Although the “Golden Age of Comics” usually connotes images of the Justice Society of America and Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw, super-hero comics were only part of the picture. The genre enjoyed a brief burst of extreme popularity in the late thirties and early forties, one that tapered off dramatically in the years immediately after World War II. Replacing them were graphic crime and horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and Crime SuspenStories from publishers like E.C, which eschewed “truth, justice, and the American way” in favor of greed, adultery, and violent comeuppance. Best known today for inspiring media like George Romero and Stephen King’s Creepshow, these comics inspired a complete moral panic in the 1950s, culminating in a literal trial of the comic book medium. Senate hearings investigated the moral character of comics and comic publishers, and graphic covers like E.C’s Crime SuspenStories #22 were damning evidence against both.
Shocking, grim, and totally inappropriate for children, you can hardly blame parents of the era for throwing these comics out when they found them in their children’s rooms. However, parents’ decision to destroy their kids’ comics had an unintended consequence: it made these gruesome issues some of the most infamous, rare, and collectible comics ever published. Few are more infamous than Crime SuspenStories #22, which features a crazed killer holding a severed head in one hand and a blood-spattered axe in the other. Cited in specificity during the 1954 senate hearings, and cited in virtually every list of the most violent covers of its era, this comic is the poster child for the anti-comic book moral panic. And next week, it’s up for auction through Heritage, part of a “Horror Pulp Magazine and Comic Books Showcase Auction” occurring just in time for Halloween. With more than ten days to bid, the price to own this infamous piece of comic history has already climbed to more than $2k.
Frederic Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent was the catalyst for the massive anti-comic book public outcry, voicing the growing fears of parents all over America. Wertham claimed that comic books were warping the impressionable minds of children, driving them to violence and juvenile delinquency. It was functionally the same argument used today against violent video games, taking data that suggested there was an uptick in juvenile delinquency, data that suggested more children were reading crime and horror comic books, and concluding that correlation implied causality. Whether Wertham’s methods were sound or not, it’s undeniable that he had a point: virtually every issue of these comics featured graphic scenes of murder, and covers that can still turn a sensitive stomach seventy-five years later (there’s a reason I elected to tell you about Crime SuspenStories #22, rather than show it).
Comic books were one of many potential contributors to adolescent crime that were investigated by Congress and the Senate in this era, part of the “Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency” formed in 1953. While some of their investigation centered on super-hero characters, who Wertham accused of promoting “sexual deviancy,” the subcommittee chose to focus on crime and horror comics, which made the easier, more defensible target. This was exacerbated by E.C. publisher William Gaines’ active antagonism of Congress, taking space in E.C’s titles to mock the hearings and suggest that anyone who supported banning comic books was a Communist and opposed to free speech. When Gaines testified before the subcommittee, Crime SuspenStories #22 was one of the issues put on trial. For proponents of the ban, it was one of the most clear-cut examples of the sickening violence in comics. For those opposed, the splitting of hairs over how much blood exactly was or wasn’t acceptable to censors was the epitome of the entire hearing’s absurd nature. Here’s an excerpt, reprinted in 13th Dimension’s E.C. retrospective:
“Senator KEFAUVER. Here is your May 22 issue. 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. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.
Senator KEFAUVER. You have blood coming out of her mouth.
Mr. GAINES. A little.
Senator KEFAUVER. Here is blood on the ax. I think most adults are shocked by that.“
After weeks of this kind of back-and-forth, a compromise was reached: comic publishers agreed to form a regulatory authority similar to the Hays Code for motion pictures. Called the “Comics Code Authority,” it would limit what kinds of content could be published in comic books, quelling concerns over their violent or sexual nature. Among its provisions was a functional moratorium on both the horror and crime comic genres, calling for the elimination of “lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations,” as well as disallowing the use of “Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism.” This put a nail in E.C. Comics’ coffin, leading to the publisher’s bankruptcy in 1956, and meant major changes for DC and Atlas (who would soon rebrand themselves as “Marvel”). For DC, that took the form of self-censoring the crime and horror elements of Batman. It also mean taking a chance on reviving defunct Golden Age hero the Flash for the modern era, ushering in the Silver Age and changing the face of the comic book medium for seven decades and counting.
Although it lasted for less than a decade, the era of horror and crime comics loomed large in the imagination of the creatives that grew up on them. In the early seventies, this took the form of new horror anthology titles from Marvel and DC, published in the wake of relaxing Comics Code censorship. At the same time, British film company Amicus adapted Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror to the big screen, borrowing stories from these and several other E.C. titles. As time passed, that influence could be felt indirectly in the work of filmmakers like George Romero, Tobe Hooper, and John Carpenter — with Carpenter even providing introductions to Dark Horse’s reprint hardcovers of fifties E.C. stories. In 1989, Tales from the Crypt even became a successful and long-running television series, as well as a sorely-underrated 1995 film.
The pervasive influence of the comics is hardly surprising: grim and a little twisted, they stoked the imagination of writers, directors, and artists whose transgressive work would also push boundaries. It’s likely that the debate over whether children should have been reading these comics will persist forever — they are offensive, the question is instead of whether or not children should be exposed to offensive media. But it’s that debate that will forever drive comic collectors’ fascination with these issues. Almost eighty years after publication, they still manage to feel shocking, standing out as some of the oldest horror media to maintain the same impact today as it did when it was new. Add to that intangible allure the physical, literal rarity of these comics, and the reason for the $2k and climbing price tag for Crime SuspenStories #22 becomes clear. However, for whichever lucky collector manages to win the comic, they had best remember to keep it where their parents can’t see it.
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