If Not Superheroes, What? Part III: Horror Comics

The creators and publishers of comics once pursued a goal that centered around the concept of "fun," and this notion defined what editors (and readers) expected of the medium from the 1930s to the 1970s, before the redefinition of the comics model in the sixties had completely crowded older (and perhaps wiser) approaches out of the market. The word fun, however, does not always carry with it the sense of rightness. Fun and trouble, for instance, frequently overlap.

In their shining era, horror comics indeed did deliver fun in potent little doses. Not all people consider all fun equal, however; some of us wince at childish games like pouring lighter fluid on anthills to burn them or blowing up frogs with firecrackers, or even (seemingly) harmless, yet naughty, pastimes like making one's younger sister look at the flattened remains of a run-over cat to see her reaction. The classic horror comics did much to connect fun and trouble in the same package. To an America of jangled nerves, these pieces did not seem either innocent or innocuous. Public attention would kill them at their peak, and later echoes would never recapture the impact of a form that came and went quickly in the 1950s.

What, precisely, did the horror comics do to attract so much unfortunate attention?

Poetic Justice

Though other comics dabbled in giving some bad guy what for in a fashion that well fit the nature of his crimes, horror comics used this kind of karmic payback as a central focus, a unifying theme from which the form might generate endless variations.

Those of us looking backwards to see the end of this form recall the accusations against comics in general, based, in large part, on the qualities of the horror comic in specific, might recall that critics saw them as a potentially corrupting social vector that, they speculated, might help incline young people to delinquency and crime.

For the moment, file this idea. It clashes with one key aspect of the horror comics: These pieces frequently followed a moralistic, rather than anti-moral, story pattern in which some ill-intentioned soul met a truly grotesque end as a result of his considered misdeeds. Punishments frequently reflected the character flaws that brought them on in a fashion loosely described as "poetic justice."

For example, a husband-killer might improbably find herself in the center of a graveyard where a small army of the animated corpses of her exes erupted from their graves to deal with their murderer. A greedy man might fall victim to his wealth. Obsessive types might end up destroyed by the object of their obsessions. Only infrequently did a bad fate befall an innocent; in those cases, the horror story took the form of the ironic fate-almost-(but not quite)-averted tale. Normally, however, they had it coming.

Evil men (and women) suffered for a reason in these books. Their destruction served justice, completely unlike the ruin one might find in pieces such as Kafka's "Metamorphosis," where a clerk becomes an insect and dies miserably for no reason at all.

Death, Disfigurement, and Decay

Murder, mutilation, and rot served as the three recurring elements of the classic horror comics. While, perhaps, these themes mean little to a more desensitized generation, at one time - not that long ago - the introduction of forensic horrors into entertainment nominally intended for juveniles might raise some concern. And, indeed, it did raise some concern, in a form that ultimately brought about the extinction of the horror comic, at least in its most vital form.

Nonetheless, some of his mayhem seemed part of a tradition that extended back to the European fairy tale, a form frequently given to themes of cannibalism (in "Hansel and Gretel"), becoming the next meal of carnivorous animals ("Red Riding Hood"), and other unpleasant fates that might await children who did not heed what their parents had told them to protect their lives. In the horror comic, death, disfigurement, and decay represented the just deserts of those who attempted to advance themselves at the cost of the lives of others, or who tried too hard to barricade themselves against the inevitable downside of the human condition itself.

The Shock Ending

We can differentiate the surprise ending, long a staple of various kinds of literature, not limited to comics (or, for that matter, to prose) from the shock ending. A simple surprise might hinge on some ironic juxtaposition, some piece of poetic justice, some thwarted goal that no man might rightly achieve. The shock ending, on the other hand, relied on evoking a healthy disgust reaction from the reader by showing him something better left unseen by the squeamish.

The shock ending, when it chose to do its job, definitely worked hard to raise the hackles of those concerned about the affects of lurid literature on young and/or impressionable people. Consider, for example, the specimen immediately above, which served as the shock ending to a tale where a child's invisible friend rises up against said child's abusive father. Seeing the father's mortal remains literally as a pile of hamburger indeed intended to horrify.

In a broader sense, the horror comics of the fifties horrified too well; and this attracted an unwanted attention that would ultimately bring about the end of this form for almost two decades, and a permanent end to a moment in comics when the form saw its finest expression.

The Comics Code Crackdown

A future Profiles column may deal with the much-rehashed events that followed public inquiry into the content of comic books. Suffice it here to say that a Dr. Wertham brought much attention to the content of popular comics as part of a short but intense social movement that adorned itself with events like comic-burnings and public forums on the subject that frequently involved celebrities of the day, such as "L'il Abner" creator Al Capp, on just what might go on in comics while the grownups had failed to notice.

Public outrage resulted in boycotts, which led to plummetting sales, which led to entire schools of comics going under. Amid the ashes of this ruin, the industry agreed to create a self-policing agency called the Comics Code Authority to define standards for compliant and non-compliant comics.

Such standards, in some ways, sought to make horror comics impossible by particular restrictions even on the titles of books, declaring noncompliant pieces with words like "horror," "terror," or "fear" in their titles. And the list went on and on: no conspicuous blood or gore, muzzle flash and smoke from pistols could not exceed some arbitrary dimensions that Code referees would determine on a panel-by-panel and book-by-book basis, and "heroes" must always overcome "villains." While I don't care to engage in a lot of Code-bashing (such bashing, after all, tends towards either the trite or the redundant), we might note that, owing to the dubious benefits of the Code, an accurate history comic would not comply with these terms. A standard that makes telling the truth impossible has inherent flaws, regardless of differences of opinion over the anticipated benefits of censorship.

The New Horror Comics

As a self-policing agency, the Comics Code Authority had restrictions that could not exist under American law without some deliberate suspension of awareness of the First Amendment - the aspects of prior restraint particularly would not pass a serious Constitutional test. The Code's restrictions on horror comics represented a rather arbitrary imposition. To forbid entire genres of comics suggests a very bad kind of rulemaking by malformed syllogism.

By the end of the sixties, DC Comics had transformed books like House of Mystery into a tamer echo of the EC classic pieces that helped bring about the unfortunate clamor that caused the destruction of the genre in the first place. In some cases, on this side of the aisle, the rebirth of horror comics might take a cross-genre approach, as in the example of war-and-horror pieces like the "Creature Commandoes" pieces.

The full flowering of the new horror comics, however, would take place over at Marvel, where DC's upstart younger sibling would approach horror-superhero pieces like Ghost Rider - a demonic superhero with a flaming head, a motorcycle, and an outfit that might qualify him for one of the positions in the Village People - or the somewhat silly "Son of Satan," Damien Hellstrom, an Oedipal hero who fought against his dubious father and all the vile hosts he commanded. To this mix we might add characters like Blade the Vampire Slayer, Moebius the Living Vampire, Werewolf by Night, Dracula (of Tomb of Dracula) fame, and, during a period of his publication, Dr. Strange, who connected with this stable of heroes through a series of common artists, writers, and plots. To this list we could add Tigra, Brother Voodoo, and perhaps a few others whom my memory has failed to retrieve.

Marvel expanded into the terrain opened by the loosening of the Comics Code Authority's restrictions on horror comics. DC, on the other hand, seemed barely to have waded into the waters, partially, perhaps, because during its own reformative years in the Silver Age, it invested much in the adoption of science fiction concepts, almost to the exclusion of fantasy. But in neither case did a publisher really take to the EC comics horror model, except in a small way. Both publishers, for the most part, had committed to the notions of continuity and a shared universe, which created an overall context that made horror material lose much of its impact; the Hulk, after all, could upstage a werewolf on the same storytelling territory, and monsters and demons don't much stand out in the colorful cast of goons that passed for menaces in that day.

While Marvel's horror pieces of the seventies, particularly those written by Marv Wolfman, would remain well-remembered and frequently in demand as part of a collector's canon, in general the titles did not endure, nor did most of the characters entrench themselves in prominent places in the overall Marvel mythos. Where such characters did continue, they tended to do so as supporting characters in other books, particularly Doctor Strange, Defenders, or Avengers. While the former two titles do resurface from time to time, the Avengers remains the main venue, since it tends to stay in print; but in this, mainly Tigra has made a small, mostly forgettable, imprint.

The Talent

To discuss the heyday of horror comics, we must, once again, return to the brief moment when EC Comics shone on a desolate comics terrain that remained after the collapse of the market that followed the Second World War.

EC's usual stable of talent - a group of artists in their twenties who would later become icons of the industry, even if, in some cases, their own lives did not reflect much benefit from this - made the horror comics into the compelling beast they became. One would note a few particular names attached to excellence in this form, especially Jack Davis. Davis proved himself a truly versatile soul who could do excellent humor work, good science fiction work, really shocking horror work, and the occasional cover of TV Guide all in a single career. Joe Orlando, who would outlive EC Comics by over forty years, worked in a gripping style on these pieces; Jack Kamen and "Ghastly" Graham Ingels also adorned a catalog of pieces with their signatures. And later, Silver Age figures like Steve Ditko would work in "fantasy" comics that owed much of their narrative structure to EC's precedents. With the new horror comics of the 1960s and 1970s, talents like Berni Wrightson would gain recognition.

Others did their piece as well: Editors Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines served to direct the EC horror comics ship, and many other writers and artists working for less historically prominent publishers would do their bit.

The Aftermath

With comics becoming a monoculture of superhero books generally interconnected with a shared universe and hard continuity editorial model, nothing like the best horror books of the fifties could arise again, and the closest fits fell into the categories of after-the-fact imitations by original involved parties (for instance, the better episodes in DC books like House of Mystery, particularly with the involvement of horror veteran Joe Orlando himself) or good but derivative, and no-longer-shocking tributes like the Creepshow books that attempted to pay tribute to a startling literature that had less to offer a difficult-to-entertain generation that followed.

One might include the Warren magazines, which printed in a different format and therefore, by a technicality, eluded the controls of the Comics Code Authority, in the horror comics canon in spite of the hairsplitting that allowed such pieces to define themselves as comics magazines instead of comic books. Even in these pieces, one sees work more inclined to experimentation with tone and mood, or in taking advantage of the freer domains outside control of the CCA. The horror and fantasy comics magazines did not, in the end, spawn a canon of classic stories and styles. Anthologization did not follow these works as they did in other schools, in part because comics (in whatever format) had already fragmented into idiosyncratic styles that did not always bear reprinting through the unifying force of a common form or theme.

The loss of horror comics stands, in many ways, as a tragedy, even considering their weaknesses and the growing gap in the ability of comics to compete with other media for the shorter and shorter attention spans of later audiences. A new generation of talent exists that could, should they desire to, create something comparable; but the medium no longer really supports short stories and no longer really has venues for a form that, in many ways, told stories better than how what replaced it does.

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