Oct. 10, 2013 -- We can learn a lot of lessons from old horror comics.
These lessons weren’t evident until recently. As most comics fans know, horror comics – and comics in general – were nearly wiped out when public hysteria panicked comics publishers into adopting the draconian Comics Code of 1954. Which was nearly the end of comics in America.
Now, comics are back. And so are horror comics. Further, old horror comics have been rehabilitated, and are getting high-end reprint treatment.
A UK firm, PS Artbooks, has hired comics legend Roy Thomas as a consultant and taken it upon themselves to collect in hardcover a vast array of U.S. horror titles from long-defunct publishers, like ACG, Charlton, Fiction House and Harvey. Dark Horse and Dynamite are reprinting the classic Warren books Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. Then there’s comics historian Craig Yoe’s “Chilling Archives of Horror Comics” line from IDW, which collects stories by creator or genre.
There’s plenty more, including large amounts of material from titans Marvel and DC, but you get the drift: America’s horror comics – or “suspense” titles, as they were called after 1954 – are finally available in a fairly broad sample.
That means we can now start learning those aforementioned lessons:
1. Stop Listening to People Who Blame Pop Culture
In addition to exhaustive academic studies that show no link between sex and violence in entertainment and criminal behavior, comics provide an object lesson.
In 1954, hysterical preachers, politicians and parents screeched that crime and horror comics were causing juvenile delinquency. That link was even investigated by a U.S. Senate subcommittee. The “Kefauver Commission” absolved comics, but nobody remembers that now because the Comics Code codified the prejudice that comics were terrible, awful junk only fit for children, and brain-damaged children at that.
Now we know different. The graphic novel Maus won a Pulitzer Prize. Comics material, which requires thought and craft, dominates the movies. Libraries stock graphic novels and host seminars on them. And this newspaper you’re reading prints a comics columnist. Comics run the gamut from big business to educational supplements.
That “juvenile delinquency” thing didn’t really work out, even back in ‘54. Nor will it for the other convenient targets of today.
So tomorrow, when you hear another cable-news talking head blame some awful event on comics – or movies, videogames, TV, rap music, Dungeons & Dragons, or any other scapegoat – don’t believe them. Pop culture isn’t the engine of our value system, it’s a reflection of it.
In other words, we get the entertainment we deserve.
2. Not All Horror Comics Are the Same
When people discuss early 1950s horror comics, they’re usually thinking of EC Comics, the gold standard for both quality storytelling and gross-out gore. But as these new collections demonstrate, each line had its unique qualities.
Over at ACG, plucky everymen and their even pluckier girlfriends routinely humbled the forces of darkness with wit and courage – before, inevitably, the happy ending where the couple begin planning their wedding. Harvey’s books mixed all kinds of lunacy in a torrent of nonsensical, barely coherent chaos, like a teenager’s Id threw up all over the page. Books like Hillman’s “The Heap” offered cautionary tales, or sad reveries on the human condition.
The mostly unknown writers of the 1950s demonstrated time and again that genre – and crummy pay – was no constraint to creativity.
3. The Times, They Are Always A-Changing
Read 1950s horror comics, and you see a lot of tough-guy detectives, two-fisted newspaper reporters, vampiric European noblemen and other reflections of the era. Read Creepy and Eerie stories from the 1970s, and be prepared for day-glo bell-bottoms, people saying “right on” without irony, strings-free sex, campus unrest, Vietnam war cynicism, tons of facial hair, VW vans and Afros so big they can be seen from space.
If you read enough comics, you become an expert on American sociology. And often it’s unintentionally hilarious.
4. Never Make a Deal with the Devil
One thing that never changes, in stories from any era or any medium, is that trying to outsmart Satan never works. Also, wishing on a monkey’s paw is a bad idea. As is buying anything from a strange curio shop that wasn’t there a minute ago. Or exploring that area of the jungle that the natives say is cursed, or climbing that mountain where every previous expedition has disappeared, or going in that creepy old house you inherited that everyone says is haunted.
I mean, seriously! Are these people just stupid? Like the idiot teens in slasher movies, who split up in the dark to explore closets, the protagonists in many comic-book horror stories hit such familiar “Twilight Zone” turf and bungle it so badly that you begin to root for them to die.
Just to tidy up the gene pool!
Some people just never learn. That’s a bad thing for them. But it’s a good thing for those of us who like a good chiller. Even if it’s a bit silly!
Contact Captain Comics at capncomics@aol.com.
Replies
Regarding pop culture and violence; I think the conclusion that culture is always a reflection and not an engine does not follow from the argument that studies have failed to show a connection between sex and violence in entertainment and criminal behaviour.
It may be the case that a direct relationship cannot be demonstrated between the level of violence in society and the level of violence in entertainment. It doesn't follow that the depiction of sex in pop culture has no influence on young people's behaviour, or that negative depictions of minorities do not reinforce negative views of those minorities, or that attractive depictions of smoking in pop culture didn't influence people to smoke. Violence might be a special case, as for many individuals the desire for violence in entertainment is a desire for excitement as opposed to violence.
It's implausible that culture doesn't influence behaviour. Pop culture is part of culture. Possibly other elements of culture are more important in shaping behaviour; I could believe some have more authority than others (e.g. sermons for religious people), and that some of the most important influences are personal, from family and friends. But it can be a factor without being all-important or acting independently of other factors.
The Birth of a Nation influenced the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. I recently heard about a book by John Loken called Oswald's Trigger Films that argues for the influence on Lee Harvey Oswald of three films depicting assassinations or attempted assassinations.
One brief aside on point number 4 Cap, OMD/BND established that in comics you can make a deal with the devil and come away from it happy, healthy and scott free.
Other than that people who make their living as Wetham did will always find a reason even if they have to use a magnifying glass to do it. As long as they can give a good speech on it and keep to a set of talking points they usually seem to make a living off of it.
I agree that pop culture can influence behavior, otherwise there would be little advertising. My favorites are the beer and deodorant ads with women literally hanging off of guys once they use the product. Whether extremes of violence desensitize people to it or serve as a release valve is more the question. It's probably both, depending on the person.
Wertham's correlation-equals-causation argument seems fairly silly today, but we still have all kinds of people proposing lunatic conspiracies and questioning science because it's only "theories." I'd like to think we're more sophisticated than to have a Wertham-style jihad against culture today, but I don't think we are.
What we are past is comic books being part of that conversation. They've been so marginalized and so surpassed by the gore and violence in TV, movies and video games that comics don't have much to worry about. They may still be harrassed for sexual images, since comics are for kids, but I don't think anyone will point to comics as the source of today's violence.
-- MSA
Yer preaching to the choir here, Cap, especially regarding point #2. I agree with you wholeheartedly that EC comics were “the gold standard for both quality storytelling and gross-out gore,” but (I have learned) that that doesn’t mean there weren’t other good horror comics. they all their own flavor (and some of them were bad, with few redeeming qualities). I’ve said it before, but the best source for affordable non-EC horror comics is Craig Yoe’s periodical Haunted Horror.
On the other hand pop culture can shape itself. I remember when I was a kid any movie that made money would spawn a host of tv shows to imitate it. It's like a set of mirrors that constantly shift to reflect themselves.
Alexandra Kitty said:
Pop culture reflects society rather than shape it -- it gives legitimacy or an okay to certain things, but to get an audience, it has to appeal to some quality people are looking for.
I agree that if they didn't want to see/read it it wouldn't sell. The opinion today that Shooter-A played video games therefore they caused it overlooks all the normal, law-abiding people who play them. It's exactly like Wertham's argument about Delinquent-A reading comics, ignoring all the good people who read them.
And I love my old horror comics -- such dreadful moralizing tales of what happens to bad boys and girls who don't eat all of their vegetables and smoke illegal substances on the stage -- or while serving as mayor!
This reminds me of a couple of short stories Mark Twain wrote. In his day they were publishing tales of the Good Little Boy and the Bad Little Boy, showing their rewards and punishment, presumably from On High. (In the sexist tone of the times, there was no such thing as a Bad Little Girl) Twain wrote parodies of these tales turning them on their heads. The Good Little Boy was a sucker who got nowhere and the Bad Little Boy prospered.
Sounds like the Black Adder Christmas Carol.
Richard Willis said:
Reminds me of something George Carlin once said -- something along the lines of, "They say smoking weed leads to snorting coke and to shooting heroin. In that case, mother's milk leads to everything!!"
I'd like to know what those three films were, and if they were in widespread distribution. I know that Frank Sinatra used his influence to pull "The Manchurian Candidate" from distribution at the time of the JFK assassination, because he felt it was in poor taste to have such a tale out there. It sat on a shelf for more than 25 years before being "recently" released again. It has not aged well, but it does have a scarey vibe to it.
Luke Blanchard said:
The description of the book at Amazon indicates it discusses three films, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Suddenly (1954) and We Were Strangers (1949), and goes into whether Oswald saw them. Not having read Mr Loken's book, I can't say how convincing his case is. I've seen Suddenly and a few minutes of We Were Strangers. In Suddenly a group of men led by Sinatra take over a suburban house as part of a plot to kill the US president. In We Were Strangers a group of revolutionaries in a Cuba-like country dig a tunnel with the intention of killing officials attending a funeral. In Suddenly the would-be assassins are the villains, but in We Were Strangers they're the heroes, and the film ends with a successful revolution.
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