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The Martyrdom of EC Comics

The Boneyard typically deals with the untimely demise of comics titles and concepts that deserved to survive, generally brought down by the ingratitude of a thankless business, the destruction of talent, or other circumstances we could describe as tragic. The normal scenario involves titles rather than publishers, but in one case the end came to an entire publishing line in the height of its vitality, producing in one moment visions of a lost Camelot of comics history and, at the same time, making the publisher the analog of a martyred saint. EC Comics, nearly half a century after the end came to this remarkable collective of talent and vitality, still holds a role of sacrificial lamb to a hostile world, rather unique in the folklore of comics publishing. For instance, though Fawcett Comics fell to the forces of National Periodical Publications / DC, the cause of their demise (the accusation of plagiarism) did not commend them to a martyr's role; and, furthermore, their product line did not achieve the scent of sanctity through pushing the frontiers of the form, and, as such, that company does not enjoy the kind of sympathy typical of examinations of the end of EC Comics.

Within amateur and professional comics history (and historiography), the topic of EC studies provides, by itself, an engaging specialty, even though the label itself only existed for a few years surrounding the turn of the 1950s. People who never had the opportunity to read an EC comic (and that would include many who came to read comics in the late 1960s and 1970s but never had the kind of building-sized bank wad necessary to acquire such pieces) nonetheless recognize the name in a kind of melodrama akin to a version of Inherit the Wind that cast the troubles of the medium in the 1950s like the Snopes "monkey trials." Many of us heard large tales of the legendary Dr. F. Wertham, who still stands in lore as a kind of cultural bogeyman, acting in such tales as a kind of Wlad the Impaler who skewered comics and laughed as he watched them die.

Serious cultural historians differ in opinion about Wertham's importance here, sometimes attributing to him the role of voice of a social trend rather than the head, body, hands, and entirety of anti-comics sentiment typical of analyses from the 1960s. His role, however large it became in the demise of EC in reality, nonetheless obscures an important angle of the tragedy: EC Comics had, through a combination of trying harder and doing it with hungry and clever talent, showed comics as a medium how to do it better by example, and, amid publishing books better than the standard for the industry, had raised the bar for the business, and had gone under in the height of their power.

Castor, Pollux, and Euthanasia

In a classical civilization class I took in 1983, our instructor brought before us a tale that presented the notion of euthanasia. This meant, in the context, not the kind of killing-for-mercy the term suggests in this post-Kevorkian period; instead, its overtones literally followed the etymology of eu- ("good") and thanatos ("death"). In the tale of Castor and Pollux, we see a view of how to die well.

As presented to me in a Classical Civilization course, way back in the early 1980s, Castor and Pollux accompanied their mother to a religious festival away from their home, bringing with them some kind of tribute in an ox-drawn cart. However, misfortune befell the ox, and this threatened the entire pilgrimage, but the brothers, strapping young Greek lads with the kind of slabs of muscle one expects of heroes and demigods in this tradition, saw other options than abandoning the religious festival. So, therefore, they took up the yoke worn by the ox and pulled the cart the rest of the way to the festival, and this so impressed the gods of Olympus that they ended the brothers' lives at that point and hung them in the sky as a constellation.

That these fine twin brothers should die at such a moment seems, to us, as a matter of tragedy, even if we credit the angle of their becoming components of a constellation that will illuminate the night skies of the earth for the rest of its history. But the notion of good death this story attempted to present requires us to look, somewhat, at the process of death. Imagine the gradual fading of various of our powers and virtues - beauty, strength, memory. Imagine the state of late senescence in which more and more of us will survive to die.

Castor and Pollux never saw a falling-off from the peak of their abilities. Taken in the prime of their youth, strength, and beauty, they never saw the onset of cynicism; never even saw enough time pass that they suffered the funeral of a parent; never faced a world that compared them in decline unfavorably to versions they remembered of them in their prime. In this sense, we should understand the "good death" that the term euthanasia originally intended to mean.

This notion - in the early, not in the contemporary, sense - applies to the untimely doom that EC Comics suffered, at least as applies to the moment of their passing; the whole complex of trouble which stopped the EC dynamo turning any longer occurred just as they had hit a stride, and pre-empted the kind of burnout that might have followed a few more good years of books. Thus EC missed the kind of brain drain that occurs when talent gets burned out or burned by management; it missed the crash that follows from overuse of a concept; and it ended, more or less, at the peak of its parabola without having the opportunity to come down again. And, like the twins Castor and Pollux, many look to these works as some kind of aesthetic or comics constellation.

The Style

In a day when the remnants of Timely Comics, which would become Atlas and ultimately Marvel, could barely sell enough to keep their doors open, EC Comics put material on the shelves that very much earned them titles subsequently applied to Marvel Comics during the heyday of that concern's period of self-promotion through self-congratulation. However, in a real sense, around 1952, the ideas in comics did run from EC; where a comic tried harder, one could rely on EC having printed it; and a number of innovations or standards that would become industry goals of a later age also emanated from this ill-starred company.

EC pushed the standard for comics color, typically of a flat and not particularly dense type in comics of that period. Modern collectors do not see the full, true image of a comic printed fifty years ago since the laws of physics have done their job on the papers and inks over five decades; but some of the best-preserved specimens show color not significantly deeper, denser, or more elaborate than typical of a Sunday comics page (logically enough, given the evolutionary relationship between newspaper comics and the comic book). However, EC did things with internal color that outdid the industry standard for comics color as late as the seventies; Neal Adams has remarked that he sometimes receives credit for color processes he brought to comics at DC and Marvel, where he simply used strategies for handling color perfected at EC Comics. Consider, then, that something like 20 years separate the heyday of EC and Neal Adams' color work on Avengers during the stories collected in TPB form as The Kree-Skrull War and one can see how far ahead of the industry some aspects of EC standards ran. Twenty years later, the business still hadn't caught up with them on that particular.

And we need not explore the idiosyncratic approach to lettering, which typically came via typesetters rather than conventional comics letterers, since, though comics lettering belongs among honorable comics crafts, by itself it fails to inspire the loyalty of readers. However, in defense of the honor of the trade, one may note that talents dedicated to the notion that a single man should have the skills to produce, from raw Bristol boards, pencil, ink, and tints, a page ready to present to the color separator, that talents as diverse as Neal Adams, Don Simpson, Jim Steranko, and many others have toiled over the clear and deft presentation of our shared Roman alphabet.

The art in a general sense presents a more difficult problem of description. EC artists worked mostly each in his own idiom, rather than taking an approach like late-sixties Marvel where several pencilers might attempt to modify their own work to create similarities of approach describable as a "house style." Attempts to designate technical aspects of the work of Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzmann, Jack Williamson, and Jack Davis all as reflections of such a house style will tend to fail. Beyond a tendency towards a heavy and melodramatic use of blacks in their panels, one does not make large connections between (say) Elder and Wood. But EC seemed to cultivate certain traits. For instance, one can examine the work of Elder and Wood and see a fascination with embedded detail. One can see certain cinematic techniques, similarly, in their styles, though perhaps more so in Wood's case than Elder; for instance, I can evoke from memory panels that utilize the dual-lighting approach to shading from each artist, though typically we associate this with Wally Wood because he did it so well and so often. Perhaps we should see as the one common angle in artists presenting pages in EC books a lack of complacency; no one seemed to dare to coast in this shop, and the pages resonate with the effort that went into them, either through the Jagged strokes in a Jack Davis page or the elegant detail of a Jack Williamson science fiction tale. One seldom gets further than the xeroxed talking heads approach of a daily comics page than this.

And this essentially leaves the writing, which selected writers such as Kurtzmann tended to handle on first-tier titles like Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad but which sometimes descended to the artists themselves on second-tier productions like Panic. Other columns here at Quarter Bin have examined genre conventions which EC essentially used within their own works- probably originating in pulp literature, but we must allow credit to those who make things work as well as the original inventors - and we need not examine them in too excruciating a detail here. The recurrent twist ending, however, characterized the crime, science fiction, and horror books that provided the meat of the EC catalog; and, in the case of crime and horror comics, the element of payback generally resolved the moral deficit involved in the horrible or criminal doings that framed these tales. As with the art, so with the writing; though often working from a kind of storytelling formula, each separate tale had to work on its own merits (another benefit of bypassing the shared-universe model of comics) and one does not see slacking or coasting in works with the EC label.

The Talent

To take the EC yearbook circa 1952 and dig up names will tend to uncover people well known from other, later endeavors for publishers that would outlive the ill-starred company. Jack Kamen, G. Ingels, Al Feldstein, Reed Crandall, Joe Orlando, Al Williamson, Harvey Kurtzmann (credited as Harvey Kurtz), Wally Wood, John Severin, B. Krigstein, Russ Heath, Marie Severin, Will Elder, Jack Davis, and occasionally even Basil Wolverton all appear, in various aspects, on EC credits, and one might note the way these names came to fill out the rosters of DC and Marvel by 1970. These names seem very familiar even to those who may not have seen much of the subsequent work with such credits on it because EC, unlike much of the comics business, chose not only to credit its talent here and there but also to run internal profile pieces, especially in Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad. Many shops might ignore the question of credits; and some, like Disney, might have policies actively hostile to the notion of crediting particular writers or artists, lest someone arrogate to himself the insufferable posture of asking for more money for providing better work, but EC seems to have valued its talent as assets in a way that would not become common until Marvel Comics showed the business the advantages of deftly applied hype.

For my own part, as I began informally studying the medium in the mid-1970s, the sparse information available through materials in public libraries frequently surprised by their familiarity. For, if I saw the name Wally Wood in a discussion of EC, I remembered him from something like Daredevil or Avengers or pieces in reprints from Mad magazine; the name invoked the comics of the modern era. Similarly, Marie Severin suggested Dr. Strange stories and Hulk stories from the era of split-comics; similarly, John Severin suggested Sgt. Fury comics and a certain fondly-remembered period, with Herb Trimpe, on Incredible Hulk. Kurtzmann and Elder tended to appear together, even after EC Comics, and might suggest to a young man who stuck his nose in magazines designed for adults the feature "Little Annie Fanny" that appeared in Playboy; Joe Orlando appeared in DC horror comics such as House of Mystery; Jack Davis appeared in Mad magazine, TV Guide covers, and advertising all over the place; and, in general, signs suggested that the market had snapped the EC veteran up wherever he had become available.

To some extent, then, we can recognize the supporting efforts of EC veterans in the blossoming of the Silver Age, particularly Marvel Comics' contributions, even if the principal figures essentially got their start in the very first waves of superhero comics, during or before the Second World War. And this supporting position does not mean insignificance in their contributions; for, in their historical role as bearers of rising standards, they did much to push the better angle of the Silver Age approach even as figures like Stan Lee pushed for the more. As one example, consider the developments in Incredible Hulk at the dawn of the seventies. Generally a disposable feature that had lacked the seminal qualities of other Marvel franchises in spawning elements that hold the shared universe together, it nonetheless came to play a particularly tasty role in Marvel's stable of comics once the art team of Trimpe (whose style borrowed in certain important ways from EC antecedents) and EC alumnus John Severin. To my eye, the Hulk never looked better, even in light of impressive talents later dedicated to his books; and a visual feel often contributes more to the staying power of a comics concept than the more prosaic aspects. Certainly I would not credit the era of torn purple pants and bad pseudo-baby talk as conceptually robust, as far as the character's definition went. EC talent, nonetheless, and talent inspired by EC, made the dawn-of-the-1970s Incredible Hulk title work.

The Genres

One might say that, if DC and Marvel Comics brought the superhero comic to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s, EC had cultivated almost everything else. EC experimented very broadly with different genres, failing to fall into the trap of overspecialization that ultimately caught the Big Two publishers when they eliminated other forms from their catalog and became shared-universe superhero monocultures.

Considering solely what appears through Gemstone and Warner reprints, the EC catalog dabbled in historical adventure (Valor); war comics of more than one type (Frontline Combat for generalized war stories, Aces High for war stories about aviation in combat); humor comics (Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad and Panic, and possibly others); horror comics (Tales from the Crypt); science fiction comics (Amazing Science-Fantasy, which ultimately ran under more than one name during its career); crime comics (such as Crime Patrol), and, in a small explosion of experimentation that hit just as EC began to fall under antipathetic scrutiny, comics about pirates, doctors, and whatever themes they could mine, perhaps in parallel to the story types typical of both popular literature and of movies. As yet, none of the examples of their romance comics or western comics have come into my hands, though I understand these to exist in some format through the usual channel (again, Gemstone, who have done popular culture quite a favor in keeping this material available).

For my own part, if someone invested me with the task of weaning a reader from superhero comics - and even some dedicated comics fans recognize that too narrow a focus from readers does not do the medium much good, even where the superhero monoculture stands as their favorite discipline within comics - I would propagandize with a stack of EC reprints, beginning with the axiom that someone who doesn't find something he likes there probably doesn't like comics in general. That the schools of superhero comics, funny animal comics, or whatever form missing from their canon owned no particularly significant place in their catalog represents no intended slight to other flavors; instead, we simply recognize that EC did not really need these genres.

The Edifying Messages

For material lambasted for its supposedly corrosive effect on the morals of youth, EC stories frequently dabbled in surprisingly moralistic undertones. People frequently came to a bad end for bad works - indeed, the crime and horror comics essentially relied on karma as a moral law of physics for story resolutions. Killers in crime comics often found themselves destroyed either by holes in their supposedly-impermeable plans or, even better, by their own tools used to destroy others. Slave-raiders who eluded arrest by dumping their living cargo into the ocean to drown suffered the same fate as flying saucers came down, captured them, then dumped them into the vacuum of space. Thus, the often-horrible things that happened frequently balanced accounts, even if the violence they depicted tended to disturb.

The messages frequently went further, however, into some degree of social commentary on themes just starting to roll in the fifties and not really up to speed until the cultural meltdown of the sixties. From Nyeberg's Seal of Approval: This History of the Comics Code, we can glean a reprint of a representative tale about a local racist who decides to don a white robe and, with similarly-attired accomplices, beat out of a Latin neighbor the notion of dating his daughter. This story ends with the realization that the corpse in a blanket belongs to his daughter, who had eloped with said young man. Other explorations might involve more fantastical allegory, substituting space aliens for cultural or ethnic minorities at the wrong end of uninformed hostile opinion. However, we can note that such tales, appearing around 1952 to 1954, did not appear in the context of a movement in comics like DC's period of "relevant comics;" instead, they moved in advance of the success of social and political movements that would deal in the same themes.

And, as things started to look bad for this remarkable publisher, sometimes the exhortations became overbearing or obnoxious, such as house ads suggesting that hostile critics of comics themselves served communist powers. As amusing as we can see such turnabout, examined disinterestedly we might best name such an approach "reciprocated McCarthyism." Sometimes, though, the barbs could amuse as well as impugn, such as a story in Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad that cast the various Congressional hearings, including meetings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the form of a game show with a proxy for McCarthy as an obnoxious panelist who wouldn't shut up. This happened, again, in the day when McCarthy still had some weight to throw around and could ruin people, rather than at a safe distance in later decades where the mere invocation of this politically-slain bogeymen, himself already fodder for the undertaker, could serve to prevent real discussion of politics. In France, a local term derides the man who fraudulently claims to have served in the Resistance (perhaps après-guerre comes close to the actual phrase); this derision recognizes that too many attempt to mine the admiration of others from claiming to have braved dangers they never defied, long after the threat abates.To oppose McCarthy while he rests in a cemetery requires less of even the sincere and non-fraudulent critic of his brand of politics than to bait him while he lives, and we should credit EC with political courage in so doing. McCarthy, after all, wasn't after EC Comics, which probably never appeared on his radar; by such a stroke, EC risked adding themselves to the various Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower appointees that represented his normal targets.

We can, perhaps, view other social and political statements, although infrequent, in a similar light. These tended to raise issues that would not become fashionable until a much later day, though seldom involving the kind of real risks that McCarthy-bashing could, until his inevitable downfall, involve.

The End

America after World War II saw an interesting series of developments, including the development of degenerating inner cities (cut off, in part, by the Eisenhower-era highway system that suddenly allowed traffic to pass by rather than through them) and the invention or discovery of the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency (some say "invented" because of the 20th-century creation of adolescence as a recognized, discrete age category). With increasing urbanization of the populace of America, fewer and fewer young people worked jobs, and the regulation of child labor similarly reduced the burden of renumerative labor on youth, as well as whatever opportunities it provided. Combine the logical increase in disposable time with the contemporaneous developments of various forms of popular entertainments - including, but certainly not limited to, cinema, television, radio, and comics - and one can see where a logical examination of increased (or perceivedly-increased) youth crime might lead.

Civically-minded individuals and not a few self-promoting busybodies got into the business of examining precisely what had started going wrong (assuming a new phenomenon truly existed here) with American youth, and certain theories suggested that coarser elements of culture, particularly popular culture, might play a role in the development of a variety of syndromes generally trashcanned in the category "juvenile delinquency." At some point in the 1940s, then, we begin to see the name Dr. Frederic Wertham appear in examinations of the notion that violence in popular entertainments - particularly comics - might provide one of the factors in developing a delinquent. Since the inception of comics, some folks had seen them as a corrosive factor in the transmission of culture and ethics; by the 1920s, and perhaps even in the last years of the previous century, accusers of the medium had accused comics of having a coarsening effect on readers. This hypothesis matured in the 1940s as experts used their credentials to buttress various claims of causal relationships.

In the absence of a careful reading of Wertham's own words, I can't accurately summarize his claims, and his out-of-print opus Seduction of the Innocentrepresents a very hard-to-find and hard-to-afford collectible, so until such time as some public-domain or inexpensive mass-produced edition appears, fairness precludes claims on my part supporting his own role as a kind of Darth Vader of Comics. But certain angles on the hostile review of comics by local and national deliberative bodies remain in the public record, and ultimately comics received their day in front of Congress, just as Hollywood had (for questions relating both to communism and to organized crime), and, as many Americans chose to add comics in the collective to a generalized burning-pile, William Gaines found himself in the position of having to talk to committees about the question of the lurid content of comics and the possible effect this might have on young readers.

Comics history might have run a slightly different course if Gaines had acted differently at this point. We may suspect he considered himself a defeated man already before giving testimony; in any case, what he said to the committee did little to aid his case. For instance, when presented with questions about whether he printed comics in bad taste, he gave a strong negative, whereupon the hostile experts referred to a blown-up reproduction of a cover featuring a woman's severed head. Such gaffes did not add to his credibility, nor to that of the medium he purportedly sought to defend. William Gaines, for all his role as a publisher that pushed the envelope of the comics medium, did little to prepare a coherent defense, which still confuses some professional (and many amateur) historians of comics today, given the possible consequences of failure in such a presentation to a government body grabbing for itself a regulatory power with the aim of driving some merchandise altogether off the market.

And, after a phase of experimentation with other genres and formats designed to allow EC to publish less controversial material, Gaines decided to shut down the concern altogether, saving no more than Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad by the ruse of printing it as a black-and-white magazine (which, as Mad survived into the following millennium under hands such as that of Dick DeBartolo).

Echoes of EC

If EC Comics, in the collective, went down like the Titanic, the talents that had gestated doing its page work had not, and many of these folks went on to careers in a very different comics market as DC and Marvel Comics brought about the superhero comics renaissance of the Silver Age. The Severin siblings came to Marvel and continued there through the 1960s and into the 1970s, with John appearing in such works as Sgt. Nick Fury and His Howling Commandoes, western comics, Incredible Hulk, and the early Kull comic when Marvel experimented with Robert E. Howard properties; Marie Severin moved from color to art, having work appear in Dr. Strange stories, Incredible Hulk, and, under John's inks, also in the Kull book. Wally Wood would continue to contribute to Mad as a magazine through the fifties and into the sixties, and would do work for Marvel (early Daredevil, contributing the red costume that replaced his original one) and DC (Captain Action in the 1960s and various pieces including the revived All-Star Comics in the 1970s) plus all kinds of work outside the Big Two. Jack Davis would become iconic in some ways, continuing for some time with the Mad magazine, but also getting gigs like magazine covers (TV Guide) and ad work. Joe Orlando would work in DC's horror line and enter the management side of the business as an art director, and Kurtzmann and Elder would create works like the Goodman Beaver stories (in some ways their last stories in a style consistent with their EC work) and the "Little Annie Fanny" feature that would run sometimes in Playboy until around 1986.

In the sixties, the EC talents themselves continued, in different contexts, to remind the world of what they knew. Still young and in the vital years of their talent - recall that people born in the mid-1920s would have entered their late 20s in the heyday of EC's success and, in the 1960s, would have moved into that late-thirties window that allows the maturity of talent before energy begins to fail - they helped fuel the Silver Age, not as has-beens lending the credibility of known names (indeed, for many readers of that era, their history with EC would present a surprising footnote) but as talents at their peak. And the resonance from the talents in specific and the flair and style they brought to a wider audience in general would shape careers of the next generation. In the seventies, talents like Berni Wrightson and Herb Trimpe showed the world what EC had taught them; in the seventies, artists like Gene Day and Paul Gulacy would show art styles that, though elaborated by a later age, seemed informed by mood and tone from EC works. Indeed, one might view much of Wrightson's career as an illustrator as a kind of ongoing love-letter to the EC style.

The business would not abandon these talents until after many had passed on or retired, though in the financial collapse of Marvel Comics in the 1990s remaining Silver Age talents, of whatever origin, became disposable and, ultimately, disposed-of. Nonetheless, even with editors and publishers turning their eyes to This Week's Hot New (and Wright son's) Talent the long-term imprint seems to have remained in the thoughts of those who have a broader perspective of comics than the limited fads that come for a few months and implode. The EC style has informed a generation of artists and has yet to go away even in the modern, post-Image, era. And, here and there, a surviving talent may still show the youngsters what they need to learn. Marie Severin as of the late nineties had returned to color work in an age rapidly moving from brush-and-tint methods to (often crassly overdone) computer color. John Severin elegantly delineates western comics outside of the meat-grinder of the top publishers. And, though Wood, Orlando, and too many others have passed on, their work survives, through reprinting, to inform the present (or impugn it through failing in comparisons of quality), showing, perhaps, that in martyrdom the company could still shape a medium that it helped make credible.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column NNN. Completed 11-DEC-2001.