Like video games, rap and rock ’n’ roll, comic books were once the object of moral panic and scrutiny from congressional committees and public watchdogs. The genuinely concerned and the professional busybodies weren’t worried about “Prince Valiant” or “Dick Tracy,” but by an unruly breed of “horror comics” that proliferated after World War II and found an enormous audience by 1950especially among young boys. With politicians bearing down, the comic book industry adopted a code in 1954 that largely eliminated disturbing images and ideas.
The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read! (Abrams ComicArts) reproduces many of the luridly colored pulps from the late ’40s and early ’50sthe kind of stuff that vanished when the Comics Code appeared. The commentary by Jim Trombetta, a journalist and TV writer, places these often-hackneyed yet bizarre images in context. He argues that the U.S. government tried to suppress the “terror” of the early nuclear agethe Cold War and its heated eruption in Koreabut that the “terror reasserted itself in the ‘junk’ medium of the horror comic.” This may be true, but it warrants some additional explanation. With its propaganda newsreels, duck-and-cover drills and fallout-shelter signs, the feds helped seed a pervasive anxiety that grew into many strange weeds, including ’50s sci-fi movies and Communist witch hunts as well as horror comics.
Trombetta is perceptive to wonder whether the psychic debris of World War II, a vicious conflict whose many casualties included truth and common decency, might have molded the mind-set of comic books and their readers. According to Trombetta, G.I.s in the Pacific often took the skulls from Japanese corpses as souvenirs. The incineration of enemy cities through firebombing and the atom bomb requires less comment. Perhaps he is also correct to link the comics’ preoccupation with zombies to the human wave attacks by Chinese “volunteers” in Korea. The uncanny was occurring in real life and was bound to assume grotesque shapes in the public imagination.
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Trombetta is against the campaign to ban horror comics, even those whose content was disturbingly racist and sexist, yet he avoids a knee-jerk condemnation of the comics’ foes and instead offers a more-nuanced perspective. The leading figure in the war on comics, the psychoanalyst Fredric Wertham, was no ordinary reactionary, but rather “a progressive and anti-racist intellectual.” A director of a child clinic in Harlem, his paper on the psychological effects of segregation factored in the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Nonetheless, Trombetta believes that Wertham was alarmist and ill-informed in his fear that children would imitate the odd behavior depicted in the comics. Appalled by the poverty and abuse suffered by the children in his clinic, Wertham (or so Trombetta says) offered the “simple solution” of depriving the kids of their favorite reading materialas if lurid titles like The Tomb of Terror or Underworld Crime were responsible for their situation. But Wertham’s argument drew many progressive supporters, especially the praiseworthy Sen. Estes Kefauver, who championed antitrust legislation and challenged the power of the pharmaceutical giants. Trombetta speculates that Kefauver might have seen the comic controversy as “an appropriately colorful platform” following his televised hearings into organized crime.
The ugly face of sensationalism belongs neither to Wertham nor Kefauver but to men like Paul Coates, a Joe Friday among panic-mongers whose TV “investigative reporting” show, “Confidential File,” devoted an absurdly over-the-top episode to the comic book menace. It is included on a DVD packaged with The Horror! The Horror!
But is the art of comic books really art? “The success of horror comics in their heyday had nothing to do with politics, idealism or the artistic avant-garde; it had to do with money,” Trombetta writes on one page, while asserting on another that many of the artists, often as anonymous as medieval craftsmen, were knowledgeable on art history. Suffice it to say that style and quality varied, even in the work of the same draftsmen who cranked the stuff out by the ream. Some of it, especially the covers of L.B. Cole, had a weird, exotic beauty conjuring up the dark tales that entertained the kids and disturbed their parents.
