The Glory and Horror of EC Comics

Mr. Beaser: Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?
Mr. Gaines: My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
Sen. Kefauver [alluding to the cover illustration for Crime SuspenStories #22]: This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic….
Sen. Kefauver: This is the July one [Crime SuspenStories #23]. It seems to be a man with a woman in a boat and he is choking her to death with a crowbar. Is that in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: I think so.

Fifty years ago this month, a comic-book publisher dared to defend his business before a panel of skeptical lawmakers. The publisher, William M. Gaines of the Entertaining Comics Group (EC), had asked to testify before the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. On the afternoon of April 21, 1954, Gaines took the stand in a Foley Square courtroom in lower Manhattan to tangle with Estes Kefauver, who had made his name (and the cover of TIME) chairing televised hearings on organized crime. In 1951 the Senator had exposed the Mafia to a nationwide audience. Now he would confront another menace: the purveyors of comic books that, one psychologist claimed, made kids go bad.

The horror books certainly were gross and grotty. In “Ghastly Terror!: The Horrible Story of the Horror Comics” (1999), Brit comics fan Stephen Sennitt describes the melodramatic panorama as “an incredible array of primal fears; a plunge into the abyss of social and cultural insecurity, and a deep distrust of one’s fellow-man — but more than this, a ghoulish fixation on vengeance, guilt and punishment. The punishment of vanity, greed, gluttony and arrogance, all in the pages of comics aimed ostensibly at children and youths! Major themes of the precode horror comics are decapitation, or dismemberment, or disfigurement of some kind, such as destruction of the face by acid, or the poking out of eyes.” And this from a witness for the defense!

As an aging kid who was an EC fan 50 years ago, I’d testify that most of us survived reading horror comics. So did Bill Gaines, under oath. “Jimmy Walker once remarked that he never knew a girl to be ruined by a book,” Gaines proclaimed, referring to the late New York City mayor, and adding, “Nobody has ever been ruined by a comic.”

But people have been ruined by Senate investigations. And smear campaigns in newspapers. And “experts” whose evidence turn out to be fraudulent. All three of these factors put an axe to the neck of the horror and crime comics of the early 50s, and abruptly aborted one of the great explosions of vox-pop literature.

For comics, the 1950-54 period is analogous to Hollywood movies in 1930-34. Both are known as the pre-Code era, although a loose, laxly administered set of standards was already in place for both media. The early 30s for films, and the early 50s for comics, were seen as times of bold, often lurid entertainment, and are viewed in retrospect as pop-cultural high points. Both formats triggered powerful opposition among the burghers of propriety: movies with the Catholic Church and its newly formed Legion of Decency, comics with members of the press, Congress and at least one respected sociologist. Finally, both were sanitized — mildly, for movies; fatally, for horror comics.

The difference was distribution. Film companies owned the companies that distributed their films and the theaters that showed them (until 1948, when the Supreme Court busted the studios’ vertical monopoly). What Hollywood made, the audience could see. Comic book publishers didn’t control distribution. When the putative guardians of public morality put the screws to crime and horror comics, distributors refused to put them on newsstands. The number of horror and crime titles on the stands dropped in a few months from 150 to nearly none. And Gaines, whose company had flourished in the horror boom, and whose Senate testimony had made him the face of the B comic-book industry — the Mae West of pulp picto-fiction — took the heat. Refusing to join his competitors’ new Comics Code Authority, he shut down all but one of his magazines.

As it happened, that one was MAD.

ME AND MY SCHADENFREUDE

A personal note. I came to EC through MAD, which was dreamed up in 1952 by Harvey Kurtzman and written by him as a 10-cent comic book (23 issues) and a 25-cent magazine. In 1956, five issues into the magazine’s life he left EC after a dispute with Gaines, taking all his artists — Bill Elder, Jack Davis and (briefly) Wally Wood — with him. I and many other Kurtzman fans followed him to Trump, the slick humor mag that Hugh Hefner funded and, after two issues, folded. From 1957 to 1966, Kurtzman edited Humbug (11 issues) and Help! (26 issues), and I was rooting him on, along with the others in his small but fervent peanut gallery.

I continued to read MAD but I found it less artful and much less funny. I’m sure I was also pissed at Gaines for letting him go and at Albert Feldstein, a longtime EC writer-editor, for assuming control of MAD. And I guess I was a bit resentful that, while Kurtzman struggled to produce a popular and well-distributed humor magazine, the Feldstein MAD flourished. (When he succeeded Kurtzman, MAD was selling about 750,000 copies. By the mid-70s the circulation had risen to 2.3 million. He retired in 1984, and circulation has lapsed to about 250,000 today.)

I still trust my comedy and loyalty instincts. I still think that Kurtzman was EC’s comedy genius, and that MAD suffered when he left. (More about Kurtzman in a forthcoming column.) But over the past year or so I’ve accumulated a nearly complete collection of the EC horror, crime and science-fiction magazines through ebay and two exemplary classic comics websites: Bud Plant and Russ Cochran’s EC Crypt. Reading the magazines that Feldstein wrote and edited in the early 50s, I have greater respect for him — an admiration for his tireless inventiveness and, as a fashioner of ghoulish tales, his gleeful mean streak. I must also confess to a grudging respect for Gaines, who did more than package the stories Feldstein wrote. He helped write them too, in daily brainstorming sessions that came to be known as the Bill & Al Show.

BEYOND THE BIBLEBill Gaines was the son of M.C. (Max) (or Charlie) (the man was so amiable he had two nicknames?) Gaines, who in 1933 had the bright idea of charging money for Famous Funnies, a 64-page collection of reprints from Sunday color comic strips — before then, the collections had been given away — and who, in 1938, found a home for Superman, the first comic-book sensation. “Max Gaines is rightly credited as the Father of the Comic Book,” writes Digby Diehl in “Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives.” By the mid-40s Max had his own company, which he called Educational Comics; it ran a line of illustrated Bible and American history stories. In 1947 Max died in a boating accident and Bill took over the business. EC was $110,000 in debt.

He was a long shot to make a profit or a passion. A “nerd” (Feldstein’s word for Gaines when he recalled their first meeting) who looked like a Jewish Drew Carey and lived with his mom throughout EC’s prime years, Gaines had scant interest in his dad’s business. “Comics? I hated ’em,” he wrote in a 1954 piece (reprinted in the excellent anthology “Tales of Terror!: The EC Companion”). “Never touched the stuff. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher.” Now he was stuck with a line of pious comics, and a pre-pre-Code code of comic-book conduct, drawn up by Max’s editor Sheldon Mayer: “Never show anybody stabbed or shot. Show no torture scenes. Never show a hypodermic needle. Don’t chop the limbs off anybody. Never show a coffin, especially with anybody in it.” That’d change.

At first Gaines showed up only to issue pay checks. Then he got to work. He secularized his merchandise, gradually retiring the Bible stories in favor of genres that were selling to young postwar consumers. And in 1948 he hired Feldstein, then just 22. What a smart pickup! Feldstein was every boss’ favorite employee: a hard-working idea man with inexhaustible energy and a nose for the market. For a few years he was editing and writing seven complete magazines every two months, often illustrating stories and drawing the covers. (Kurtzman, before MAD, was painstakingly producing only two magazines — the war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat — on the bimonthly schedule.) Feldstein could turn on a dime. In the June-July 1954 issue of Panic, he wrote a derisive parody of Major Donald E. Keyhoe’s best-selling book “Flying Saucers from Outer Space.” A few months later, he wrote a special issue of Incredible Science-Fiction dedicated to the proposition that UFOs were real. His highly-touted source: Major Donald E. Keyhoe,

For a year or so, Gaines and Feldstein tried magazines devoted to romance, space adventures, detective stories and the Old West. None scintillated. Then, perhaps noticing the advent of a few horror titles (Eerie was the first, in 1947), they introduced a few horror elements into their Crime Patrol and War on Crime titles. The last issue of Crime Patrol (March-April 1950) had a full larder of spooky-titled tales: “The Corpse in the Crematorium,” “Trapped in the Tomb,” “The Graveyard Feet “ and a Crypt-Keeper tale, “The Spectre in the Castle!”

GAINES GOES GORY

In early 1950, Gaines cleaned house. Indeed, he practically blew it up. He junked all the old titles and replaced them with a bolder line he called “New Trend” comics. War Against Crime became The Vault of Horror; Crime Patrol was made over into The Crypt of Terror (its title changed to Tales of the Crypt after a few issues); Gunfighter morphed into The Haunt of Fear; Saddle Romances gave way to Weird Science, and A Moon, a Girl, a Romance to Weird Fantasy. All the new magazines were introduced within a few months in early 1950. Crime SuspenStories premiered six months later, Shock SuspenStories in early 1952. Presumably, the subscribers to the old magazines found the new ones in their mail boxes. What must those Zane Grey fans and sweet schoolgirls have thought?

It didn’t matter, for the horror line attracted hundreds of thousands of new readers. “By mid-1953 business at EC was astonishing,” writes Maria Reidelbach in “Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine.” “The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror and the renamed Tales from the Crypt had a circulation of 400,000 copies each;… Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat lagged behind, at about 225,000 copies each.” Decades later, Feldstein recalled that Haunt of Fear sold fewer copies than the other two horror titles, and for a good reason: “What the hell is a Haunt anyway?”

With EC’s success, the horror freshet became a flood of 150 or more imitators and competitors. But Gaines was doing fine. He had a small staff: Feldstein, Kurtzman, writer-artist Johnny Craig, a secretary, a few others. Most of the illustrators were free-lancers who at first were paid $18 per page for pencil work, $13 for inking; the fee later rose to about $50 a page. And the income was, for Gaines, incomparable. According to his Senate testimony, EC’s annual gross revenue by this time was about $1 million, the net $50,000. Not bad for merchandise that went for 10 cents a pop. That meant they were selling 10 million comics a year. The company’s motto might have been: EC Does It.

The horror comics offered grown-up, or at least adolescent fare — which is why it was popular with kids; they wanted a passkey to the forbidden, the extreme, and in these campfire tales they could feel scaredy-brave both by subjecting themselves to horror tales and by daring to read something that might be condemned by their parents. Which suggests a financial oddity: EC’s main audience was teen and young adult males — the target demographic for today’s advertisers. Yet the average New Trend magazine contained no more than three pages of outside advertising. The revenue came almost entirely from readers.

EC-CENTRICITY

And EC gave them their dimes’ worth. Bill and Al’s flourishing line of bimonthly comics brought the dead-of-night short story to lurid, four-color life. As longtime MAD writer Frank Jacobs noted in his 1982 book “The MAD World of William M. Gaines,” each magazine “seethed with wild, twisting tales brought to life by spectacular art that is today regarded by aficionados as the dawning of a new age in comic-book illustration.”

Horror comics were the first successful instances of comic books without a regular hero or heroine — a Superman or Little Lulu. But the EC horror mags did have “hosts”: the wise-cracking Crypt Keeper, Vault Keeper and Old Witch (whose function Feldstein adapted from the framing device for Arch Oboler’s radio suspense show “Lights Out”). These post-mortals set up each story and signed off at the end, leaving the audience laughing, or screaming. And the story itself? It was a thing of familiar elements. To wit:

A story set in the midnight of a demented soul. A tale of several deadly sins — every one, really, but lust, which was replaced by bloodlust. Moral tales, in a retributive, Old Testament fashion: an eye for an eye, and I’ll raise you four limbs and your intestines, payable on the last page of the story. Villains who sneer, victimized wives who go “sob… sob” and outsiders who show up at the end to count the corpses. Vivid descriptions of terror, to prepare the reader for the enormity of what he was about to encounter, the crucial dialogue rendered in boldface. Typical dialogue, from “The Grave Wager” (Vault of Horror #16): “He’s sitting in the corner whimpering like a scared puppy! And his hair has turned snow white!” Or this, from “Horror House” (Vault of Horror #15): “Great scott! She’s aged twenty years! She must have seen something horrible beyond words to make her the babbling lunatic we see!” And a surprise ending — the O. Henry-style twist that made the malefactor pay in the most gruesome way possible.

Revenge was a dish best served on the last page of an EC comic, at an extreme temperature. Sometimes the vengeance came at Fate’s hands, as in “Hot-Rod” (Weird Fantasy #19). First the grisly murder: “Amos brought the monkey wrench down on Cynthia’s skull again and again until the pillow and her head melted into a fused mass of red pulp.” Then the fitting comeuppance: With a car that speeds through time and space, Amos plans the perfect alibi. After killing Cynthia, he drive to a faraway town and establish his presence at the exact time of the murder. But he revs the motor too much and at the end realizes, “Good Lord! I’m on Mars! And… and… and I’m out of gas!”

“Bedtime Gory” (Haunt of Fear #18) is about Milton, the sadistic chauffeur who killed the boss, married his daughter and took over the company. Finally his abused wife takes her revenge. “Milton lay spread-eagled across the four-poster, his wrists and ankles each securely bound to a post. Lorna began to turn a crank, Somewhere inside the bed, a ratchet clicked. ‘You’re going to be a big man, Milton!’ Milton felt his arms pulled… his legs drawn… And then, Milton felt the tendons tearing, the muscles snapping, the veins and arteries bursting and hemorrhaging. He screamed. He knew. The ratchet clicked as Lorna turned the crank…” The Vault Keeper then lightens the mood with a punning peroration: “Milty yelled ‘Uncle’ that night, but Lorna kept ‘Doone’ it… turning the crank, that is! Milty sure was a big man when they found him in the morning…. Some wise guy had a tape measure with him and took a reading. Anybody want to buy a twelve-foot long majority stockholder?”

This was a formula, to be sure, the horror version of sitcom: sit-dram or, considering the effect it had on some people’s stomachs, sit-vom. And it originated in Feldstein’s storytelling savvy and gift for lovingly elaborate narration. (As he recalled: “The old joke was that I got to write such heavy captions and balloons that the characters had to be drawn with a hunchback.”) Though Craig, Davis, “Ghastly” Graham Ingels and other EC artists had distinctive styles and built up discriminating fan bases, words were what sold the magazines more than pictures. It was Feldstein’s pustulating imagination of unearthly vengeance and pummeling descriptions of extracted body parts that gave the stories their lingering chill. For example, Davis’ illustration of the climax of the infamous “Foul Play” (Haunt of Fear #19), in which a murderous ball player gets his comeuppance — and an instant autopsy — is fairly mild. It’s the Crypt Keeper’s (Feldstein’s) narration of midnight retribution that curdles the blood…

“So now you know, fiends. Now you know why there is a ball game being played in the moonlight at midnight in the deserted Central City ball park. Look closely. See this strange baseball game! See the long strings of pulpy intestines that mark the base lines. See the two lungs and the liver that indicate the bases… the heart that is home plate. See Doc White bend and whisk the heart with the mangy scalp, yelling… ‘Play ball!’ … See the batter come to the plate swinging the legs, the arms, then throwing all but one away and standing in the batter’s box waiting for the pitcher to hurl the head in to him. See the catcher with the torso strapped on as a chest-protector, the infielders with their hand-mit[t]s, the stomach-rosin-bag, and all the other pieces of equipment that once was Central City’s star pitcher, Herbie Satten…”

THE CASE OF THE PURLOINED HORROR STORY

From 1950 to 1953, Gaines and Feldstein dreamed up, and Feldstein wrote and storyboarded, an average of three full six- to eight-page thrillers every week — 144 a year (168 after Shock SuspenStories joined the fold). True, the tales were often inspired by, or stealing from, previously published material: anecdotes (in Bennett Cerf’s “Try and Stop Me”), pulp fiction (they eventually agreed to credit Ray Bradbury and pay him a princely $25 for each of his stories they illustrated) and James N. Young’s 1946 book “101 Plots Used and Abused” (which has 125 plots — thin anecdotes, really — none of which, to my mind, are worth stealing). But Gaines, Feldstein and their artists generated a terrific line of illustrated fiction at a pace that was breakneck and brain-hemorrhaging.

So the EC writers would borrow and steal story ideas. But sometimes they were ahead of the narrative curve. Kurtzman’s “Television Terror” (Haunt of Fear #17, Sept.-Oct. 1950) was one of the first pieces of fiction to convey the seductive power of an entertainment box in America’s living room. The story has an Arthur Godfrey-like TV host taking a portable camera into a haunted house and, as things go horribly wrong, forcing viewers to witness the spectacle of a man literally scared to death. It predates “The Blair Witch Project” by nearly a half-century — and “Fear Factor” by more than that. A Feldstein fable, “The Ugly One” (Weird Science #21, Sept.-Oct. 1953), about a beautiful woman deemed repulsive by the deformed people around her, precedes Rod Serling’s famous “Twilight Zone” episode “Eye of the Beholder” by seven years.

The s-f writer’s favorite O. Henry twist ending — “Good Lord! We’re on Earth!” — is routinely associated with Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel “Planet of the Apes” and the 1968 film (co-written by Serling, who worked in an echo of “Eye of the Beholder” when human Charlton Heston tells monkey doctor Kim Hunter, “I’d like to kiss you goodbye,” and she replies, “All right, but you’re so damned ugly”). But Feldstein used the Earth punch-line early and often. So often, he sometimes felt the need to cap his no-longer-surprising ending with another surprise. A twist top.

In “The Exile” (Weird Fantasy #14), a space crew of two men, named X-51 and Z-7, is transferring a sedated convict across the galaxy to a prison planet where all the sociopaths are kept so as not to contaminate the good people back home. (Sort of like “Escape from New York,” but global.) We learn that the prison planet is Earth; that it has been bred, from Adam and Eve onward, with the human refuse of a more peaceful civilization; and that in Earth years it’s the early 1930s. Just before the ship lands, X-51 stares at the sleeping convict — it’s Adolf Hitler — and muses, “He looks evil, Z-7! I… I wonder how much effect he will have?” Beneath the last panel is an editors’ note: “Would you like it in round numbers, X-51?” The freezing frisson of a twist, followed by a blast of holocaustal sarcasm.

Sometimes the capper is less an Ugh! than a Huh? “A Strange Undertaking” (Haunt of Fear #3), EC’s first unauthorized use of a Bradbury story, ends with lawmen staring into a mean man’s coffin, their faces bloated with nausea, but there’s no “reveal.” Instead of showing us the befouled corpse, the Old Witch cackles, “Want to know what they did to Ezra? What’s the most horrible thing you can think of? Hee, hee… That’s it!”

EC horror comics had a lot of hee-hee. There was wordplay in the characters’ names (Mrs. Thaumaturge, in the Robert Bloch rip-off, “Daddy Lost His Head!”) and in the story titles (“Horror We? How’s Bayou?” for a Louisiana swamp saga, about a hermit and his deranged, voracious brother — the sickest EC story I’ve read). The Grim Fairy Tale series ran cynical variations on old fables, often turning them into parables of gluttony. (Don’t read too much into this, but Gaines was always on a diet.) In one fable, peasants in a kingdom plagued with rats storm the castle, force huge hungry rats down the throats of the morbidly obese king and queen, and cheer as the rats eat their way out of the royals.

The mags were also studded with in-jokes, frequently about Bill and Al, who appeared in seven stories, including one that purported to tell the origin of the horror titles (the lads were trapped in a sewer by the Vault Keeper, Crypt Keeper and Old Witch). In “The End” (Weird Fantasy #13), a comet that explodes near Earth renders all humans sterile. “As the last generation of children to be born grew up, the toymakers went out of business… comic magazine publishers* closed their doors…” A caption strip below the panel explains the asterisk: “* With the exception of EC, which continued to appeal to an adult readership.”

In a sense, then, two years before MAD, and throughout the New Trend period, these EC horror titles were comic comic books.

PAGAN PANIC

“The comics business brought censorship down on its head because of the kind of things the horror comics were doing,” Kurtzman opined, with unnecessary smugness, to The Comics Journal in the 1980s. “I always thought the horror comics were vile. At some certain point they turned sick, I thought, and I think they reached that point when EC was running short of classic book plots and had to turn inward; what came out was sheer gruel — ideas that sniffed of necrophilia. When the investigation turned to EC, it was like, ‘I told you so! Look what you did to us.’”

Kurtzman had made glancing reference to Gaines’ plight in a MAD (#16, Oct. 1954) parody of tabloid newspapers. “Comics Go Underground” screamed the headline, above a “photo” of a bespectacled, Gainesian publisher flashing his product to a kid like the old dope peddler near a schoolyard. In fact, Kurtzman’s magazines rarely got censored or censured, though they were graphic (Two Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat) or irreverent (MAD). Feldstein was the culprit: in the horror mags, in Crime and Shock SuspenStories and, a bit of a surprise, with EC’s own MAD ripoff, Panic.

In many ways Panic was a pure clone: same four-story format, same artists, same subjects (movies, TV shows, comic strips) for parodic skewering. Where MAD was subtitled “Humor in a Jugular Vein,” Panic was “Humor in a Varicose Vein.” Kurtzman signed his covers with a Kurtz and a stick man; Feldstein’s signature became a Feld and a beer stein. The man who had “borrowed” so many horror-story motifs from other writers was doing what came naturally: creating a ripoff, and parody, of EC’s most valuable title….

…but with the old Feldstein sadistic flair. The cover of the very first issue (Dec. 1953-Jan. 1954) — a Christmas Eve hearth with a bear trap awaiting Santa’s foot and a kid giggling maliciously to one side — immediately set the tone. The two less incendiary inside stories were a parody of the TV show “This Is Your Life” (which ends with the guest of honor under arrest for the murder of his wife) and another Grim Fairy Tale, “Little Red Riding Hood” (Red and her grandma are both werewolves). This wasn’t your Uncle Harvey’s lampoon magazine; it would be edgier than Kurtzman, an angry MAD.

The lead story in that first issue — “My Gun Is the Jury,” a conflation and spoof of Mickey Spillane’s enormously popular and violent Mike Hammer crime novels — has a Tarantinish body count (six, many of them beautiful women) and eight pages of vivid dialogue familiar to readers of Vault, Crypt and Haunt. On page 2, private eye Mike Hammershlammer is seen dispatching his first va-va-voom babe: “She gurgled up at me, spitting blood. She was still alive. I rammed my heel into her face and did a graceful pirouette on her nose, grinding in…” The image (Davis did the art) is of Mike twirling on one foot, as blood and pulp splatters up from the bottom of the panel and the gumshoe shouts, “Die, Sadie, die!”

It could be argued that the gore in the story simply parodies, perhaps even criticizes, the gore in Spillane’s work, which in the mid-50s count for six of the ten best-selling paperbacks to that time. On the last page of “I, the Jury,” Hammer learns that the killer he’s been searching for is a beautiful shrink he almost fell in love with. So he shoots her dead. “‘How c-could you?’ she gasped. I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. ‘It was easy,’ I said.”

But to see “My Gun Is the Jury” as a critique of Spillane would be to ignore Feldstein’s horror work. This Panic story has the writer’s favorite ingredients of murder, hatred and extravagant revenge — plus a patented Feldstein double-twist, which tops the O. Henry ending of “I, the Jury.” Stella, the gorgeous doll whose advances Mike keeps strangely resisting, turns out to be the killer. “I let her have it, right in the gut, a little below the belly-button…” Then Stella’s blouse falls away to reveal that — she’s a guy! “And when I saw Stella’s manly physique, I started to cry, ‘Stella! Don’t die! Don’t die!’ But Stella died, never realizing that I, Mike Hammershlammer, was a woman.”

DISGUSTING, PAGAN AND UNFUNNY

To say that Feldstein’s Panic was the comics equivalent of an R rating to Kurtzman’s PG is not to say Panic wasn’t funny. It’s certainly not to suggest it was illegal. But some important people did. Panic got EC in trouble with the state of Massachusetts, the New York City Police Department and Sen. Kefauver. New York’s Finest were not at all amused by “My Gun Is the Jury.” As Jacobs writes: “The police descended on the EC office an bought a copy of the magazine. [EC business manager Lyle] Stuart told Gaines to stay out of sight. The police arrested Stuart and book him on the charge of selling ‘disgusting’ literature. If convicted, he faced a possible year in prison. … [EC lawyer Martin Schlieman] argued the case in the lower court so effectively that the judge, in Gaines’ words, ‘threw it out as the most stupid Goddamn thing he’d ever heard of.’”

The final story in Panic #1 was Bill Elder’s illustrated version of “The Night Before Christmas.” It’s bursting with wonderful sight gags: a slaughterhouse with body parts (boxes of Lady Fingers, a jar of Housemaids Knees), a carton of feline bits (“Our stuffing is the cats!!”), a large rodent (“portermouse steak”) and a “stewed lamb” (crouching over an empty bottle of rotgut). But what offended some delicate sensibilities was the portrayal of Santa Claus: cursing as he drives a sleigh with a “Just Divorced!” bumper sticker and morphing into a blackface crooner when he emerges “all tarnished with ashes and soot.” Massachusetts Attorney General George Fingold, aghast at this “pagan” desecration of Saint Nicholas, called for Panic’s suppression. “Not only was it banned in Boston,” Jacobs writes, “it was banned in the entire state of Massachusetts.”

One more Panic outrage. During the Subcommittee’s quizzing of Gaines, Kefauver took exception to a Maidenform bra parody ad: “I Dreamed I Went to a Fraternity Smoker in My Panic Magazine!” Really, Mr. Gaines, is that supposed to be funny? There must have been a sigh in the publisher’s voice when he explained: “This is a lampoon magazine. We make fun of things.”

Feldstein kept making fun of dicey things and influential people. He tweaked the blue-noses in a Li’l Abner lampoon called “Li’l Melvin” — seven pages of standard japery and an eighth purporting to be a report of “the Committee on Protecting the Soft Minds of Our Little Monsters.” For example, the Committee detects a picture of a cow in a pasture. “This is obviously Lil’ Melvin’s mother’s cow. Mammy’s cow… Ma’s cow… Moscow is the capitol of Russia. This… is Communist propaganda!”

HORRIBLE SURPRISE ENDING

In an earlier column on Kurtzman and MAD, I wrote about Dr. Fredric Wertham and his campaign to save the minds of American kids by keeping “crime comics” away from them. But he deserves a bit more here. Wertham, a clinical psychologist specializing in disorders of the young, trembled when he read comic books. Any comic books: Superman (fascist!), Batman and Robin (perverts!), wonder Woman (lesbian!). Apparently after an encounter with a Looney Tunes comic, he reported, aghast, that “Ducks…threaten to kill rabbits.” He blithely stated that, since most juvenile delinquents he had examined were readers of horror comics, horror comics must be a factor in their misbehavior. (This is the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy of logic. No Senator dared ask if all the delinquents hadn’t also listened to “The Lone Ranger” and eaten mashed potatoes.)

Wertham was a star witness, and a friendly one, of Kefauver’s subcommittee. The good doctor told Kefauver that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry.” (Right: “Mein Kampf” couldn’t corrupt young people. No pictures.) When Gaines followed him that afternoon, he did not ingratiate himself with the solons when he said, “It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror comics to Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.”

Gaines, who was dosed with dexedrine for his diet, began his testimony with the bold statement, “I was the first publisher in the United States to publish horror comics. I am responsible. I started them.” (Actually, he didn’t.) He escalated into rhetorical questions: “Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens too and entitled to select what to read and do?” (Actually, they’re not.) The rest of his testimony made for high drama, but it didn’t win Gaines any points with his questioners.

They wanted to know about a house ad Gaines had run in all his magazines: “Are You a Red Dupe?” It noted that among the detractors of comic books was the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker and perorated, “So the next time some joker gets up at a PTA meeting, or starts jabbering about ‘the naughty comic books’ at your local candy store, give him the once-over. We are not saying he is a Communist. He may be a dupe. He may not even read the Daily Worker. It is just that he’s swallowed the Red bait — hook, line and sinker.”

In 1954, with Commiephobia at its apex (the Army-McCarthy hearings began the day after Gaines’ appearance), irony or sarcasm would be lost on crusading Senators. In its interim report, the subcommittee condemned “those materials offered for children’s reading that fall below the American standard of decency by glorifying crime, horror, and sadism.” It then took a swipe at Gaines: “The tempter of children cannot excuse his attempts to gain personal wealth through disregard of cultural values by crying that the parents should have been more vigilant. [This vigilance] would not have been necessary if the persons responsible for producing and distributing comic books had exercised that measure of self-restraint and common decency which the American people have a right to expect from an industry aiming its product so largely at the young and impressionable minds of our children.”

“HEE, HEE… THAT’S IT!”

Gaines had volunteered to testify at the Kefauver clambake as a way of putting his case to the people. Didn’t help. Even without a hundred talk shows to stir the ferment — and even though no legislation resulted from the hearings — horror comics got buried in harsh publicity. This goaded the community of comics publishers to create a self-censoring Code for their magazines. Gaines knew this would kill off his books — they were the “Alien,” the “Kill Bill,” the “Evil Dead” of their day — and refused to join.

As quickly as they had risen, the EC horror comics fell. After the Haunt of Fear witch hunt, Gaines closed down all his New Trend titles( except for MAD), whether or not they had attracted official opprobrium. (He had already discontinued Frontline Combat in late 1953, when Kurtzman was devoting all his attention to making MAD a monthly, and combined Weird Science and Weird Fantasy into one quarterly, Weird Science-Fantasy, whose title was changed seven issues later to Incredible Science Fiction. Two-Fisted Tales struggled along until the Feb.-March 1955 issue.)

Gaines then shoveled EC’s profits down two holes. One was a line of 10-cent New Direction comics with mid-cult aspirations. I remember buying an issue of, no kidding, Psychoanalysis comic book; it was the only EC publication my father ever told me to throw out — but, as I recall, it wasn’t nearly that provocative. The other was a 1956 quartet of Picto-Fiction magazines, priced at 25 cents to emulate MAD’s success. These contained full short stories with a drawing on each page. Called Crime Illustrated, Terror Illustrated, Shock Illustrated and Romance Illustrated (the word had become marketable the year before, with Time Inc.’s introduction of Sports Illustrated) lasted only two issues. By 1956, when his national distributor went bankrupt, Gaines was $110,000 in the hole — exactly his financial position when he took over EC nine years before.

Then Kurtzman left MAD and took his three top artists with him.

It happens that Gaines’ story is not a horror comic but a romance comic. He found true compatibility with his old-new editor, Feldstein, and made a bundle. He became the fat, funny face of MAD (aside from Alfred E. Neuman). But his great work, I’d say, was behind him: the creation and nurturing of those wonderful, awful comics.

During his Senate appearance, he was shown a copy of the Shock SuspenStories then on the newsstand. In that issue was a fable called “The Orphan,” in which the girl’s torturers end up in the electric chair. Gaines was asked sarcastically if he thought the story had any therapeutic value for children. Instead of twisting some moral rationalization out of his scare tale, Gaines sensibly replied, “I don’t think it does them a bit of good, but I don’t think it does them a bit of harm, either.”

I was a kid then. I read some of the EC horror titles, and I don’t think they did me a bit of harm, either. Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein and I could spot quality entertainment when we saw it.

NEXT TIME: THE REVENGE OF HARVEY KURTZMAN