “Silver Age” superheroes in the mid- to late 1950s as the Atomic Age’s end. See Jess Nevins, The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger: The 4,000-Year History of the Superhero (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 242–48; and M. Keith Booker, ed., Comics through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas, vol. 4 (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2014), 1853. Jacobs, Mad World, 75; Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books): Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 83rd Congress, 2nd session (April 21, 22, and June 4, 1954), 98, http://archive.org/details/juveniledelinque54unit. Despite Gaines’s claim, comics anthologies such as Jim Trombetta’s The Horror, the Horror: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2010) offer evidence of other titles that preceded EC’s horror. Bill Gaines, interview by Rich Hauser, in Spa Fon #5 (1969), reprinted in Von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror, 179. Al Feldstein, interview by John Benson, in Comics Journal Library: The EC Artists: Part 2, 64. Wright, Classic Era, 187; Jarret Keene, “EC Comics,” in Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman, ed. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2013), 223; Daniels, Comix, 63; and Larry Stark, EC’s Number One Fan: The 1950s Fanzine Writing of Larry Stark (Bartlett, TN: Boardman Books, 2016), 4. Feldstein, interview by Ringgenberg, 73. Daniels, Comix, 66. See also Grant Geissman. Foul Play! The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E.C. Comics! (New York: Harper’s Design, 2005), 123–29. Pustz, Comic Book Culture, 38. Benson, “Transcripts,” 23. Al Feldstein (w/a), “Reflection of Death!,” in Tales from the Crypt #23 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, April–May 1951), 1. Ibid., 8. See Feldstein, interview by Ringgenberg, 76; and Pustz, Comic Book Culture, 37. Daniels, Comix, 64. Al Feldstein (w) and Jack Davis (a), “’Taint the Meat . . . It’s the Humanity!,” in Tales from the Crypt #32 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, October– November 1952), 8.

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51. Daniel F. Yezbick, “‘No Sweat!’: EC Comics, Cold War Censorship, and the Troublesome Colors of ‘Judgment Day!,’” in The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Frances Gateward and John Jennings (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 27. 52. Gaines, interview by Decker and Groth, 19. 53. Feldstein, interview by Ringgenberg, 89. 54. Daniels, Comix, 64. 55. Thommy Burns, “Waking Up from the American Dream,” in The Life and Legend of Wallace Wood, vol. 1, ed. Bhob Stewart and J. Michael Catron (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2016), 179. 56. “Shock Talk,” Shock SuspenStories #3 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, June–July 1952), 57. Benson, “Transcripts,” 22. Bradford W. Wright’s exhaustive study of comics during the Cold War, for instance, singles out six issues of Shock SuspenStories as evidence of the EC’s “extraordinary qualities” (Comic Book Nation, 136). Burns also uses the terms Shock SuspenStory and message story interchangeably, but he defines the preachy as a story in which “racial prejudice is punished with a patented Shock snap ending” (“Waking Up,” 179, 185). 58. Feldstein was more inclined than Gaines to make the connection between the preachies and EC’s approach to storytelling more generally: “We did many switches on that kind of thing. We also got into some formulaic plots too, like what we called ‘The Preachies,’ which were poetic justice kind of things. You step on a cockroach and a cockroach steps on you kind of thing.” See Feldstein, interview by Ringgenberg, 78. 59. Frank Nuessel, “Social Commentary in EC” (unpublished ms., 1996), 16, James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections and Archives, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. 60. Ibid., 1–17. 61. Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 205. 62. Lawrence Watt-Evans, “The Other Guys,” Alter Ego 3, no. 97 (2010): 3–14. 63. Suat Tong Ng, “EC and the Chimera of Memory,” Comics Journal, no. 250 (February 2003), http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/09/ec-comics-and-thechimera-of-memory-part-1-of-2/. 64. Ibid. 65. Wright, Comic Book Nation, 149. 66. Stark, EC’s Number One Fan, 9. 67. Al Feldstein (w) and Jack Davis (a), “Foul Play!,” in The Haunt of Fear #19 (Entertaining Comics Group, May–June 1953). Regarding “Foul Play!,” Davis has said, “I hated to [draw] it, but Al Feldstein was the boss, the editor.” Jack

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68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

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Davis, Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture: A Career Retrospective (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2011), 192. See also Wright, Comic Book Nation, 152. Juvenile Delinquency, 98. Ibid., 99. Al Feldstein (w) and Wally Wood (a), “Hate!,” in Shock SuspenStories #5 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, October–November 1952), 7. Feldstein, interview by Benson, 61, 65. EC editors announced the end of the New Trend line due to CCA restrictions in full-page announcements in each major series. See “In Memoriam,” in Tales from the Crypt #46 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, February– March 1955), n.p. Benson, “Transcripts,” 23. Carol L. Tilley, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics,” Information and Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 385. Monte Beauchamp, ed., Blab! # 2 (Chicago: Monte Comix, 1987).

Chapter one Epigraph: “The Crypt Keeper’s Corner,” in Tales from the Crypt #24 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, June–July 1951), n.p. 1. The three GhouLunatic hosts of the horror titles would have been the only faces familiar to EC readers, yet the Old Witch, the Vault Keeper, and the Crypt Keeper followed in the tradition of classic radio programs by acting as heterodiegetic narrators, escorting readers through the gruesome tales rather than taking part in them. The same can be said for Alfred E. Neuman, who began appearing regularly in Mad in 1956. On occasion, Feldstein and Gaines included short “EC Quickies” that told a connected story in two parts. 2. While the term SuspenStories was included in part of two EC series titles— Crime SuspenStories and Shock SuspenStories—the term was often featured in promotional material to describe any comic in the New Trend line. EC’s “illustrated SuspenStory” represents an effort, like the “Illustories” from the comics creator Charles Biro, to brand the formal and thematic qualities of comics while distinguishing EC’s approach from that of other publishers. On Biro, see Robert C. Harvey, Insider Histories of Cartooning (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Many thanks to Phillip Smith in Facebook’s EC Fan-Addict Group for suggesting the connection between EC and Biro. 3. “Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots,” Writer’s Digest, February 1954, reprinted in Fred Von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, Tales of Terror! The EC Companion (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 192.

NOTe S TO PaGeS 26–32

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4. Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 98. 5. Thomas J. Roberts, An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 4. 6. Ibid., 60. 7. Ibid., 151. 8. “Combat Correspondence,” Two Fisted Tales #22 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, July–August 1951). 9. “Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots,” 191. 10. Ibid., 192. 11. Ibid., 191. See Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); and Bill Gaines, interview by Dwight Decker and Gary Groth, May 1983, in The Comics Journal Library: The EC Artists: Part 2, ed. Michael Dean (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2016). 12. In at least one interview, Gaines has also indicated that EC’s business manager, Lyle Stuart, might have been the one to actually write the Writer’s Digest piece. See Gaines, interview by Decker and Groth, 18. 13. The writer Jess Nevins defines contes cruel as “those stories of the maliciousness of fate which hover on the border between fantasy and horror.” See Nevins, Homefront Horrors: Frights away from the Frontlines (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2016), 21. 14. Wright, Comic Book Nation, 147. 15. “Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots,” 192. 16. Roberts, Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, 60. 17. Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books): Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 83rd Congress, 2nd session (April 21, 22, and June 4, 1954), 1–2. 18. Ibid., 57. 19. Prior to Wertham’s publication of Seduction of the Innocent, the psychiatrist had established a national reputation as an outspoken critic of the comic book industry and its effect on children through his clinical research, speaking engagements, and commentary in popular magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Readers Digest. Fredric Wertham, “What Parents Don’t Know about Comic Books,” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1953; Wertham, “Comic Books—Blueprints for Delinquency,” Readers Digest, May 1954. 20. Gabriel Mendes, Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lefargue Clinic and the

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

NOTeS TO PaG eS 32–39

Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 123. Juvenile Delinquency, 95. Roberts, Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, 108. Juvenile Delinquency, 100. Linda Adler-Kassner, “Why Won’t You Just Read It? Comic Books and Community in the 1950s” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Washington, DC, August 1995), 10. Peter Kihss, “No Harm in Horror, Comics Issuer Says,” New York Times, April 22, 1954. Gardner, Projections, 80. John Michlig, “EC Horror Comics,” Fully Articulated (blog), accessed March 30, 2017, www.fullyarticulated.com/page30/page36/page69/page39/; Jarret Keene, “EC Comics,” in Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman, ed. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2013), 223. Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 140. Al Feldstein (w) and Wally Wood (a), “The Whipping,” in Shock SuspenStories #14 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, April–May 1954), 1. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1998), 64. Ibid. Ibid. Juvenile Delinquency, 105. Gardner, Projections, 90. Carol L. Tilley, “Children and the Comics: Young Readers Take on the Critics,” in Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent, ed. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, James L. Baughman, and James P. Danky (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 164. See also Nora Brown, “Reform of Comic Books Is Spurred by Hearings,” New York Times, June 31, 1954. Fredric Wertham, letter to Bill Spicer, January 15, 1981, Folder 8, Box 92, Fredric Wertham Papers, Research Files 1818–1982, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth (New York: Reinhart, 1954), 311, 312, 144. Carol L. Tilley, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifica-

NOTeS TO PaGeS 39–4 4

41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

1 49

tions That Helped Condemn Comics,” Information and Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 386. In the National E.C. Fan-Addict Club Bulletin, EC’s editors listed the address for the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency with the request, “If you agree that comics are harmless entertainment, write a letter or postcard today.” See National E.C. Fan-Addict Club Bulletin, no. 3 (June 1954). Bobby Lee Jones, letter to the Subcommittee, received August 23, 1954, Box 169, “Corres Pro-Comic Letters,” Records of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, National Archives, Washington, DC. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 73. Wright, Comic Book Nation, 147. As I discuss in chapter 2, non-American blacks are often an exception here, particularly in the stories modeled after “jungle comics” in places such as Haiti or in African countries. Feldstein and Wood, “Whipping,” 3. Harvey, Insider Histories of Cartooning, 28. Feldstein and Wood, “Whipping,” 6. Ibid. Roberts, Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, 217. Juvenile Delinquency, 100. Examples of this childhood acuity extend even to “The Whipping” through Ed’s daughter. Amy, a newlywed in the story, physically resembles the embittered, adulterous young wives of Crime SuspenStories. As Nyberg notes, her sexualized visual representation makes her the object of Ed’s gaze in problematic, incestuous ways (Seal of Approval, 65). At the same time, Ed’s daughter is bullied by his bigoted views and by his physical abuse, which aligns her sympathetically with other forward-thinking children in EC. She states, “I’ll make friends with whoever I please, daddy! When I meet a boy, I’m not interested in what country his ancestors came from” (Feldstein and Wood, “Whipping,” 3). Al Feldstein (w) and Wally Wood (a), “Under Cover!,” in Shock SuspenStories #6 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, December–January 1953), 1. Frank Nuessel, “Social Commentary in EC” (unpublished ms., 1996), 4–25, James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections and Archives, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 41. See also Mark I. West, Children, Culture, and Controversy (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1988), 79–85.

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56. Gaines, interview by Decker and Groth, 28. 57. Robert Warshow, “Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham,” Commentary, June 1954, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-study-of-man-paulthe-horror-comics-and-dr-wertham/. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Paul Warshow, letter to Frederic Wertham, June 10, 1954, Folder 13, Box 159, Writings 1895–1983, Fredric Wertham Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, reprinted in Tilley, “Children and the Comics,” 175. 63. Adler-Kassner, “Why Won’t You Just Read It?,” 23. 64. Ibid., 3. 65. Larry Stark was one of EC’s most prolific letter writers during the 1950s and became well known among the editorial staff for his detailed, thorough reviews and commentary. See Stark, EC’s Number One Fan: The 1950s Fanzine Writing of Larry Stark (Bartlett, TN: Boardman Books, 2016). 66. Carol L. Tilley, “Comics: A Once-Missed Opportunity,” Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, May 2014, www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/2014/05/ comics-a-once-missed-opportunity/. 67. Paul Witty, “Children’s Interest in Reading the Comics,” Journal of Experimental Education 10, no. 2 (1941): 100–104. 68. Paul Witty and Dorothy Moore, “Interest in Reading the Comics among Negro Children,” Journal of Education Psychology 36, no. 5 (1945): 303. 69. Interestingly enough, the findings concerning white comic-book readers were used as proof of the medium’s extensive popularity, with Witty offering suggestions for teachers to help maintain a balance of reading material that was based on the individual children’s interests. Reading habits among black children, however, were seen as cause for alarm. Witty and Moore expressed concerns about the lack of quality reading material in black homes and schools (due to “inadequate funds” and “meager opportunities”) and suggested that comics were filling the gap, especially given the ease with which the issues were purchased and recirculated among children in their comic book clubs. See ibid., 304. 70. Tilley, “Children and the Comics,” 173. 71. Curtis Meningall Jr., letter to the Subcommittee, received October 6, 1954, Box 169, “Corres Pro-Comic Letters,” Records of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, National Archives, Washington, DC. 72. Cleo Brown, letter to the Subcommittee, received October 6, 1954, Box 169,

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“Corres Pro-Comic Letters,” Records of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, National Archives, Washington, DC. I would like to give special thanks to Carol Tilley for so generously sharing these letters from her ongoing research. 73. Adler-Kassner, “Why Won’t You Just Read It?,” 15.

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

Chapter two Epigraph: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 10. Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “The Guilty!,” in Shock SuspenStories #3 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, June–July 1952), 1. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 7. Letter pages such as EC’s “Shock Talk” column are a selective sampling and difficult to verify. By themselves, these letters offer an incomplete picture of the responses that comics readers may have had to a particular story. It is important to acknowledge that, as with other paratextual content such as editorial notes, promotional ads, and subscription forms, the letter page is assembled as part of a larger effort to extend and shape the reader’s engagement in strategic ways. In my analysis, I have endeavored to couple discussions of letter pages with critical commentary from other sources including interviews, biographies, essays, and archival material. When asked about the legitimacy of the letters that EC published, Bill Gaines stated in a 1955 interview that “they’re all real,” with the exception of two “phony” letters that he wrote to “stir up trouble,” including one by Mrs. Arline Grandon Phelan in Vault of Horror #25 (1952) that was highly critical of EC and prompted a flurry of defenses from readers in future issues. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, interview by Ted White, Fred Von Bernewitz, and Larry Stark, 1955–56, in Tales of Terror: The EC Companion, ed. Fred Von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 273–74. Ralph Olmos, letter to the “Shock Talk” column, in Shock SuspenStories #5 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, October–November 1952). J.H., letter to the “Shock Talk” column, in Shock SuspenStories #5. James McDowell, letter to the “Shock Talk” column, in Shock SuspenStories #5. Black women play no explicit role in the message stories and seldom appear in EC comics as more than background characters (such as the Haitian voodoo “high priestess” in “Voodoo Death” from Vault of Horror #25). Two notable exceptions, “Slave Ship,” from Weird Fantasy #8, and “The Slave Ship,” from Piracy #3, are discussed in chapter 4.

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10. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 36. 11. Ibid., 86. 12. Clayton Knowles, “Civil Rights Is an Issue for Both Major Parties,” New York Times, May 4, 1952, E10. 13. William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, introduction to Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South, ed. William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad (New York: New Press, 2001), xxix. 14. Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 278. 15. Russ Cochran, “EC’s Morality Tales . . . The EC ‘Preachies,’” in The EC Archives: Shock SuspenStories, vol. 1 (Timonium, MD: Gemstone, 2006), 110. 16. E. Pauline Degenfelder, “The Film Adaptation of Faulkner’s ‘Intruder in the Dust,’” Literature/Film Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1973): 139–40. 17. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 2003), 140. 18. Charles Hannon, Southern Literary Studies: Faulkner and the Discourses (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 138. 19. Michael Curtis, quoted in Roberto C. Ortiz, “That Distinguished Negro Star: Juano Hernandez in Hollywood Cinema,” Centro Voices, December 4, 2015, http://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu. 20. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 139. 21. Brian Cremins, Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017), 101. 22. Quoted ibid., 107. 23. Feldstein and Wood, “Guilty,” 1. Light reflecting on the beads of perspiration on the face of a black character plays a central and controversial role in “Judgment Day!,” which I discuss in chapter 4. 24. Will Eisner, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse, 1996), 19. 25. Interestingly enough, Wood’s familiarity with the racial stereotypes so common in comic books is reinforced by the fact that while he was illustrating pages for EC, he was also working with Will Eisner on The Spirit. Wood contributed to an outer-space story arc in 1952 that included the title detective’s African American sidekick, Ebony White, a Sambo caricature with saucer eyes, balloon lips, and heavy dialect. Wood’s decision not to incorporate these features in his depiction of Aubrey Collins in “The Guilty!” is a strategic choice designed to suit the tone and purpose of highlighting a more sympathetic, realistic black figure in Shock SuspenStories. Michael T. Gilbert, “Total

NOTe S TO PaGeS 59–67

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

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Control: A Brief Biography of Wally Wood,” in Alter Ego 8 (Spring 2001): 4–6. Many thanks to Andy Kunka for bringing this connection to my attention. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 162. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 141. Feldstein and Wood, “Guilty,” 7. Eisner, Graphic Storytelling, 17. Suat Tong Ng, “EC and the Chimera of Memory,” Comics Journal, no. 250 (February 2003), http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/09/ec-comics-and-thechimera-of-memory-part-1-of-2/. Ibid. The Challenger #3 (New York: Interfaith, September 1946), 1. All-Negro Comics #1 (Philadelphia: Orrin C. Evans, June 1947). Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 278. Ibid. Feldstein and Wood, “Guilty,” 6. A similar message concludes the story “Under Cover!” from Shock SuspenStories #6: “How long can we stay ‘cool’ and indifferent to this threat to our democratic way of life? It is time to unveil these usurpers of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms!” Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “Under Cover!,” in Shock SuspenStories #6 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, December–January 1953), 7. Cremins, Captain Marvel, 106. Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood, “In Gratitude . . . ,” in Shock SuspenStories #13 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, October–November 1953). Ibid., 7. In fact, his identity as a black man is not mentioned explicitly until the final page. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 162–63. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 7. Angelika Kruger-Kahloula, “On the Wrong Side of the Fence: Racial Segregation in American Cemeteries,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally Ibid., 131. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 12. Harry S. Truman, “Address of the President to Congress, Recommending Assistance to Greece and Turkey,” March 12, 1947, the Truman Doctrine

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51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

NOTe S TO PaG eS 67–77

Research File, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum, accessed March 30, 2017, www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/doctrine/large/documents/index.php?documentid=5-9&pagenumber=1. Feldstein and Wood, “In Gratitude . . . ,” 7. Ibid., 3. A/3c Fisher, letter to the “Shock Talk” column, in Shock SuspenStories #13 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, February–March 1954). 3505th Pilot Training Squadron, letter to the “Shock Talk” column in Shock SuspenStories #15 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, June–July 1954). Thommy Burns also points out that EC received another letter from a staff sergeant at the same Biloxi base who also shared the same last name as A/3c Fisher. The sergeant’s letter, printed in Shock SuspenStories #16, announced that Fisher had “grossly misrepresented Keesler AFB.” See Burns, “Waking Up from the American Dream,” in The Life and Legend of Wallace Wood, vol. 1 (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2016), 185. Leonard Rifas, “War Comics,” in Ibid, 185–86. Wallace Wood (w/a), “Perimeter!,” in Frontline Combat #15 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, 1954), 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid. David L. Albright and Christopher J. Hayton, “The Military Vanguard for Desegregation: Civil Rights Era War Comics and Racial Integration,” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 6, no. 2 (2012), www.english.ufl.edu/ imagetext/archives/v6_2/hayton_albright/. Ibid., 8. Gerald Early, “Race, Art, and Integration: The Image of the African American Soldier in Popular Culture during the Korean War,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 57, no. 1 (2003): 35. Albright and Hayton, “Military Vanguard for Desegregation.” Ibid. Early, “Race, Art, and Integration,” 34. Ng, “EC and the Chimera of Memory.” Wood, “Perimeter!,” 5. Ibid., 7. Chapter three Epigraphs: Andy Andrews, letter to the “Shock Talk” column, in Shock SuspenStories #15 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, June–July 1954); Leo Valdes Jr., letter to the “Shock Talk” column, in Shock SuspenStories #15.

NOTe S TO PaGeS 77–86

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1. Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “In Gratitude . . . ,” in Shock SuspenStories #11 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, October–November 1953), 7. 2. Ibid. 3. John Benson, ed., “The Transcripts: 1972 EC Convention,” Squa Tront 8 (1978): 22. 4. “Editor’s Note,” in Impact #1 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, March– April 1955). 5. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Anne Clark, introduction to Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing, ed. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Anne Clark (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 3. 6. Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger, Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991), 5. 7. Ibid., 8. 8. Ibid., 125. 9. Quoted in Adamson and Clark, introduction to Scenes of Shame, 9. 10. Feldstein and Wood, “In Gratitude . . . ,” 5. 11. Salman Akhtar, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Karmac, 2009), 264. 12. Feldstein and Wood, “In Gratitude . . . ,” 6. 13. Ibid., 6–7. 14. Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Appleton, 1899), 1319–20, Project Gutenberg, accessed March 1, 1998, www. gutenberg.org/files/1227/1227-h/1227-h.htm. 15. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 132. 16. Ibid., 131–32. 17. Shirley Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5. 18. Frank Jacobs, The Mad World of William M. Gaines (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), 78. 19. Bill Gaines, interview by Dwight Decker and Gary Groth, May 1983, in The Comics Journal Library: The EC Artists: Part 2, ed. Michael Dean (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2016), 19. 20. Al Feldstein (w) and Wally Wood (a), “Hate!,” in Shock SuspenStories #5 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, October–November 1952). 21. Ibid., 1–2. 22. Ibid., 6. 23. Ibid., 7. 24. Ibid.

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NOTe S TO PaG eS 88–94

25. Al Feldstein (w) and Wally Wood (a), “Blood Brothers,” in Shock SuspenStories #13 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, February–March 1954), 3. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Karin Kukkonen, Studying Comics and Graphic Novels (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013), 9. 29. Andrews, letter to the “Shock Talk” column. 30. Valdes, letter to the “Shock Talk” column. 31. Akhtar, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, 264. 32. Feldstein and Wood, “Blood Brothers,” 6. George, the farmhand, is another of EC’s silent African American characters, appearing only from the back and in shadow. 33. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (New York: Beacon, 1955), 19. 34. This term is derived from criminal-justice theories attributed to John Braithwaite. See Braithwaite, Crime, Shame, and Reintegration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 35. Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 111–12. 36. Feldstein and Wood, “Blood Brothers,” 2. 37. Ibid., 5. 38. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 112. 39. Feldstein and Wood, “Blood Brothers,” 4. 40. Ibid. 41. Al Feldstein (w) and Jack Davis (a), “The Patriots!,” in Shock SuspenStories #2 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, April–May 1952), 2, 5. 42. Ibid., 3. 43. Stephen Reicher, “The Psychology of Crowd Dynamics,” in Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes, ed. Michael A. Hogg and Scott Tindale (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 194–95. 44. Feldstein and Wood, “Hate!,” 3. 45. Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “The Whipping,” in Shock SuspenStories #14 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, April–May 1954), 7. 46. Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 230. 47. See David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); and Crystal Gaylean, “Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburbs,” US History Scene, April 10, 2015, http://ushistoryscene.com/article/ levittown/.

NOTeS TO PaGeS 94–99

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48. Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “The Guilty!,” in Shock SuspenStories #3 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, June–July 1952), 1. 49. Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “Under Cover!,” in Shock SuspenStories #6 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, December–January 1953), 7. 50. Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 231. 51. Carl Wessler (w) and Reed Crandall (a), “A Kind of Justice,” in Shock SuspenStories #16 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, August–September 1954). In a related story, “The Assault!” from Shock SuspenStories #8, a woman lies about being raped to cover up her own late-night meetings with a boyfriend and ends up getting an old reclusive man killed. Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “The Assault!,” in Shock SuspenStories #8 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, April–May 1953). 52. Wessler and Crandall, “Kind of Justice,” 1. 53. Ibid., 3. 54. Ibid., 6. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 7. 57. Ibid., 8. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 2. 60. Ibid., 5. 61. Ibid., 7. 62. “Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots,” Writer’s Digest, February 1954, reprinted in Fred Von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, Tales of Terror! The EC Companion (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 192. 63. Al Feldstein (w) and Bernard Krigstein (a), “Master Race,” in Impact #1 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, March–April 1955), 8. Given that the unnamed man in black never speaks, it is important to note that his identity as a concentration-camp survivor is not made explicit in the story. Just as credible is an alternate reading in which Reissman’s guilt leads him to mistake “a perfect stranger” for one of the many Jewish men he once persecuted. 64. Santiago Garcia, On the Graphic Novel, trans. Bruce Campbell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 30. 65. John Benson, David Kasakove, and Art Spiegelman, “An Examination of ‘Master Race,’” in The Comics Studies Reader, ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worchester (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 288. According to Spiegelman, this analysis of “Master Race” was based on a college term paper he wrote in 1967 that Benson and Kasakove expanded for publication in the EC fanzine Squa Tront 6 (1975). See Art Spiegelman, “Ballbuster: Bernard Krigstein’s Life between the Panels,” New Yorker, July 22, 2002.

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66. Martin Jukovsky, “‘Master Race’ and the Holocaust,” in EC Archives: Impact (West Plains, MO: Russ Cochran, 1988), available online at www.jukovsky. com/masterrace.html. 67. Al Feldstein, interview by Grant Geissman, April 1996, in Von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror, 79. 68. Feldstein and Krigstein, “Master Race,” 3. 69. Ibid. 70. Benson, “Transcripts,” 296. 71. Feldstein and Krigstein, “Master Race,” 4. 72. Quoted in Adamson and Clark, introduction to Scenes of Shame, 9. 73. Feldstein and Krigstein, “Master Race,” 3. 74. Benson, “Transcripts,” 298–99. 75. Jukovsky, “‘Master Race’ and the Holocaust.” 76. Kathrin Bower, “Holocaust Avengers: From ‘Master Race’ to Magneto,” International Journal of Comic Art 6, no. 2 (2004): 182.

1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

Chapter four Epigraphs: Ralph Ellison, “Harlem’s America,” New Leader, September 26, 1966, 25; quoted in Bill Mason, “Orlando Ascendant,” in Judgment Day and Other Stories, by Joe Orlando and Al Feldstein (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2014), ix. Comics Magazine Association of America, Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America (New York: Comics Magazine Association of America, 1954). Ibid. Gabriel Mendes, Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lefargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 122. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth (New York: Reinhart, 1954), 100–103. David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 322. “Judgment Day!” was intended to replace another story, “An Eye for an Eye,” that also had been removed for violating the Code. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, interview by Ted White, Fred Von Bernewitz, and Larry Stark, 1955–56, in Tales of Terror: The EC Companion, ed. Fred Von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 272. Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 123. In addition, according to a 1955 letter uncovered by Amy Nyberg, EC’s busi-

NOTe S TO PaGeS 106–11 0

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

159

ness manager offered an entirely different explanation for the impasse. He claimed that the sentience of the story’s robots was an affront to Murphy’s religious beliefs (see ibid., 123). Feldstein ultimately maintained that Murphy was acting in the interest of mainstream publishers, who were threatened by EC’s success. See Dewey Cassell, Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows, 2012), 39. See Hajdu, Ten-Cent Plague, 323; and Don Thompson, “Here Come da Shrink! Spawn of Dr. Wertham,” Monster Times, May 31, 1972, 11. Gaines employed Jim and Margaret Wroten to letter EC’s comics using the Leroy lettering machine. Their signature style replicated the custom in comicbook lettering of bolding and italicizing words for emphasis throughout the dialogue and captions. Bill Gaines, interview by S. C. Ringgenberg, in The Comics Journal Library: The EC Artists: Part 1, ed. Michael Dean (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013), 68. Al Feldstein (w) and Joe Orlando (a), “Judgment Day!,” in Weird Fantasy #18 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, March–April 1953), 1. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6, 3. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Ibid., 1. Ibid. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, “Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein: An Interview,” in Monster Times, May 31, 1972, 18. William H. Young, The 1950s: American Popular Culture through History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 114. Mike Ashley, The History of Science Fiction Magazines, vol. 1 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 138. Ibid., 141. Otto Binder, letter to Sam Moskowitz, October 4, 1952, Folder 260, Box 1, Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. Many thanks to Brian Cremins for bringing this letter to my attention. Isiah Lavender III, “Critical Race Theory,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2009), 185. Challenges to this norm are not difficult to find among twentieth-century African American speculative writing. Early examples of these are W. E. B. DuBois’s postapocalyptic short story “The Comet” (1920) and Black No More by George Schuyler (1931). Schuyler’s work

160

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

NOTeS TO PaGeS 1 1 0–114

uses science fiction and satire to imagine the societal consequences of an experimental formula that turns the skin of black people white. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Comet,” in Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 253–73; George Schuyler, Black No More (New York: Random House, 1931). Ray Bradbury, “The Other Foot,” in The Illustrated Man (New York: Doubleday, 1951), 48. Ibid., 52. Isiah Lavender III, Race in American Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 102. Bradbury, “Other Foot,” 56. Lavender, Race in American Science Fiction, 98. Al Feldstein, interview by John Benson, in The Comics Journal Library: The EC Artists: Part 2, ed. Michael Dean (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2016), 62. Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 10. A case could be made, however, that white male hegemony is implicated in the most urgent political commentary in the science-fiction comics—namely, the criticism surrounding the ethical implications of atom bombs and the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. Al Feldstein (w) and George Roussos (a), “The Slave Ship,” in Weird Fantasy #8 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, July–August 1951), 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. The plot of “The Slave Ship” also contains elements that the EC writer Carl Wessler revisited in Piracy, an EC New Trend series published shortly before the Comics Code was instituted. The third issue of the series featured a story similarly titled “Slave Ship.” It also focuses on an illegal slave-trading operation, but it is told from the point of view of a reluctant white crew member who is so sickened by “man’s inhumanity to man” that he initiates a successful revolt among the enslaved Africans. The sailor even establishes a friendship with one of the captives, named M’bwuna. By the story’s end, the sympathetic white man has taken charge of the ship, and as the freed blacks sit on deck, “soaking up the warm sunshine,” their liberator directs the crew to turn the vessel around so that M’bwuna and his people can be returned home. Carl Wessler (w) and Graham Ingels (a), “Slave Ship,” in Piracy #3 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, February–March 1955), 5, 7. Feldstein and Roussos, “Slave Ship,” 5. Ibid., 6.

NOTeS TO PaGeS 115–123

161

39. John Reider, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 7. 40. Another notable example is “The Bath,” in Tales from the Crypt #42, in which a Brazilian slave rebels against his owner by filling the owner’s daily bath with flesh-eating piranhas. Jack Oleck (w) and Bernard Krigstein (a), “The Bath,” in Tales from the Crypt #42 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, June– July 1954). 41. S. C. Ringgenberg, “Joe Orlando,” in Judgment Day and Other Stories, by Al Feldstein and Joe Orlando (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books 2014), 162. See also Joe Orlando, “The Many Worlds of Joe Orlando,” interview by Paul Levitz, Amazing World of DC Comics 6 (May 1975): 4. 42. Quoted in Mason, “Orlando Ascendant,” ix. 43. Daniel F. Yezbick, “‘No Sweat!’: EC Comics, Cold War Censorship, and the Troublesome Colors of ‘Judgment Day!,’” in The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Frances Gateward and John Jennings (Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 30. 44. Ibid., 34. 45. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 17. 46. Jean Christophe Cloutier, “The Comic Book World of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Novel 43, no. 2 (2010): 296. 47. Ellison, “Harlem’s America” 25. It is important to note that Ellison was a strong supporter of Harlem’s Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic and a friend of Fredric Wertham, although Ellison was not directly involved with Wertham’s research on comics and juvenile delinquency at the clinic. See Mendes, Under the Strain of Color. 48. Danielle Allen, “Ralph Ellison on the Tragi-Comedy of Citizenship,” in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man, ed. Lucas Morel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 39. 49. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 50. Ibid., 5. 51. Ibid., 3. 52. Ibid., 202. 53. Ibid., 218. 54. Ibid., 217. 55. Ben Williams, quoted in Lavender, “Critical Race Theory,” 169. 56. Ibid., 190. 57. Feldstein and Orlando, “Judgment Day!,” 1. 58. In other EC stories such as “The Micro-Race!” (Weird Science #2) and “Return” (Weird Science #5), the experiments to develop new life models—either in a lab or on another planet—inevitably lead to war and the threat of nuclear

162

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

NOTeS TO PaGeS 1 23–130

destruction. Jack Kamen (a), “The Micro-Race!,” in Weird Science #2 (#13 on the cover) (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, July–August 1950) (the writer of this comic is unknown); Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “Return,” in Weird Science #5 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, January–February 1951). Feldstein and Orlando, “Judgment Day!,” 2. Reider, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, 5. Ibid., 7. Feldstein and Orlando, “Judgment Day!,” 7. John Benson, ed., “The Transcripts: 1972 EC Convention,” in Squa Tront 8 (1978): 23. Feldstein and Orlando, “Judgment Day!,” 2. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ellipses appear in much of the dialogue in the story, but when the punctuation is accompanied by Tarlton’s fact-finding mission, the pauses suggest that he is making deliberate choices about what information to share and withhold. Allen, “Ralph Ellison on the Tragi-Comedy of Citizenship,” 39. Feldstein and Orlando, “Judgment Day!,” 5. Ibid. Ibid., 6. Ellison, Invisible Man, 14. Feldstein and Orlando, “Judgment Day!,” 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 162. Lucas E. Morel, “Ralph Ellison’s American Democratic Individualism,” in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to “Invisible Man,” ed. Lucas Morel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 66–67. Ellison, Invisible Man, 581. “Judgment Day!” was not the first time in which a black character was framed in this way. A few months prior to the publication of Weird Fantasy #18, Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis experimented similarly with an African American storyteller in “Abe Lincoln!” in the Civil War issue of Frontline Combat #9. An enslaved black man narrates the comic’s hagiography of Lincoln’s life and praises his sacrifice, although his face and identity are not fully revealed until the last’s panel’s close-up image. The story offers some clues to his identity, including his speech, the cabin setting (reminiscent of Uncle Remus tales), and his appearance in profile, but it does not show his face until

NOTeS TO PaGeS 130–1 32

79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89.

163

the end. Harvey Kurtzman (w) and Jack Davis (a), “Abe Lincoln!,” in Frontline Combat #9 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, November–December 1952). Al Feldstein (w) and Wallace Wood (a), “In Gratitude . . . ,” in Shock SuspenStories #13 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, October–November 1953), 5. Ernest Newsum, letter to the “Cosmic Correspondence” column, in Weird Fantasy #20 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, July–August 1953); William Reith, letter to the “Cosmic Correspondence” column, in Weird Fantasy #20. Ray Bradbury, letter to the “Cosmic Correspondence” column, in Weird Fantasy #20. Larry Stark, letter to the “Cosmic Correspondence” column, in Weird Fantasy #20. Otto Binder (w) and Reed Crandall (a), “Close Shave,” in Weird Science-Fantasy #27 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, January–February 1955), 4. Al Feldstein (w) and Joe Orlando (a), “The Teacher from Mars,” in Weird Science-Fantasy #24 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, June 1954). Brian Cremins notes that Eando Binder was the name used to signify collaborations between Otto and his brother, Earl Binder. Cremins, Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017), 58. Once Gaines shuttered EC’s comic book division, Orlando worked on titles for Classics Illustrated, EC’s Mad, and Warren Publishing’s Creepy and spent the bulk of his career at DC Comics, where he became vice president and editorial director. Interestingly, one of Orlando’s freelance jobs was as lead artist on the pro-apartheid series Mighty Man: The Human Law Enforcing Dynamo, for Afri-Comics, a company sponsored by the South African government during the 1970s. His request to “create one-page heroes for blacks to identify with” in the comic was rebuffed in favor of guidelines that sent “a strong lawand-order message to South African blacks.” Orlando, “Many Worlds of Joe Orlando,” 3–13; Steve Weissman, “Dealing with Propaganda—Soweto Style,” Southern Africa, January–February 1978, 4; William Worger, “Afri-Comics Introduction,” UCLA International Digital Ephemera Project, accessed September 15, 2018, http://idep.library.ucla.edu/news/afri-comics-introduction. “Comics and Propaganda,” Chicago Defender, February 17, 1953, E10. Ibid. Stanley J. Kunitz, “The Roving Eye,” Wilson Library Bulletin 15 (June 1941): 846. The Chicago Defender published a more detailed review of Invisible Man on page 11 when the novel first appeared, on April 19, 1952. In it, Gertrude Martin

164

NOTeS TO PaGeS 1 33–136

describes Ellison’s novel as “oddly enough a disappointing” book despite its thoughtful and sympathetic “study of a Negro’s mind.” Gertrude Martin, “Book Reviews,” Chicago Defender, April 19, 1952, 11. Conclusion 1. J. Clay Smith Jr., introduction to “The 1950s,” in Supreme Justice: Speeches and Writings, Thurgood Marshall, ed. J. Clay Smith Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 26. 2. Marshall delivered the speech to the National Newspaper Publishers’ Association on January 23 1954. Thurgood Marshall, “The Future Lies with Our Youth,” ibid., 69. 3. Paul O. Partington, letter to the “Cosmic Correspondence” column, in Weird Fantasy #20 (New York: Entertaining Comics Group, July–August 1953). 4. Marshall, “Future Lies with Our Youth,” 73. 5. Text of the Livingstone College yearbook, The Livingstonian, from 1955 and 1958 indicates that Curtis Meningall attended the school and served as the freshman-class president. See “Full Text of ‘The Livingstonian [1955],” Internet Archive, accessed September 1, 2017, https://archive.org/stream/livingstonian1951955livi/livingstonian1951955livi_djvu.txt; and “Full Text of ‘The Livingstonian [1958],” Internet Archive, accessed September 1, 2017, https:// archive.org/stream/livingstonian1951958livi/livingstonian1951958livi_djvu.txt. 6. Curtis Meningall Jr., letter to the Subcommittee, received October 6, 1954, Box 169, “Corres Pro-Comic Letters,” Records of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, National Archives, Washington, DC. 7. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 458.

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IN D E X

“Abe Lincoln!,” 130fn78, 137 Adler-Kassner, Linda, 34, 47-49 Akhtar, Salman, 80, 90 Albright, David, 70, 72 All-Negro Comics, 7, 8fn13, 61 Allen, Danielle, 119, 125 American Comics Group, 13, 19 Animal Fables, 9 anti-Semitism, 21-22, 26, 33, 78, 131. See also “Hate!” and “Master Race” anticommunism, 26, 78, 92-93 Ashley, Mike, 109 Atomic Age of Comics, 13 Avon Publications, 15, 19, 116 Baldwin, James, 62, 90 “The Bath,” 115fn40, 137 Beaser, Herbert, 32-35, 46, 50 Beaty, Bart, 19, 36 Beck, C.C., 7 Beauchamp, Monte, 23 Binder, Otto, 41, 108-109, 131, 137 Biondi, Martha, 94 “Blood Brothers,” 29, 68, 77, 87-95, 100, 114, 116, 129, 137 Bogle, Donald, 56 Bower, Kathrin, 102 Bradbury, Ray, 4-5, 108, 110-112, 118, 130.

See also “The Other Foot” and “Way in the Middle of the Air” Brown v. Board of Education, 4-5, 53, 133-134 “Bunker!,” 70 Burns, Thommy, 6, 18, 68fn54 The Challenger, 7, 61 Chicago Defender, 5, 7fn8, 132, 132fn89 Clendenen, Richard, 30 “Close Shave,” 131, 137 Cloutier, Jean Christophe, 119 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 51 Cochran, Russ, 24, 55, 99 Cohen, Sol, 12 Coleman, Jerry, 10 Comics Code of 1954 (Comics Code Authority), x, 22-23, 104-107, 128 Comics Magazine Association of America. See Comics Code of 1954 “A Country at the Crossroads,” 10-11, 21-22. See also Pictures Stories from American History Craig, Johnny, 6, 13-14, 57 Crandall, Reed, 95-97, 131, 137-138 Cremins, Brian, 57, 131fn84 Crime Does Not Pay, 12 Crime Patrol, 12

178 Crime SuspenStories, 13, 18, 25fn2 28, 43, 45, 99 Daniels, Les, 11, 14-15, 17-18 Darwin, Charles, 81-82 Davis, Jack, 6, 8fn13, 20, 93, 130fn78, 137-138 Donenfeld, Harry, 9-10 Dudziak, Mary, 66-67 Early, Gerald 8, 72 Eastern Color Printing, 9 Ebony White (The Spirit), 57, 135, 59fn25 EC (Entertaining Comics): as compared to other comic publishers, 6-8, 14, 61; as Educational Comics, 9-11; as exhibit in the US Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, 29-39; as formula fiction, 14-19, 25-26, 27-30, 43-44, 63, 83-84, 9697, 108-110; circulation and sales, 7-8, 12-13, 20, 69, 108; claims of juvenile delinquency in, 8, 20, 26, 29-34, 38, 44-48, 104, 134; creators influenced by, 23-24; demographics of reading communities, 15, 47- 50; EC Fan-Addict Club, 27, 44-45, 130; “EC Quickies,” 25fn1; marketing strategies,13-15, 18, 25-29; snapending, 16-18, 83-87, 102; transition to Entertaining Comics, 12-15; use of child protagonists in, 42-43, 43fn52, 92. See also letters from EC readers. See also under comics series titles. Eisner, Will, 58. See also Ebony White Ellison, Ralph, 62, 104, 136; Invisible Man, 119-122, 125-126, 129, 132 Evans, Orrin C. See All-Negro Comics Famous Funnies, 9, 48 Fawcett Comics, 6-8, 48. See also Steamboat Feldstein, Al: before EC, 12-13; “Blood

iNDex Brothers,” 87-95; co-writing with Bill Gaines, 14-17; “The Guilty!,” 5162; “Hate!,” 84-87; “In Gratitude…,” 62-69, 74, 77-82; Jewish heritage, 8fn13; on science fiction, 108-109, 111-112; “Judgment Day!,”104-109, 115-133; on the preachies, 3, 17-19; “Master Race,” 98-103; “The Slave Ship,” 112-115; “The Whipping,” 3643; writing style, 17, 35, 61 films, race, 55-56, 72 form, elements of comics: captions, 2527, 33-36, 38-43, 54, 60-61, 69, 85, 89, 97, 99; coloring, 57, 64-65, 75, 91, 118; page layout, 43, 59-60, 75, 80-82, 93, 100-102; second-person perspective, 17, 35, 41, 85, 100 “Foul Play!,” 20, 23 Fox Comics, 12, 15, 116 Frontline Combat, 13, 69-76, 130fn78, 137-138 Gaines, Maxwell Charles “M.C.,” 9-11, 28 Gaines, William M., acquiring and establishing EC 11-13, 28; cowriting with Al Feldstein, 14-17, 61; defining the EC way, x, 18, 44, 84, 93-94, 136; Jewish heritage, 8fn13; on authenticity of EC letters to the editor, 52fn4; on “Judgment Day!,” 105-106, 108-109; testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, 20-21, 32-34, 47 Garcia, Santiago, 99 Gardner, Jared, 26, 34-35, 38-39 Geissman, Grant, 4fn2, 6 gender, representation of: masculinity, 52-53, 61, 70-74, 107-108, 123; women and girls, 42-43, 53fn8, 96-97 Gernsback, Hugo, 109

iNDex GhouLunatics, 14-16, 25fn1. See also Tales from the Crypt Gilbert, James, 44 Going Steady with Peggy, 12 Groth, Gary, 44 “The Guilty!,” 5, 18, 51-62, 68, 79, 94, 98, 116, 129, 137 Gunfighter, 12 Hajdu, David, 6, 28, 10fn22, 105-106 Harris-Perry, Melissa, 90-91 Harvey, Robert C., 41 “Hate!,” 5, 22, 84-87, 90, 93, 98, 100, 114, 138 The Haunt of Fear, 13, 29-30, 34. See “Foul Play!” and “The Secret” Hayton, Christopher, 70-72 Henry, O., 16 Impact, 23, 99-101, 138 Incredible Science Fiction, 8, 23, 104-106, 138 Ingels, Graham, 6, 13, 139 “In Gratitude…,” 43, 52, 62-69, 74, 7782, 91, 102, 116, 129-130, 138 Intruder in the Dust (1949, film), 55-56, 59, 62, 72 Invisible Man (Ellison), 119-122, 125-126, 129, 132 Jackson, Tim, 8fn13 Jacobs, Frank, 6, 84 “Johnny Everyman,” 7 “Judgment Day!,” 3-5, 8, 18, 22-23, 43, 86, 104-109, 115-133, 138 Jukovsky, Martin, 99, 102 jungle comics, 57, 72, 105, 123-124, 135 juvenile delinquency, 8, 20, 26, 29-34, 38, 44-48, 104, 134. See also US Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency Kamen, Jack, 6, 13, 42, 138 Keene, Jarrett, 14, 35 Kefauver, Estes, 21, 26, 30, 38

179 “A Kind of Justice,” 22, 78, 92, 95-98, 138 Korean War, 5, 53, 63, 66-78, 80, 92-93, 130 Krigstein, Bernard, 41, 98-102, 115fn40, 137-138 Kruger-Kahloula, Angelika, 66 Kukkonen, Karin, 89 Kunitz, Stanley J., 132 Kurtzman, Harvey, 6, 8fn13, 13, 69-70, 130fn78, 137 Lavender, Isiah, 110-111, 121 Leroy lettering, 14, 106 letters from EC readers, 5, 8, 39, 48-49, 52, 52fn4, 67-68, 77, 89, 130, 134135. See also Meningall, Curtis, Jr.; Warshow, Paul; and Stark, Larry Lewis, Helen, 80, 101 Litwack, Leon, 55, 61-62 Mad, ix-x, 8, 13, 19, 23, 25fn1, 28, 45 “Madman Gaines Pleads for Plots” (Writer’s Digest), 25-30, 84, 98 Marshall, Thurgood, 133-135 “Master Race,” 5, 18, 78, 98-103, 138 Mendes, Gabriel, 32, 105 Meningall, Curtis, Jr., 49, 134-136. See also letters from EC readers Michlig, John, 35 Mitchell, W.J.T. 59, 64-65, 128 mob violence, representations of, 5, 21, 27, 32, 36-38, 51, 55-58, 62, 92-98, 100-102 Modern Love, 12 Moore, Dorothy, 48 Morel, Lucas E., 129 Murphy, Charles F., 104-106 NAACP, 95, 133 Nama, Adilifu, 112 National Comics Publications (DC Comics), 7, 9-10 Negro Heroes, 7 Nevins, Jess, 13, 29fn13

180 New Direction line, 23, 99 New Trend line, 12-16, 19, 23, 25-26, 53, 72, 108, 115, 128, 135 Ng, Suat Tong, 19-20, 60-61, 72 North, Sterling, 26, 132 nuclear threat, 5, 19, 110-112, 123fn58 Nuessel, Frank, 6, 19, 43 Nyberg, Amy Kiste, 6, 38-40, 106 Oleck, Jack, 115fn40, 137 Orlando, Joe, 4, 8; artistic style, 115-118; career after EC, 131fn85, 138-139; “Judgment Day!,” 104, 106, 122-129; “The Teacher from Mars,” 131 “The Orphan,” 30, 42-43, 97, 138 “The Other Foot,” 110-111. See also Ray Bradbury Panic, 13, 45 Parents Magazine Press, 6 “The Patriots!,” 5, 18, 22, 78, 92-94, 138 “Perimeter!,” 5, 53, 68-76, 79, 83, 86, 91, 95, 100, 129, 138 Pictures Stories from American History, 10-11, 21-22, 135, 137 Picture Stories from the Bible, 9, 10fn22, 12 Picture Stories from Science, 10 Picture Stories from World History, 10 Piracy, 13, 139. See also “Slave Ship” Pittsburgh Courier, 132 Poe, Edgar Allen, 14, 45 preachies, characteristics of, 3, 18-21, 26, 42, 49-50, 78-79, 98, 121 Pustz, Matthew, 15 radio shows, 11, 13, 25fn1 realism, social, 18, 26, 28-29, 41, 54; in contrast to speculative fiction, 106, 115-117 “Reflection of Death!,” 15-17, 85, 139 Reicher, Stephen, 93 Reider, John, 115, 123-124 Retzinger, Suzanne M., 79

iNDex Rifas, Leonard, 69 Roberts, Thomas J., 27-29, 41-43 Roussos, George, 112-115, 139 S. M. Iger Studio, 12 Saddle Justice, 12 Samuels, Shirley, 83, 89 Scheff, Thomas J., 79 science fiction pulp magazines, 11, 16, 108-110 “The Secret,” 30, 43 segregation, racial, 5, 8, 54, 63-66, 76, 87-89, 91-95, 107, 111, 124-126, 133134 sentimental fiction, 82-83 seriality, 25-26, 35, 89, Severin, Marie, 6, 8fn13, 57, 59, 69, 75, 91 sexual assault, 19, 36, 38, 62, 95-98 shame, 38, 52, 54, 77-103, 121, 127 Shock SuspenStories, 8, 18-21, 28-32, 36-44, 52-54, 77, 87, 106, 112. See also under titles of individual stories Simon, Allen, 10 slavery 10-11, 83, 112-115, 130fn78 “Slave Ship” 113fn36, 139 “The Slave Ship,” 68, 112-115, 117, 139 Spiegelman, Art, 99, 101-102 Stark, Larry, 14, 20, 48, 130. See also letters from EC readers Steamboat (Captain Marvel), 7, 57, 62. See also Fawcett Comics stereotypes, racial and ethnic, 7, 53, 5659, 64, 68, 70, 72, 105, 116, 124 Stuart, Lyle, 28fn12 Tales from the Crypt (The Crypt of Ter ror), 13, 28, 35, 41, 66, 84; Crypt Keeper, x, 6, 23, 25, 27, 35, 50; “Reflection of Death!,” 15-17, 85, 139. See also “The Bath” “The Teacher from Mars,” 131, 139 Tilley, Carol, 6, 23, 26, 39, 48-49 Tiny Tot Comics, 9

iNDex Tompkins, Jane, 83 Trans-World, 19 Trombetta, Jim, 13fn38 Truman, Harry, 53-54, 66-67 Tuskegee Institute, 119, 133-134 Two-Fisted Tales, 13, 27, 53, 69, 112. See also “Bunker!” “Under Cover!,” 43, 92, 94, 62fn37, 139 US Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency: aftermath on comics industry, 39, 104; discussions of EC comics during, 29-32, 42, 4647; Gaines’ testimony, 20-21, 33-36, 44; letters from EC readers to, 49, 134-135 The Vault of Horror, 13-14, 53fn8 War Against Crime, 12-13 Warshow, Robert, and son Paul, 44-49. See also letters from EC readers Watt-Evans, Lawrence, 19 “Way in the Middle of the Air,” 110. See also Ray Bradbury Weird Fantasy, 3-4, 13, 68, 107-110, 112118, 122-131, 133, 137-139; See also “Judgment Day!” Weird Science-Fantasy, 13, 108, 131, 137 Weird Science, 13, 108-110, 115, 123fn58, Wells, H.G., 115, 119 Wertham, Fredric: anticomics criticism, 26, 36, 40; race hatred in comics,

181 critique of, 32, 105; reading of “The Whipping,” 38-39; Paul Warshow’s letter to, 46-47; testimony before US Senate, 20-21, 30 Wessler, Carl, 95-96, 113fn36, 138-139 “The Whipping,” 20-21, 32-34, 36-43, 49, 53, 87, 93-94, 139 White, Ted, 12 Wildenberg, Harry, 9 Witty, Paul, 48 Wonder Woman, 7, 10, 12 Wood, Wallace “Wally”: artistic style, 15; compared to Joe Orlando, 115116; “In Gratitude…,” 64, 66; “The Guilty!,” 56-61; “Perimeter!,” 69-76; The Spirit, 59fn25; “The Whipping,” 36, 40-41 World War II: as represented in comics, 17, 98-102, 111; impact on comics industry, 3, 5-6, 69; impact on society and civil rights, 44, 54, 76, 82, 94 Wright, Bradford W., 6, 8-9, 18fn57, 20, 28-29, 40 Wright, Nicky, 10, 14 Writer’s Digest, 25-29, 32 Yezbick, Daniel, F. 6, 17, 116, 118 Youthful Magazines, 116 “‘Taint the Meat . . . It’s the Humanity!,” 17

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Qiana Whitted is a professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. A graduate of Hampton University with a PhD from Yale, her research focuses on African American literature, cultural studies, and American comic books. Her publications include the co-edited collection Comics and the U.S. South (2012) and the monograph “A God of Justice?”: The Problem of Evil in TwentiethCentury Black Literature (2009). She is also editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and chair of the International Comic Arts Forum. Her homepage is www.qianawhitted.com.