On the newsstands of the U.S. and Canada, more comic books are sold than any other type of magazine. About a quarter of the 80 million comic books that readers buy each month are known as "horror comics," bearing such titles as Tormented, The Thing, Web of Evil. Typical plot: a gravedigger falls in love with a beautiful girl, kills her in a fit of passion and then makes love to the corpse. When rigor mortis sets in, the gravedigger is strangled in the dead girl's arms. Such gory plots and pictures, which brought on a congressional investigation of horror comics (TIME, May 3), have stirred up a nationwide campaign against the books.
Clean Line. Last week the campaign was running so strong that in Manhattan one of the biggest horror-comic publishers announced he was stopping publication of the books in response "to appeals by American parents." Entertaining Comics Publisher William M. Gaines had been a star witness before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. He had insisted his comic-book cover of an ax-wielding man holding aloft the severed head of a blonde was "in good taste, [but] would be in bad taste if the head were held a little higher so the neck would show blood dripping out." Gaines last week stopped his own flow of 2,000,000 horror comics a month, plans to substitute a "clean, clean line."
Publisher Gaines had another reason for stopping his horror comics. New York's Mayor Robert Wagner recently ordered the city's lawyers to get injunctions banning the worst books under the state's obscenity laws. But many a community has already learned that comic books cannot be easily legislated off the newsstands. Five years ago New York's Governor Dewey vetoed a bill banning them on the ground that it was unconstitutional. Los Angeles County passed a similar law, only to have it knocked out by the courts. Nevertheless, in Oklahoma City, the city council recently passed an ordinance banning crime and horror comics. Some council members opposed the ordinance on the ground that the wording was so vague it could be used to ban the writings of Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle. In Houston, spurred by Page One editorials in Jesse Jones's Chronicle, the city council also passed an ordinance similar to Oklahoma City's.
Some communities, opposed to the Oklahoma City and Houston-type ordinances because they are concerned about the effects of scattershot censorship, have turned to a better method of control. In Cincinnati, for example, a citizens' committee of businessmen, educators, clergymen and parents rates every comic book published. In Canton, Ohio, a mayor's committee started "Operation Book Swap," in two days collected 12,000 horror comic books, which were exchanged at the rate of ten to one for hard-covered books, e.g., Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland.