EC Comics

EC Comics was arguably the most innovative and controversial company in the history of mainstream comic-book publishing. Although EC thrived for only half-a-decade in the early 1950s, it accounted for a body of comic-book work that shook up the industry and has continued to influence popular culture artists ever since. EC's publications featured some of the cleverest writing and most accomplished artwork ever to appear in comic books, and attracted a fanatically enthusiastic following; but they also provoked harsh criticism from those who charged that they degraded the morals of the nation's youth. Whatever might be said of EC's comic books, they certainly left few readers disinterested.

EC began in 1946 as a company called Educational Comics. Its founder, Max C. Gaines, was one of the original entrepreneurs responsible for the development of comic-book magazines. In 1947 his son William M. Gaines inherited the company and soon thereafter embarked upon a new editorial direction for the line. Keeping the imprint EC, the younger Gaines changed the company's full name to Entertaining Comics in 1950 and launched a series of new titles promoted as EC's "New Trend" comic-books. These titles eventually included three horror comics called Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear ; the crime titles Crime Suspen Stories and Shock SuspenStories ; the science-fiction series Weird Fantasy and Weird Science ; the war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, and a humor comic called Mad.

The New Trend titles were different from anything that had come before them. All featured quality artwork—some of the most innovative and accomplished ever seen in the medium, and writing that, while often crude, was still far more sophisticated than the norm for comic books. William Gaines and his chief collaborator, Al Feldstein, wrote most of the stories for the horror, crime, and science-fiction titles, and they obviously enjoyed their work. As Feldstein later explained, "We always wrote to our level." They aimed the stories at adolescents and young adults, although their audience doubtless included many children as well. The stories commonly incorporated such "adult" themes as murder, revenge, lust, psychosis, political intrigue, and scathing satire.

An alternative, irreverent, and even confrontational perspective on American Cold War culture informed the stories in EC comics, which criticized, satirized, and subverted prevailing values, conventions, and institutions. At a time when the mass entertainment industry in general remained captive to conservative financial and political concerns, such social criticism was seldom to be found in popular media offerings, and EC comic books rank collectively as perhaps the most subversive work produced for profit by an entertainment enterprise during the McCarthy era.

The war comics, published concurrently with the Korean War, qualified as the first truly anti-war comic books ever produced. Harvey Kurtzman wrote and drew many of these, bringing to them both his penchant for historical accuracy and his gift for irony. In Kurtzman's hands, historical stories, ranging from Julius Caesar to the Battle of Little Big Horn to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, became parables on the dangers inherent in military authority and the utter futility and horror of war—weighty material for comic-books.

In their science-fiction and crime titles, Gaines and Feldstein often attacked such social ills as racism and bigotry, and even dared to point the finger at McCarthyism. Shock SuspenStories in particular was a vehicle for realistic and damning portrayals of the violence and injustice inflicted upon African Americans, Jews, and Latinos. No other comic book even began to approach this kind of social commentary, and few contemporary movies or television series did so either.

Under the editorial direction of Harvey Kurtzman, Mad became the first and best satirical comic book ever published. Besides mocking many of the conventions, institutions, and icons held dear by mainstream America, Mad also took aim at its own competition with devastating parodies of such inviting targets as Superman, Batman, and Archie. This irreverence branded EC as a maverick within the comic-book industry, a distinction that Gaines welcomed.

EC became best known, however, for its horror comic books. Titles such as Tales from the Crypt offered readers some of the most grotesque and grisly images available in mass culture. To say that violence and murder were commonplace in these comics, hardly begins to do justice to stories wherein people were chopped to pieces, ground into pulp, deep-fried, and even eaten. One infamous story, called "Foul Play," ended with a baseball team murdering a rival player, disemboweling his corpse, and playing a baseball game with his body parts. There was usually a tongue-in-cheek quality about these atrocities, as evidenced by the ghoulish narrators who introduced and concluded each tale with gallows humor and bad puns. Husbands murdered wives, wives murdered husbands, parents abused their children, and children rose up to murder their parents. Stories like these sold over half-a-million copies per issue and found a revealingly large audience within a society dominated elsewhere by images of affluence and vapid suburban conformity. They also made EC the most controversial publisher in the business and the one most vulnerable to the charges of the industry's critics. It was, therefore perhaps unsurprising that EC was unable to survive the crisis that engulfed the comic-book industry in 1954-55.

In 1954, Gaines testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee that was investigating the alleged influence of crime and horror comic books on juvenile delinquency. At one point he found himself in an absurd (and often recounted) debate with Senator Estes Kefauver over the artistic merits of an EC horror comic with an image of a severed head on the cover. When Gaines' competitors formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and adopted the self-censoring Comics Code, he initially refused to join the organization. He subsequently capitulated, but nervous distributors nevertheless refused to handle the EC publications, code-approved or not. In 1955 Gaines canceled the entire EC line except for Mad, which then enjoyed a long run of success in a black-and-white magazine format.

Long after its demise as a comic-book publisher, EC's influence remained evident. Successive generations of comic-book creators drew inspiration from the imaginative ideas of EC's writers and artists. Hard Rock acts such as Alice Cooper and Rob Zombie incorporated EC's grotesque world view into their own musical tributes to American junk culture, while horror novelist Stephen King has cited EC as a profound early influence on his imagination; he paid tribute to their horror titles in his 1982 movie Creepshow. Many of EC's crime and horror stories have been adapted into the successful live-action anthology series Tales from the Crypt on the HBO and Fox networks, and the original comic books themselves continue to be reprinted and sold in comic-book stores in the 1990s. As an exemplar of mass entertainment of the most inspired, gutsy, and irreverent sort, EC's place in comic-book immortality is assured.

—Bradford W. Wright