"Incredibly creative and perhaps surprisingly socially conscious horror"
Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire (2022) by W. Scott Poole
Poole's exploration of U.S. history is informed by a jejune Chomsky-Zinn petty bourgeois left politics (i.e. George W. Bush-era campus whateverism).
Subtext, never far from the surface: U.S. workers benefited from empire, as Caucasians supposedly benefited from racist oppression.
Dark Carnivals is a book filled with abstract generalizations that cut against a class understanding of events:
"American state of mind"
"the American public"
His analysis of the horror field, though, is thoughtful and not perfunctory. Alas, most of the emphasis is on movies.
Excerpt:
10.Two-Fisted Tales
WAS THERE a political motive behind EC? On the one hand, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein appeared to adopt a smash-and-grab style of attack on popular attitudes with no clear political agenda. In an advertisement for new writers in the February 1954 issue of Writer’s Digest, Gaines asked prospective authors to recall that “We love walking corpse stories” and tales in which “the villain tries to get away with murder—and probably does. No cops and robbers stories. Virtue doesn’t have to triumph over evil.”
In a time that worked assiduously to maintain a frozen smile, it’s impossible to overemphasize how much this represented a call for anarchy. Moreover, while EC has received understandable credit (or blame) for pioneering such stories, nearly 150 different horror comic titles appeared in the early fifties from their rivals, most reveling in the same kind of brutal art and gruesome storytelling.
Sometimes much more specific political critique of the American empire appeared from EC. Readers, including a new wave of adult readers, began to see the EC brand as a mark of quality and maturity—not to mention bloody images and bleak ideas hard to find in other nooks and crannies of popular culture. Horror remained the primary draw, and few companies other than EC managed to come up with a continuing stream of exceptionally weird ideas, macabre humor, and unforgettable artwork.
But the work of Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood ensured EC horror would be tinctured with an even stronger dose of cultural criticism than The Crypt of Terror or Vault of Horror. A series of comics took on American imperialism past and present, often telling truer tales of American history than most of the era’s school textbooks. Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, titles that seemed to promise childish conceptions of war, carried a radically different message.
Kurtzman, who authored most of EC’s war comics, grew up in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1920s and ’30s. His family left Odessa after World War I. His stepfather (his father died when Kurtzman was very young) regularly read the radical Daily Worker and could be described as an active socialist at a time when the movement conceived of itself as deeply American and patriotic. Kurtzman joined the army soon after high school. Although trained as a rifleman, his talents as an artist and writer soon found him illustrating posters and camp newspapers.
Wallace Wood (known to everyone in the EC bullpen as Woody) grew up in Minnesota, graduating high school near the end of World War II. He served briefly in the Merchant Marine and then as a paratrooper in the Army Airborne. In his early work for EC, horror from and in space became his first love and he excelled in imagining Lovecraftian creatures rearing their oily tentacles and oozing green slime. But Woody’s turn to war comics made horror much more visceral and, along with Kurtzman, created what can only be described as anti-war war comics.
Kurtzman told an interviewer in 1972 that “all our stories really protested war.” Woody covered the panels of EC’s war comics with decaying body parts and, in one particularly haunting tale of trench warfare in the First World War, featured a rat crawling out of an empty eye socket in no-man’s-land. Even a story of the Revolutionary War, “Pell’s Point,” questioned the values of a gung ho Continental Army soldier who ends up bayonetted in a foolish and pointless show of bravado.39
Most astonishing of all, a 1953 Kurtzman/Wood tale called “Atom Bomb” followed the daily life of a Japanese family in Nagasaki. Wood drew bodies swept into a sky on fire but also the slow death of radiation sickness that followed. Kurtzman ended the story by showing a young survivor but also recording the grim statistics of the blast.40
This comic masterpiece appeared at a time when very few Americans understood the consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. government made a full-throated effort to squelch information about the death toll of the bomb and the effects of radiation sickness. John Hersey’s book had already passed out of the American consciousness, and in fact historian Paul Boyer suggests its account may have allowed readers to face the horror of the A-bomb and then literally “close the book on that episode.”41
EC encouraged readers young and old to reopen the black book of American crimes. Both their war and horror lines joined in a full-frontal assault on the values and assumptions of white Americans in the 1950s. Why did anyone want to read an attack on their values? David Hajdu has suggested that the success of EC emerged out of the fear of the times. The empty-eyed corpses that shambled from panic to panel in EC and their competition “could not have been far removed from the readers’ mental pictures of their own fate in the wake of the nuclear holocaust.” Maybe at least some Americans were terrified of what their values might do to them and the world.42
Not surprisingly, the efforts of EC and its artists and writers attracted plenty of unwanted attention. The FBI briefly investigated EC in the final year of the Korean War. An April 29, 1952, memo from Hoover’s office suggested that the government might render a charge of sedition against Gaines and even specific artists. EC comics, the memo read, “tend to discredit the army and undermine troop morale.”43
Other comic publishers faced similar scrutiny, none more than Lev Gleason of Lev Gleason Publications. His company’s series Crime Doesn’t Pay seemed to promise a moral message in its very title. It told stories from the perspective of criminals themselves. Although Gleason could point to the fact that the characters in these books did face the consequences of their actions in the final panels, the stories tended to build sympathy for bank robbers and crime lords in a fashion not dissimilar from gangster pictures of the thirties such as The Public Enemy and Little Caesar.
Gleason also faced intense personal scrutiny from the FBI, who closely monitored his activities during World War II. In December of 1943, Hoover sent a memo to the special agent in charge of the New York bureau ordering the office to “immediately open a case” on Gleason that would “develop fully all information on his Communist activities.” Gleason does not seem to have ever been a member of the CPUSA, though he certainly worked with communists. The FBI investigation focused on three matters in particular: Gleason and his wife traveled to Mexico City for a meeting of an organization devoted to aiding refugees of the Spanish Civil War. He attended meetings of the left-wing Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Most damning, from the perspective of Hoover’s men in black, Gleason wrote a letter to the editor of the Newcastle News that praised “our ally” the Soviet Union during World War II at a time when, in fact, the Soviet Union was our ally.44
The FBI lost interest in the investigation, possibly because heavier thunderheads emerged over the comics industry by 1953. A national panic developed over comics in the aftermath of the brutal but indecisive Korean War. Students of folklore describe such moments as a moral panic, a widespread sense that some kind of poisonous conspiracy planned to subvert society.
A moral panic has far sharper incisors than what’s sometimes called an urban legend. A panic may begin with the sharing of baseless stories told as personal anecdotes. But it ends with legal and political authorities taking such stories seriously and announcing to the public that some insidious danger threatens the very foundations of national life.
The great comic book scare had numerous sources in the 1950s. The actual content, both imagery and text, played more of a role than the problematic idea of “mass hysteria.” EC and their many imitators really did challenge some of the basic values of America’s dominant culture; in the lurid beauty of their pages, American family life became an abattoir, with spouses plotting each other’s demise while teenage rebellion took the form of homicide. The angry dead refused to stay in their graves, a disturbing image at any time but particularly after a half century of corpses being produced by global war. Artists suggested that war and the military represented pointless bloodletting and institutionalized sadism.
Estes Kefauver of Tennessee led an investigation of possible links between what the era called “juvenile delinquency” and comics. His committee soon moved on to an investigation of organized crime for which he became famous. But the grassroots hand-wringing of parents, clergy, and civic leaders continued, their fears blooming an angry red. Parochial schools and PTAs held public burnings of comics, and now and again parents took it upon themselves to purify their households of the comic scourge.
Some of these burnings involved students allegedly gathering up offensive comics themselves, although David Hajdu’s interviews with participants at several of these local events revealed that many of the students never read the comics anyway, while some may have developed an interest in them while stoking the bonfires. At a Catholic high school in New Jersey, one alum remembered years later that as they stacked comics for incineration, a pile developed of “jungle books, with their covers of heroines swinging from vines in leopard-skin bikinis.” That particular pile disappeared, saved from the conflagration by “several of the young crusaders” who hid it “under a step in the boys’ lavatory.”45
The war against comics coalesced at the national level in a series of Senate hearings culminating in the industry creating their own Comics Code. EC refused to comply, only to find they’d been abandoned. They would turn to the magazine format with many in their stable of artists, like Wally Wood, working for companies that created horror magazines like Creepy and Eerie to continue the EC tradition. The size and the amount of text in the new magazines allowed them to operate safely outside the Comics Code.
Twenty-six publishers assented to the code and incorporated the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) to administer its standards. Charles F. Murphy, a judge with a particular concern for the alleged outbreak of juvenile delinquency, headed the association. Most publishers felt they could keep sales up by sanitizing their comics while also destroying competitors who essentially depended on crime and horror fantasy. In a move that clearly suggested this mercenary motive, one of the first provisions of the new code banned the use of even the words horror and terror.
The German émigré Fredric Wertham has usually been presented as the villain behind the death of EC’s glory days. His November 1953 Ladies’ Home Journal article “What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books” appeared to lend scientific justification for parental anxiety. The book born from his somewhat limited reading of comics bore the dangerously sensationalist title Seduction of the Innocent.
Wertham’s book appeared at a time when local police produced public service announcements like the Inglewood, California, police department’s “Boys Beware,” which insisted in the ugliest of terms that gay men are by definition sexual predators. Wertham’s willingness to tap into those dark energies remains unforgivable, particularly since it seems his own celebrity became his driving motivation as national fame beckoned.46
However, Wertham himself remains a complicated figure. He did not favor complete censorship of comics and his reputation as the incarnation of a killjoy has overshadowed his work on, for example, the Brown v. Board of Education case the same year he released Seduction of the Innocent. His work on Brown grew in part from the free psychiatric clinic he ran for African Americans in New York City, at a time when the Black community continued to be denied any access to mental health care beyond segregated and often brutal institutionalization. Influenced to some degree by the Frankfurt School’s critique of popular culture, he saw comics and television as narcotics for the masses, especially dangerous to the young.47
Wertham saved his harshest words for comics that related in any way to the supernatural. They were, he insisted, “horror, crime, sadism, monsters, ghouls, corpses dead and alive . . .” He unfortunately could not see that the best of these tales mirrored many of his own concerns over social justice and American apathy. In the many stories of nonconformist adolescents that peopled the pages of Vault and Crypt, parents are repeatedly shown as desensitized by exhausting work, television, and their afternoon martinis.
EC even broached the topic of American racism at a moment when most white readers would have been unaware of a struggle for racial justice or its origins in the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The final comic published by the company in February of 1956, an issue of Incredible Science Fiction, featured a story called “Judgment Day!” in which a human astronaut visits a planet of orange automata that has long been at war with blue automata. The orange mechanicals, we learn, once enslaved their blue counterparts. The astronaut decides the planet has not advanced enough beyond the most savage prejudices to join an intergalactic alliance. As he blasts off to return to earth, he removes his helmet to reveal that he is an African American, a not-so-subtle note to the reader about the nature of the allegory they just read.
The very moderate liberal appeal to tolerance in a science fiction tale proved too much for the CMAA. When Feldstein submitted the story for approval, Judge Murphy leaned back in his heavy leather chair and looked gimlet-eyed at the editor.
“You can’t have a Negro,” Murphy declared flatly.
Feldstein, genuinely shocked, asked what part of the Comics Code forbid the representation of Black people. Murphy said he had the authority to forbid it. Feldstein walked out.
Back at the EC bullpen, the news made Gaines something more than furious. He was finished with comics. He let Murphy know that he planned to hold a press conference describing the effort to censor “Judgment Day!” and tell anyone who would listen that the Comics Code apparently had a deeply racist agenda.
Murphy called Gaines and announced a sudden change of heart, but he bizarrely suggested that the final panel should be fine as long as the artist removed the beads of sweat popping from the character’s forehead. Apparently, Murphy considered an African American man sweating in a comic too suggestive.
“Fuck you,” Gaines said, and slammed down the phone.48
EC published the story with only one change. Feldstein called attention to the controversial perspiration by adding to the text that “the instrument lights [of the spaceship] made the beads of perspiration on his dark skin twinkle like distant stars.”
Gaines had largely been right when he suggested that the Comics Code allowed for racist caricature. In fact, white supremacist fantasies, ignored by the conservative critics of comics, flourished in “jungle adventure” stories not dissimilar from the mad-scientist-zombie-jungle-horror films in the forties, fifties, and sixties (explored in the next section of this book). But Wertham is not guilty by association. Part of his critique of comics in general, if not EC in particular, concerned how “jungle adventure” tales affected the self-esteem of Black children and encouraged a rancid racism in their white counterparts.49
William W. Savage Jr. explained the racist assumptions of this comic genre well when he described, in his wonderfully researched and written Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens: Comic Books and America, 1945–1954, the “jungle lords and ladies” that all imitated Tarzan in stories that regarded Black people as “a form of fauna” not so different from “lions, panthers, snakes, [and] elephants.”50
The incredibly creative and perhaps surprisingly socially conscious horror and crime comics created some interesting work. Fans of EC, for example, included what would become a new generation of horror film directors who would completely reimagine how to tell tales of terror in a darkened theater. George A. Romero even drew on the visual style of comics, noting how they had influenced the way he shot and edited Dawn of the Dead.51
Perhaps Wertham was correct that comic creators engaged in a spree of “horror, crime, sadism, monsters.” What he missed is that such stories grew directly out of the tortured history of the nation. By the 1960s, more and more Americans would come to agree with Malcolm X, and EC comics, that they’d been sold an “American dream” but found themselves in an “American nightmare.”
