The Horror Comics of the 1940s and 1950s

It is now October and longtime readers of this blog will know that every October I do the 'Month of Horror' where each blog post we look at something terrifying. To start 2018's Month of Horror I'd thought it would be interesting to look at a forgotten part of comic book history. By the end of the 1940s most superhero comics had gone into decline with only really Batman, Superman and Captain Marvel (now called Shazam) surviving until their return in the second half of the 1950s. In that time comic companies experimented with a range of genres including Western, romance, and, most importantly, horror. You don't see many comics truly in the horror genre. We have some notable ones including Scott Snyder's Wytches and the manga by Junji Ito but considering the size of the medium horror comics are a bit underrepresented. However, this wasn't always the case. During the late-1940s and 1950s there was a plethora of surprisingly graphic horror comics and today we're looking at them.

The Rise of Horror

Eerie #1

Superheroes were incredibly popular during the Second World War - readers saw the daring exploits of the comic book heroes and made a link to wartime propaganda. Soldiers were represented as heroes fighting for, (in the words of Superman comics), 'truth, freedom and the American way' so readers read the comics and imagined their friends and relatives doing the same. However, when the war ended so did the love for superheroes with the exception of a few like Captain Marvel and Batman. The end of the War did not bring an end to global issues making readers lose faith in glossy heroes, and returning veterans wanted something different. For several years they had been exposed to stories filled with sex and violence which made them want more which superhero comics, aimed at a younger audience, didn't offer. Avon Periodicals answered the call with a one-shot comic in January 1947 called Eerie (pictured above). The cover would create a stereotype for horror and comics for years to come which showed inspiration from the Universal horror movies like Dracula and The Bride of Frankenstein: a scantily clad, slim, voluptuous, bounded young woman was looking fearful in ruins as a vampire resembling Count Orlok from Nosferatu leering over her. Inside were stories of terror including a man being haunted by the ghost of a tiger and another of an island infested with carnivorous lizards. It was tame and even had some humour in it; a story of a man haunted by his wife was called 'The Strange Case of Henpecked Henry' and there was a two-paged story featuring a comical ghost. Nevertheless, it started a trend and a year later the first ongoing horror comic began with Adventures into the Unknown by American Comics Group. The first issue adapted Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto as well as other stories; the first two issues featured stories of werewolves, killer puppets and ghosts. This began a trend which other companies decided to emulate, including Marvel...

Marvel's Dabble with Horror

At this stage I'm using Marvel, anachronistically: it would not be known as Marvel for years to come. By 1949 Timely Comics (which would go through another name change before becoming Marvel) was having an identity crisis. The end of World War Two had damaged Timely's three main characters: Human Torch, Namor and Captain America. It had started moving away from superheroes to focus on Westerns like Two-Gun Kid, romances like My Romance and at times mixing the two together with comics like Rangeland Love. Timely even made an Archie-esque humour comic called Millie the Model and even got Archie artist Dan DeCarlo to write and draw for the comic from issue 18 in order to compete with Archie. The popularity of Adventures into the Unknown had spawned several other horror series so Timely joined in, tentatively at first. In August 1943 Timely's first publication as Timely, Marvel Comics or since issue two Marvel Mystery Comics, was renamed Marvel Tales in issue 93 featuring a cover featuring a shadowy ghoul. However, more shockingly was what they did with Captain America. Captain America's Comics in issue 74 was renamed Captain America's Weird Tales featuring a demonic looking Red Skull looming over a far smaller Captain America, seen only from behind, and Captain America was much smaller in the title compared to Weird Tales. Even the story embraced horror where Captain America fought Red Skull in Hell! The next issue only had Captain America in the title of the comic itself and eventually Captain America would be scrubbed out entirely. The cover was done by Gene Colan who would later be a major illustrator in Marvel and one of the few female illustrators.

Timely's first embracing of Horror

Timely in 1951 would launch two horror comics, Mystic and Strange Tales, who were often used interchangeably. Those who know their comic book history will recognise Strange Tales as the comic which would go on to publish Doctor Strange and Nick Fury stories. The reason for these publications was to compete with another company which we'll get to later on. In December Timely became Atlas and with it came more horror comics including Journey Into Mystery which would go on to publish Thor. Atlas would further embrace the horror trend even turning comics with little to do with horror into horror comics. In 1948 to entice fans of teen humour and a female audience Timely had started publishing a comic called Venus about the goddess who came to Earth, fell in love, and then hi-jinks ensued. As her popularity decreased by 1952 more fantasy and horror elements were brought in including her being embraced by a man whose face turned into a quite graphic skull. The comics started becoming increasingly graphic. In one, Suspense #29, future Marvel heavyweight Stan Lee and artist Joe Maneely had a cover featuring a man being buried alive with sheer and realistic terror on his face. One story in the comic, 'The Raving Maniac', featured a Stan Lee stand-in arguing with a stand-in for psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, a fierce critic of comics, who is dragged to an asylum. Astonishing #34, pictured below, is very graphic and disturbing featuring on its cover a terrified man awaiting the blade of a guillotine. 

This was published by the same people who would later publish Spider-Man!

Timely and Atlas never truly embraced horror. Although it had many horror comics it had an equal amount of romance and Westerns, and after the outbreak of the Korean War there was a boom in war and spy comics. At times it even continued to dabble in bringing back superheroes although this would not properly happen until Stan Lee and Jack Kirby took over. They were also fairly tame for the time compared to its competitors. Even though it's very intense Astonishing #34 had nothing on the comics by another company...

EC Comics - The Masters of Horror

Tales from the Crypt #31, compared to the comics from Atlas it is far more distressing featuring more graphic images, actual weapons, and depictions of violence

In 1944 a new company called Educational Comics was founded by Maxwell Gaines and, unsurprisingly, largely published educational comics for schools and Churches. He later was killed in a boating accident in 1947 bringing control of the company to his son, William. Being a veteran himself he knew that more mature stories would be popular so renaming the company to be Entertaining Comics, or EC, he began publishing darker stories. These dealt with sex, drugs, racism, justice, revenge, violence, and commentaries on society with Gaines himself even contributing to a few stories. EC soon made its mark for two reasons: its biting satirical comic MAD and its gory, graphic and violent horror comics. Over the course of 1950 three bi-monthly horror comics were published: The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, and, most famously, Tales from the Crypt. There would be other comics like Weird Science and SuspenStories but these would be the main three. In practice there was little to distinguish each of the three comics with all of them featuring violent and graphic supernatural tales with accompanying images. Instead to differentiate the three each one had a 'host' who in most of the comics would link each story together. Vault featured a hooded old man named the Vault-Keeper who would later be joined by a scantily clad silent co-host called Drusilla; Haunt featured a cackling and almost disformed witch with one giant eye called the Old Witch; and Crypt featured sinister hermit sitting on the threshold of a crypt called the Crypt-Keeper. At times the hosts would appear in the comics themselves. As the comics progressed the hosts would become increasingly comedic making jokes as they introduced the stories and pretending to have a rivalry with each other. 

The hosts: top-right is the Crypt-Keeper; bottom-left is the Old Witch; and bottom-right is the Crypt-Keeper

Gaines had a surprising large influence in writing the stories often reading horror stories beforehand and then using that as a springboard to write stories. Several stories show clear inspiration from various H.P. Lovecraft stories, 'Voodoo Horror' in issue 17 of Vault shows inspiration from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and at least two stories in Haunt show inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Some stories showed a bit too much inspiration from stories by Ray Bradbury; so much so that Bradbury actually contacted EC about plagiarising his stories. They came to an agreement where EC would adapt six of his stories, two in each comic, and the charges of plagiarism were dropped. Stories often featured themes of ironic, and gruesome, poetic justice including one where a husband kills and stuffs his wife's cat only for her to take revenge by doing the same to him. Other stories included gory retellings of fairy tales, tales of conjoined twins (about nine stories all together), and satire on injustices in society including lynching, political corruption, racism, and antisemitism. Naturally all of this was accompanied by sex, suspense, violence, guts and gore. There's one cover from Crypt #44 which I like to imagine is the aftermath of the cover of Astonishing #34:

EC was never shy of showing the darker side of life. While Atlas was publishing heroic stories of soldiers EC was publishing stories of soldiers going mad. I can't show all of their more gruesome parts, I'm literally spoiled for choice, so I'll just show one: a man handcuffed to another man who's gorily being torn apart by vultures.

Why then did all this come to an end? Why don't we refer to EC in the same way we do Marvel, DC, or Dark Horse? Two words: public scandal.

The End and Legacies

The 1950s were times of change in the US. We saw the first steps of the African-American Civil Rights movement and Second Wave feminism causing great waves in society, but also there was a conservative backlash to changes. One reason for this was thanks to the Cold War and Red Scare. Fear of 'Reds under the Bed' spread across the US as individuals ranging from Richard Nixon to Walt Disney vowed to root out communist subversion. People were concerned that communists were attacking traditional values and Christian morality so there were cries to have them protected. There was a second reason concerning the youth. The 1950s saw the emergence of a teenage subculture, especially among the middle-class. As famously shown in the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause a new generation born into affluence and bored with life emerged, and was willing to rebel against the family system. A moral panic happened targeting everything from movies to books to music; Catcher in the Rye's infamy came from this panic. Comic books were not exempt and child psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, lampooned by Stan Lee in Suspense #29, attacked the medium accusing comics of corrupting the minds of the youth. Wertham had caused a stir but what really damaged comics was his 1954 book Seduction of the Youth. He accused comics of encouraging violence, crime, and sex in a young and impressionable audience; among his accusations included saying that Batman and Robin were gay (bearing in mind the US was very homophobic), Wonder Woman promoted BDSM, Blue Beetle was a Kafkaesque nightmare, and Captain Marvel featured a decapitation. The book was criticised by contemporary comic writers, including Stan Lee, for distorting reality. For example, the 'decapitation' in Captain Marvel was really someone spilling invisible ink on someone's head and Blue Beetle was a human who dressed as a bug, not someone turned into a bug like in The Metamorphosis as Wertham claimed. In 2010 when his original research was officially released Carol Tilley found that he had even falsified his evidence that comics caused crime and mental illness; he purposefully used small test groups, children who had mental illnesses before reading comics, and even lied about results.

The Comics Code Authority which killed horror comics

Despite all this the population in moral panic mode believed Wertham. Stan Lee summed it up best:  it was like shouting fire in a theater, but there was little scientific validity to it. And yet because he had the name doctor people took what he said seriously, and it started a whole crusade against comics. A Senate committee on comics was formed with Wertham as chief witness and it even brought William Gaines up before it! The committee decided that comics did not cause crime but it did give a thinly veiled threat that comics had to voluntarily tone down the violence. Thus the Comics Code of Authority, referred to as CCA from now on, came into being. The CCA would give its stamp of approval to comics it deemed 'safe' which meant that comics couldn't be: too violent, allow villains to get away without seeing justice, showed sex, showed LGBT+ themes, or even mention 'horror' or 'zombie'. A comic could publish without adhering to the CCA but due to the Senate and moral panic if they wanted to actually get sales they needed the CCA's approval. However, EC regularly violated these rules so struggled to sell their comics. Within a year Vault, Crypt and Haunt all stopped publishing - only MAD managed to survive from EC's biggest titles. Horror comics, except Adventures into the Unknown which lasted until 1967, were wiped out. As a whole comics were throttled by the CCA and some interesting things came out of it, like Batman's 'no-kill, no-gun' rule, most times it hindered comics, especially with LGBT+ characters. Companies continued to use the CCA until the 1980s when comics became more willing to publish maturer comics which caused a domino effect. More and more comics started being published and were selling with CCA approval and soon companies stopped seeking CCA approval. By 2010 only three companies continued with the CCA, including strangely DC which in the 1980s had several major maturer comics like The Dark Knight Returns, but within a year no companies signed up to the CCA. 

Creepshow by Stephen King and George A. Romero is practically an EC comic on screen

The CCA is a big reason why we don't have as many horror comics today as you would expect but their brief time in the sun proved very influential. Particularly the EC horror comics were read by many people who in turn would keep the horror anthology series alive. In 1972 there was a Tales from the Crypt movie which adapted several stories from all of EC's comics which was overshadowed by HBO's own series of the same name. The Crypt-Keeper was re-imagined as a corpse and it adapted again stories from across EC's library. It even featured guest stars and directors including an episode by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then in 1982 two masters of horror, Stephen King and George A. Romero, came together to make an anthology film called Creepshow heavily inspired by EC's stories. The film opens with a boy having his horror comic taken away by his dad and who is later visited by the host of the comic called the Creep. We get the five stories from the comic featuring supernatural monsters, ironic revenge, dark comedy and features classic effects by Tom Savini of Dawn of the Dead and Friday the 13th fame. A sequel was made but the third movie had nothing to do with King, Romero, and EC which also explains why it was terrible and direct-to-DVD holding 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. In the last ten years comic companies have reprinted the old EC horror comics introducing the tales of horror and suspense to a new generation. 

Thank you for reading and I hope you found it interesting. Catch the blog every week this month for other Month of Horror posts. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby. Also, in the UK it is Black History Month and to mark this on Facebook for every day we're doing a short post about something from black history if you want to check that out.