Printing terror: American horror comics as Cold War commentary and critique

By Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith

Printing Terror places horror comics of the Cold War in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently, and necessarily, subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s up to 1954, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The book examines each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics at this time were centered on white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526135940

Michael Goodrum

Michael Goodrum is senior lecturer in modern history at Canterbury Christ Church University and the coconvenor of the TORCH Oxford Comics Network. He is author of Superheroes and American Self Image: From War to Watergate and Printing Terror. He is coeditor of “Firefly” Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon’s Classic Series and Gender and the Superhero Narrative, the latter published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book preview

Introduction

In none of these later war memoirs is there anything to recall that queer quality of the 1914–18 stories, of men who felt they were going out from absolutely sure and stable homes and cities, to which with reasonable good fortune they would return and live happily ever after … The men of this later cycle of wars felt that there would be no such homecoming. They knew that they went out to misery and left misery in active possession at home. Their war was not an expedition; it was a change for ever. (H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, 1933)¹

The war described above by Wells did not happen; it is a traumatic future history transmitted through dream and recorded by Dr Philip Raven, a prominent international diplomat. Published in 1933, The Shape of Things to Come probes the near future and recent past and finds only horror. In the wake of the real war, which contained nightmares unimagined by Wells, horror comics served a similar function, investigating the war, its aftermath, and the anxieties to which it gave rise. They both anticipated and documented some of the traumatic effects of the war – the dislocation of dream and reality, of the past, present, and future, and of values from their social mooring. Although horror comics preceded the Second World War, it was in its aftermath that they attained their greatest popularity, and notoriety, both in the US and abroad. The world was certainly a more horrifying place after the mass destruction of the war, after the massacre of civilians through bombing campaigns (predicted by Wells), and the Holocaust. It was horrifying in different ways for different demographics; many of those who had historically enjoyed a position of social privilege felt threatened by social upheavals along the lines of gender and race brought to prominence by the war. In this sense, the horror comics under consideration here contributed to a relatively one-sided dialogue on the boundaries of acceptability and of monstrosity, where the agents of fear ‘have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human … make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle-class, and heterosexual’.² In dramatizing this process of dialogic construction, comics, particularly the crime and horror genres, attained the status of a moral panic. This panic was both domestic and international, and in both cases was explicitly tied into Cold War concerns around communism, race, and perceived ‘deviance’ in sexuality and gender roles. Comics were therefore swept up in the internalization of the doctrine of containment (then being applied by the US to international relations). In 1954, following a Senate subcommittee hearing on juvenile delinquency that took comics as its focus, the comics industry implemented a self-regulatory code that removed everything essential to horror. However, horror comics were subsequently reanimated after changes to that code in 1971, and thereafter served as a similar nexus of anxiety during and after another war: Vietnam. As in the 1950s, there were similar domestic patterns of containment in the 1970s, such as the War on Drugs and the monitoring of Civil Rights groups; horror comics drew on past practice as well as contemporary resonance to create shocking moments for their readers.

Contemporary resonance is at the core of this book. Horror comics exist in dialogue with the social, cultural, and political movements of their time – both the comics themselves and the narratives they contained became, following Jack Halberstam, monstrous machines of meaning.³ In the Cold War climate under consideration here, these comics engage with the national trauma of war, feminist projects, and public conversations on civil rights, but they do so in a manner centred primarily on the experience of white middle-class heterosexual men. We take up an argument presented by Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai, that in horror comics the ‘experience of fear’ can be read as emotional property, access to which is restricted to specific privileged individuals – while these comics often seem to condemn overt racism and misogynistic violence, they consistently present women and people of colour as a threat to both individual white males and the social fabric.⁴ This is partly related to spatial politics. Economic shifts, the rise of political movements, and patterns of urban and suburban development placed the ‘wrong’ bodies in the ‘wrong’ places, rendering both the body and the space it inhabits uncanny; as something that does not belong within the lived experience of white men living in and moving around the US.⁵ In this introductory chapter we seek to outline the perception and conception of the reality in which horror comics circulated, both in terms of the development of the genre and in the socio-cultural milieu in which horror comics were produced. This contextual study paves the way for the close readings in subsequent chapters. We also offer a framework for the study and an overview of the chapters to follow.

American horror

Critics generally recognize Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first horror novel in the sense that it codified many of the markers we now associate with the genre.⁶ The novel includes a pervasive sense of threat, trap doors, secret passages, mysterious sounds, and doors opening seemingly of their own volition. Monstrous manifestations emerge, as in Hamlet, from something being rotten in the state, indicating an early example of anxieties around leadership in a time of war being mediated through the horror genre.⁷ Poet Thomas Grey told Walpole that the novel made ‘some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’nights’.⁸

While Walpole’s work was an important intervention in the genre, critics also acknowledge that fear is so essential an experience that it would be fruitless to attempt to establish the first occasion in which one human sought to horrify another through storytelling.⁹ We find elements of the Gothic, S. T. Joshi argues, in The Epic of Gilgamesh from around 2100 BC and Noël Carroll identifies horror elements in Petronius’ Satyricon (late first century AD) and Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 AD).¹⁰ Renaissance theatre, too, included elements of supernatural horror in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592) as well as Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606) and The Tempest (1611). Indeed, in The Castle of Otranto, Walpole quotes both Shakespeare and various poetic ‘odes to horror’ such as Collins’ Ode to Fear (1747).¹¹ We can detect horror elements, too, in the earliest attempts to record folk tales in seventeenthcentury France. The story ‘Blue Beard’, for example, which appears in Charles Perrault’s Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals (1797).

Despite his stated desire to create ‘a new species of romance’, Walpole did not invent horror.¹² Walpole drew on imagery from the eighteenth-century ‘Graveyard School’ of poetry as well as earlier forms of horror and codified these elements into a recognizable and reproducible structure. Such was Walpole’s influence that the Encyclopaedia Londinensis of 1827 specified a sub-genre of romance called the ‘horrible romance’ in which the anonymous author included John Polidori’s The Vampire (1819) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).¹³ The horror romance, the author argued, typically contained ‘a dark and wicked man […] a lady whose purity and transcendent virtue are continually displayed by her aversion to ravishment […] dungeons deep, fortified castles, assassins, bandits, and sometimes a treacherous priest’.¹⁴ After Walpole, and certainly after the huge success of Ann Radcliffe, writers were mindful that when they wrote to evoke a sense of threat, they were contributing to an established genre of fiction with its own semiotics and codes. Many of these formal elements have come to be recognized as a distinct sub-genre of horror, the Gothic, from which later versions of horror have evolved.

In Victorian England, Royce Mahawatte argues, horror was ‘encompassing and intricate’.¹⁵ The language and imagery of horror found its way into genres and forms beyond its original scope. Horror also continued in novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), the emergent ‘penny dreadful’ novel such as The Mysteries of London (1884–1888), in the explosion of print culture during the 1880s and, most famously of all, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

In the US, the language and imagery of horror were invoked in anti-slavery tracts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹⁶ American writers such as Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving adapted the form to the emergent American literary palate. Horror in the US, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues, had both literary precedents in the form of ‘captive narratives’ – women’s accounts of being captured by Native Americans – and historical events, most famously the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s.¹⁷ The American Gothic form was later developed by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, taking distinct American forms in such developments as Southern Gothic, with decaying plantations and racial politics supplanting the decaying castles of medieval Europe.

David J. Skal identifies another American innovation in horror: the carnival. P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, founded in New York in 1841, made ‘[d]warves, pinheads, Siamese twins, albinos, giants of height and girth […] staples of American diversion’.¹⁸ The carnival grotesques found their way into the works of Mark Twain, James Otis, and, later, Ray Bradbury.¹⁹ Indeed, Leslie Fiedler argues that American literature often seems like ‘a chamber of horrors disguised as an amusement park fun house, where we pay to play at terror and are confronted in the innermost chamber with a series of inter-reflecting mirrors which present us with a thousand versions of our own face’.²⁰ During the early twentieth century the horror genre was popular on the stage as well as in print. Horace Liveright’s 1927 American stage adaptation of Dracula was a huge success, generating $2 million in profits.²¹ American horror fiction also gained some momentum. Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen was the second-best selling book in 1923. Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s ‘weird fiction’, which would not gain a significant readership until later in the twentieth century, described monsters lurking in Manhattan’s lower East Side, while also developing the genre of ‘cosmic horror’ – the notion that humanity was an insignificant presence in a hostile, or worse, indifferent universe.

While the carnival grotesque, theatrical adaptation, and particular types of horror fiction were key American developments, the US and its audiences were slower to warm to the possibilities of film. Although audiences had been thrilled by the Edison Company’s production of Frankenstein as early as 1910, the first cycle of horror films to truly fire international imaginations were made not in the US, but in Weimar Germany. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, released in America 1921), Skal argues, ‘built up a pretentious head of steam, capitalizing on postwar xenophobia and traditional American self-doubts in matters artistic. Caligari was a kind of cultural sputnik, launched out of nowhere by Europe, a gauntlet not thrown down but projected up on the shivering screen of America’s insecurities’.²² It was followed by similar German masterpieces of horror film such as Nosferatu (1921) and Orlacs Hände (1924). This cinema resonated with the American preoccupation with the grotesque in a different format; in Anxious Visions, Sidra Stitch argues that the Surrealists’ preoccupation with altered bodies is a direct response to the crippled and mutilated veterans who returned from the First World War.²³ These images of disfigured bodies also found a home in cinema in the form of the rat-like vampire in Nosferatu and the autonomous hand in Orlacs Hände. European horror cinema, then, offered a window into the cultural unconscious after the First World War. American filmmakers found themselves scrambling to catch up.

The earliest film interventions in horror came from Universal Studios, which began production of what is now known as the Universal Monsters series of films in 1923. Universal produced six films during the 1920s, the most successful of which featured the startling performances and make-up of the actor, Lon Chaney. After the American release of Nosferatu in 1929 proved a significant box office success, production increased. As an unlicensed adaptation of Dracula, however, the estate of Bram Stoker sued the producers of Nosferatu. As a result of the lawsuit, which found in favour of Stoker’s estate, all prints were supposedly destroyed (though fortunately for later audiences, some survived). An American adaptation of Dracula, based on the successful Broadway play and also starring its lead, Bela Lugosi, filled the void in 1931. The film proved sufficiently popular to spark major American production of horror films throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

The initial success of American horror cinema can in part be attributed to director Tod Browning and leading actor Lon Chaney, the latter of whom took many roles that involved prosthetic disfigurement. Browning’s directorial work appeared as early as 1915, but it was not until the 1920s and 1930s that he learned the lessons of German horror cinema and directed films such as London After Midnight, The Unknown (both 1927), and, most famously, Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932). Kendall R. Phillips argues that Dracula was ‘the film that began America’s love affair with horror’.²⁴ Films that immediately followed represented a wide range of horror genres from monster films to psychological thrillers. They included, to name a few, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (both 1931), The Mummy (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), King Kong (1933), and The Black Cat (1934). The production of horror films remained high after 1934, with The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Devil Doll and Dracula’s Daughter (both 1936), Face at the Window (1939), and The Wolf Man (1941). However, the post-1934 era, most critics agree, saw a decline in quality due to the enforcement of the Hays Code, which controlled the content of film and rendered horror more difficult to realize, and the end of Carl Laemmle Jr’s period as head of production at Universal, a major advocate of horror cinema, in 1936.

In many cases, the early films of the 1930s established the model to which subsequent versions of a given character, including those found in comics, would refer – Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, for example, were quickly adopted as cultural icons. The genre was sufficiently established by 1933 to spawn parody such as the Disney film The Mad Doctor (1933), in which Mickey Mouse seeks to rescue Pluto from a deranged scientist. It also spawned imitators in radio, perhaps most famously Arch Oboler’s series ‘Lights Out’ (1938–1939 and 1942–1943) which, thanks to the absence of visuals and more relaxed censorship laws, told stories even more gruesome than those found on screen. Oboler’s drama ‘Burial Service’, for example, comprises a monologue of a woman who is being buried alive.

American horror cinema of the 1930s inherited some of the interest in bodily disfigurement from European film while addressing more contemporary concerns. Cinema was one outlet for those who fell victim to the Great Depression. As Gilbert Seldes asserts, the American public craved escapism, and while ‘[t]he rich could still go to the South Seas Islands [and] the intellectuals went to Mexico[,] the poor went to the movies’.²⁵ In films such as King Kong, the poor could even see themselves on screen: film producer Carl Denham plucks Ann Darrow from the Depression-era streets of New York to star in his new film after he sees her stealing food from a stall. Popular cinema under Prohibition had turned to the gangster genre, revelling in images of unsanctioned opulence, and failing social and legal structures; in the wake of Prohibition’s repeal, the monster film seemed to speak more directly to the cultural moment.²⁶ As Skal asserts, ‘America’s worst year of the century would be its best year ever for monsters’, suggesting an affinity between the horror of existence under the Depression and the desire to see that, in some way, played out culturally.²⁷

Kendall R. Phillips argues that horror cinema enjoyed significant success because it ‘connected to existing cultural drifts and directions in such peculiarly poignant ways as to be recognized as somehow true… that somehow what they saw up on the screen was an accurate, if allegorical, depiction of their own collective fears and concerns’.²⁸ Such an approach can be seen to take us so far – clearly, people in the 1950s were concerned about atomic warfare and species-level threats – but horror must also, by definition, horrify. Part of this is through spectacle, and horror is quick to harness new production techniques. For instance, Kevin Heffernan discusses how the same story of a crazed wax sculptor was used to herald Warner’s ‘brief excursion into two-strip Technicolor’ in 1933 (as Mystery of the Wax Museum), and, as House of Wax, was the first film by a major studio made in 3-D.²⁹ Horror, like Modern Art in the terms of Robert Hughes, can derive much of its power from ‘the shock of the new’.³⁰ Technological developments, like colour or 3-D, can provide such a shock. This is not to say that pleasure cannot be gained through meeting expectations – this is one of the major appeals of genre fiction, after all – but that it is the texts that deviate from them in particularly interesting or culturally resonant ways that attain the greatest success and notoriety.

Film to comics

The increasing scrutiny of Hollywood, the postwar channelling of Cold War anxieties, and economic shifts all had a dramatic effect on horror cinema and the horror comics that would follow. During the late 1940s, Hollywood saw dramatic changes that profoundly affected horror film production and distribution. Cinema as a whole faced a decline in ticket sales resulting from competition from television. These problems were compounded in 1948 when the US Supreme Court issued the Paramount Decree that, among other anti-trust rulings, made it illegal for studios to ‘block-book’ films by selling A and B list films as a package to theatres. The end of block-booking meant that B-movies became dramatically less profitable, causing a decline in their output. Studios began to produce a small number of high-budget films rather than a combination of A and B titles. Horror, which made up a significant portion of B films, declined as a result. Horror film was also under threat from shifting perceptions of respectability; even before the Paramount Decree, Universal had chosen to stop making horror films and serials in order to reinvent itself as a higher-brow film company. As a result of these industrial and broader technological shifts, the film industry suffered what Kevin Heffernan calls ‘the most precipitous and sustained decline in box-office attendance in the postwar period’, moving from a central component of the lives of the vast majority of Americans to a more marginal presence that attracted more marginal audiences.³¹

The 1940s saw a general decline in the quality and quantity of horror cinema, with the most notable works being a series of thoughtful, low-budget, films such as Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943), directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton at RKO. By the late 1940s, older forms of horror were ripe for parody: the comedians Abbott & Costello appeared in several horror comedies, beginning with Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Horror film did not vanish entirely, however; Maila Nurmi began a popular turn as Vampira in 1954, a host for a late-night schedule of horror films on KABC-TV, a Los Angeles station.³² This became an increasingly popular concept for promoting late-night screenings particularly as, in 1958, Universal signed a deal for television syndication of their 1930s horror productions. The horrors of the 1930s stalked the screen once more, though the audiences watching them were now haunted by new fears. Invasion, not immigration, and communism, not the crypt, were the new spectres haunting the US. This is not to say they were discrete issues: aspects of former horrors were overlaid with new meanings in this new context. While the Gothic prowled the imagination of filmmakers and audiences in the 1920s and 1930s, leading to and resulting from a sustained period of horror film production between 1931 and 1934, the postwar period faced more concerns about their future than the secret pasts of Gothic fiction.³³ These issues were, certainly, still historical. The changed circumstances of the world, and of the US within it, gave rise to new fears born of atomic warfare, space travel, and escalating conflicts between superpowers. Threats from the ‘Old World’, such as European vampires, were largely replaced by enemies from new worlds, aliens bent on conflict or conquest, or the results of science probing areas it did not, and should not seek to, understand. Phillips argues that ‘if the interwar years were haunted by legacies of the past, the post-war years were filled with uncertainties about the future […] By 1950, Americans had developed a cultural replacement for the Gothic ghouls from the crypt – little green men from flying saucers’.³⁴ These alien bodies, however, were usually still marked as Other, whether through conforming to the stereotype of ‘little green men’, or through more subtle differences, the subtlety of which, as in It Came from Outer Space (1953), might be stripped away at any moment to reveal the true threat posed by the alien – not just through its destructive capabilities, but through its ability to cross boundaries, to move from the category of apparently safe and homely to deviant Other. More threatening was the suggestion that the space itself, the home(land) could be rendered alien, often through the restaging of models of violent imperial intervention that the US was exporting alongside its cultural imperialism: its popular culture.

Like many of the creatures they depicted, horror comics crept up on the 1950s. It is beyond the scope of this project to detail the lives of various horror properties across different media or to document the entirety of the discourse between comics and film throughout the twentieth century. It is of note, however, as critics such as Dru Jeffries and Blair Davis have shown, that there has always been considerable traffic of ideas, properties, and stylistics between comics and film.³⁵ The inaugural issue of Movie Comics (1939), for example, adapted horror film to the comics page by combining promotional movie stills from Frankenstein (1931) with hand-drawn backgrounds and colour – a technique referred to as the ‘fumetti’ method.

As Mark Jancovich notes, ‘most people’s understanding of a genre is developed through their awareness of a number of different cultural forms’, indicating that even if there is little obvious influence of one form on another at the level of creation, readers of horror comics were likely to position a given text within their consumption of a broader milieu drawing on film, literature, radio, and other forms.³⁶ There are, however, clear points of crossover between horror film and comics. To name a few, the Batman villain Two-Face, who first appeared in 1942, was inspired by the film adaptation Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) and, more famously, Joker has a clear debt to Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs (1928); the title and intermission screens of the now cult classic, Robot Monster (1953), are set to a backdrop of horror comics; in 1940, Wonderwall Comics advertised a ‘Comic-Scope’ projector that promised to turn comics pages into film; and comics artist Bob Powell, who drew for various publishers during the early and mid-twentieth century was, Howard Nostrand asserts, greatly influenced by Hitchcock.³⁷

American cinema has sought to capitalize on the ‘presold’ audience for comics ever since the short film Happy Hooligan in Jail (1903). The reinvention of comic characters in film began with a series of ‘funny page’ characters in cinema of the 1930s, as well as superhero serials and film franchises from the 1940s onward. Unlike other genres, horror has tended to be derivative of, rather than in dialogue with, film. This might be explained by the fact that horror lacks a recurring transmedia presence with its origin in comics – the majority of transmedia horror characters have origins in either literature (such as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster) or film (Freddy Krueger or Aliens). Vampirella came close to being such a figure in the 1960s and 1970s, but during the 1940s and 1950s horror comics, for all of their popularity, lacked the brand recognition of a Superman, Dick Tracey, or Li’l Abner to draw in a presold audience. As a result, the flow of content between horror cinema and horror comics seemed to go in one direction. It was not until Tales from the Crypt (1972) and Creepshow (1982) that horror comics would repay some of their debt to horror cinema.

The comics industry

The question of an origin, such as one can be said to exist, for the comics form is as problematic as identifying an origin to the horror genre. This is for many of the same reasons, the most central one being that for us to establish a beginning to comics, we must first agree what comics are. Scott McCloud understands comics as a means to tell stories through images and so cites the Bayeux Tapestry and other artefacts as early examples of comics.³⁸ David Kunzle, similarly, starts the history of the comic book in the 1400s with church frescos and, later, early broadsheets and chapbooks.³⁹ If one wishes to trace a more direct lineage from modern comics, however, then one must read comics not only as storytelling through images, but in terms of their production and distribution as well as semiotic codes that they employ such as motion lines and speech bubbles, or what cartoonist André Franquin calls ‘krollebitches’.⁴⁰ In this sense, the origins of American comics might be traced to newspaper cartoons from nineteenth-century Europe, the most frequently cited of which is Puck. These newspaper cartoons, in turn, were inspired by the woodblock prints of Rodolphe Töpher, Gustave Doré, and the Forrester brothers.

Early American comics appeared in newspapers and were collected in hardback books – Mike Benton asserts that seventy or more such collections were published between 1900 and 1909.⁴¹ In 1929, the publication The Funnies was the first to print a collection of comics not previously published in newspapers. In 1933, Eastern Color Printing Company began publishing Funnies on Parade in seven-by-nine inch dimensions. The project was the brainchild of salesman Max C. Gaines, who also decided on the iconic ten-cent price tag. In November 1936, Comic Magazine Company, publishers of The Comics Magazine, released Detective Picture Stories – the first anthology devoted to a genre other than comedy. Other genres quickly followed, most prominent among them being the superhero, arguably the dominant genre from the first appearance of Superman in 1938. The Second World War proved to be particularly fertile ground for superheroes – they were, after all, well-suited to nationalistic and unnuanced stories of good versus evil. Comics were inexpensive and, during the 1940s, faced little competition from television or radio. By 1944, 91 per cent of children read comics.⁴² By 1950, adults made up 54 per cent of comic book readers, and the American comic book industry produced 50 million comic books each month.⁴³

The horror comic

Bradford Wright and Mike Benton identify the beginning of the horror comic genre as 1950, when EC launched the hugely successful series Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fears.⁴⁴ Robert Michael ‘Bobb’ Cotter, similarly, asserts ‘[i]t all starts with E[ntertaining] C[omics]’.⁴⁵ EC (then Educational Comics) was founded by Max C. Gaines, who began as a publisher of educational and religious comics. His son, William Gaines, took over the company in 1947 at the age of twenty-five, changed the name, and introduced crime and war comics to the company’s offerings. In 1950, Gaines, along with his editor Al Feldstein, decided to launch a ‘New Trend’ of comics. They ceased publication of their existing six titles and instead began publishing high-quality provocative works in the horror, science fiction, and war genres. In the most commonly told version of this story, in 1949 Gaines and Feldstein decided that they wanted to bring the style of horror radio drama to comics and thus gave birth to the genre.

The narrative is not quite so straight-forward – Shelly Moldoff claims to have pitched the idea of a horror series to Gaines in 1948. More importantly, EC’s intervention in horror comics also had many antecedents; exactly which comic might be described as the ‘first’ horror title is the subject of some debate and depends upon the problematic question of how we define horror. Harry A. Chesler’s team of artists, for example, produced some stories that contained horror elements in late 1936.⁴⁶ The previously mentioned Movie Comics featured a comic adaptation of the film Frankenstein in 1939, making it another contender for a first horror comic. While occupying a different evolutionary branch of the comics industry, Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons beginning in the 1930s contained a strong allegiance to the Gothic.⁴⁷ Greg Sadowski also identifies horror elements in stories that ran in Amazing Mystery Funnies as early as 1939, such as the story ‘Madhouse Murder Mystery’, which features the now-familiar trope of a beautiful woman being abducted by a monster (Figure 1). In 1939, Detective Comics #31 and #32 pitted Batman against, in the words of Glen Weldon, ‘a mysterious supervillain called the Monk, hypnotism, a giant ape, werewolves, and vampires’.⁴⁸ Superhero stories continued to feature horror elements such as the Frankensteinesque Solomon Grundy, who first fought the Green Lantern in 1944, or Two-Face, the recurring Batman villain who debuted in Detective Comics #66 in 1942. Prize Comics’ Frankenstein series (1940–1954) evoked an icon of horror fiction and cinema, although its overall tone seemed to vacillate between humor and action rather than a sustained attempt to evoke fear. Other adaptations of literature contained far more horror elements, however; Classics Illustrated #12 featured the stories of Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. Evelyn Goodman and Allen Simon’s adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which appeared in Classics Illustrated #18 (1944), was so violent that eight pages were removed from the 1949 reprint.⁴⁹ Suspense Comics, which began publication in 1943, featured horror themes on the cover, although the comics within seemed to more closely resemble the already well-established crime genre. Yellowjacket Comics also featured horror stories in the mid-1940s.⁵⁰ Eerie Comics, which first launched with a single issue in 1947, featured ghosts and bloody murders as well as the iconic formula of a monster menacing a pin-up girl in a red dress on the cover, and is likely the comic series that served as the template for the genre.⁵¹ William Schoell identifies American Comic Group’s Adventures into the Unknown (1948–1967) as the earliest, and longest-running, example of the horror genre in the sense that it introduced elements from supernatural horror cinema, pulp fiction, and radio into a comic book format.⁵² By early 1950, before EC launched their three horror titles, the horror genre had already reached a level of ubiquity that it was ready for parody; Jerry DeMatt’s ‘Scoopy’ strip, which appeared in Sparkler Comics #91 of January 1950, showed the eponymous hero and his friend visiting the house of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, where they are confronted by (what transpired to be) horrifying Halloween props.⁵³ This volume does not seek to offer an answer to the question of a ‘first’ horror comic because the concept is somewhat misleading – rather than the horror genre being the invention of a single publisher or single creator, we can identify from the above examples a coalescence of different themes and styles across several publications. These disparate elements collectively gave rise to a codified genre in early 1950.

Even if EC were not the first to produce a horror comic, they inarguably left the largest footprint. Artists such as Dick Beck and Bill Savage, for example, who wrote for Mysterious Adventure, and Howard Nostrand at Chamber of Chills, unashamedly mimicked the EC style.⁵⁴ The editor of Black Cat Mystery, Sid Jacobson, states that ‘I think that [before my arrival], everyone knew we were doing hack things, and then I came in, new to the whole business and I looked at EC and I said ‘Oh my God!’ I mean, no one else knew anything except them. And I said, ‘Why don’t we strive to do this? … That’s what we were trying to emulate’.⁵⁵

1 ‘The Madhouse Murder Mystery’, Amazing Mystery Funnies

Although EC loomed large, they were certainly not the only horror publisher. EC’s place at the centre of horror comics publishing is at least in part due to the contemporary marketing efforts of Bill Gaines and his status as a key witness in the Senate subcommittee hearings on juvenile delinquency of 1954. This contemporary visibility sits alongside later attempts to curate the content and reputation of the company by both Gaines and fans of horror and comics and goes some way to explaining the endurance of the EC myth. Recent comics historians have been more cautious in describing EC’s position as the first mover of the horror genre – Terrence R. Wandtke speculates that his work ‘may knock EC Horror a bit from its pedestal’ while John Benson, for example, asserts that EC were responsible for just 7 per cent of horror publishing output. He further notes that Atlas (later Marvel) were by far the most prolific publisher, producing 25 of the (by his count) 130 horror titles released between 1950 and 1954.⁵⁶ This project, while aware of the significance of EC, takes a wider focus, reintegrating the scores of other horror titles that constituted the bulk of the boom and led to the censorious interest of the Senate subcommittee hearing on juvenile delinquency of 1954.⁵⁷

The fact that horror comics were derivative of horror film did not mean that they simply recycled the same themes and images.⁵⁸ As Linda Hutcheon argues, transmedia adaptation involves different modes. Print, audio/visual, and interactive texts are all immersive media, but they are immersive in different ways.⁵⁹ As a medium, comics function differently from film, allowing the reader to access the simultaneity of a page and creating chemistry between panels.⁶⁰ Unlike film (in the era before home video, at least), readers can choose the speed at which they apprehend images in a comic, facilitating different forms of horror and removing the possibility of others. Where a horror film, for example, might suddenly cut to a horrifying image accompanied by an orchestral stab of high-pitched strings, the closest equivalent in a comic would be to reveal a horrifying image through the turn of a page.⁶¹ The time that the reader spends looking at the image once confronted with it, however, is beyond the creator’s control. Unlike film, a comic can build dramatic irony by showing a character in a safe position in one panel and imperiled in another within the same page. Entire sequences can be dominated by the presence of a single image around which other panels are oriented. The effect of one panel, in other words, can bleed through to others.

Comics were also subject to different censorship laws (the Hays Code, which controlled film content, preceded the Comics Code Authority (CCA) by more than two decades), different budget constraints, and a different range of visual possibilities than film. As Douglas Wolk asserts, comics have an ‘unlimited special effects budget’; comics are drawn rather than filmed, which means that the content is limited only by the imagination and skill of the writer and artist – while horror cinema had to make do with prosthetics and wires, monsters in horror comics could be made subject to what Scott Bukatman calls ‘cartoon physics’.⁶² The obvious artificiality of drawn images also mitigated their capacity to shock, meaning that horror comics could be (and frequently were) far more grotesque than the horror films that in many cases inspired them. Comics also faced fewer risks than film because the financial stakes were far lower; a film in the 1950s cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce (the low-budget films of Val Lewton in the 1940s, mentioned above, had to be produced for less than $150,000), meaning that the box office performance of one production could alter the trajectory of an entire studio, or even the entire industry. A single story in