If you grew up in the 1990s, various mascots of mutilation filled your Halloween. If you weren’t careful, one of them might get you. Freddy could slay you in a somnambulant state, Jason might slaughter you during summer vacation, and Michael Myers would possibly murder you without a sound. Though it felt like these characters had always been with us as some part of a tremulous tapestry of urban legend, these icons of horror did not always haunt the dark recesses of minds worldwide. They were all birthed from the imaginations of people just like you and me, not out of ancient tribal traditions or whispered word of mouth, but of young directors trying to make their mark in the movies.
Freddy Krueger took root through Wes Craven, and Michael Myers sprouted from John Carpenter. You may ask where they came up with such nefarious nightmares and who fueled the fiendish fire that sparked their careers? Likely it was not a single source that inspired these ghoulish giants of the industry. They all seem to have at least one thing in common: a love for the horror comics of the 1950s, specifically Entertaining Comics.
The exact origin of the first horror comic is widely disputed, but EC’s attention to storytelling, both in its writing and illustrations, is not. To understand EC’s place in comic history, we must travel back to the beginning of the medium itself, all the way back to the 1890s when newspapers began printing comedic cartoons as supplements to their coverage of current events. Comics soon evolved to serials of adventure and daring-do, highly influenced by their progenitor, pulp magazines — periodicals containing short stories in all genres, from detective to aviation to fantasy and science fiction. If it had an audience, it had a magazine dedicated to it.
Newspapers printed the exploits of heroes in the pulp tradition, including Flash Gordon, Terry, and the Pirates, and even a hero directly taken out of the pulps themselves — Tarzan of the Apes. As these syndicated slices of super-heroics bolstered the sales of newspapers everywhere, those in the pulp publishing business began to toy with the brilliant idea of collecting these strips into single floppy editions, what we now call comic books. The first of these was Famous Funnies, published by Maxwell Gaines in 1934. A long-time publisher of pulps, Gaines invested heavily in this new literary distraction. His company EC began as Educational Comics and put out a plethora of wholesome titles like Illustrated Tales of the Bible. They sold almost none of them, compared to the other hundreds of comic titles on the market. So, he ditched the scholastic line to turn his sales around and started printing romance strips and the newest craze — superheroes.
World War II brought superheroes front and center. Their patriotic ideals and seeming invincibility proved the perfect archetype to combat the Nazis. This golden age of costumed crusaders introduced such bread-and-butter stalwarts of the genre as Captain America, Wonder Woman, and many others who still populate the page. After the war was over and with the Great Depression in the rear-view mirror, superheroes seemed to lose their luster. Without a monumental worldwide threat to fight, they lost their purpose. Other categories surpassed them, most prevalently crime comics — books featuring the dastardly deeds of criminals robbing and pillaging until the final panel when they were inevitably caught.
In 1947, Max Gaines died in a boating accident, leaving the task of running his business to his son, William. William, or Bill as most knew him, wanted nothing to do with his father’s endeavor at first, though his mother eventually convinced him to give it a go. Gaines the younger changed the company name to Entertaining Comics, and for a time, he and his staff chased trends come and gone. Until a relatively new artist at the time, Al Feldstein suggested they try something different, something that did not already saturate the market — horror. Thus, Tales From The Crypt first appeared as a trial segment in Crime Patrol. Readers devoured it with a frightful fervor.
EC’s new line of horrible hijinks grew to encompass four ferocious offerings: The Crypt of Terror (later changed to Tales From The Crypt), The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, and Crime Suspense. Each EC title, save for Crime Suspense, had its own humor hemorrhaging host: the Crypt Keeper, the Vault Keeper, and the Old Witch, or the “Ghoulunatics” as they were known around the EC offices. Feldstein and Gaines harkened back to the radio shows they listened to as kids, notably “The Witch’s Tale,” wherein a witch would introduce and conclude each story percolating puns aplenty along the way.
The stories in EC followed the formula of the wicked always ending up receiving their just desserts, usually in some ironic fashion. For instance, in the tale “Tainted Meat,” a butcher starts selling spoiled horse meat to cut down on his expenses and maximize his profits, causing death along the way, only to be told by his wife that his son was having dinner at a friend’s house –– a friend whose family bought the tainted meat. Or “Foul Play,” in which a baseball team takes revenge on a rival player by murdering him and using his body parts to construct a baseball diamond. At the end of each story, the Ghoulunatics waited to soften the impact for the reader.
EC expanded its line to include science fiction and “preachies,” stories with a clear moralistic bent. These stories directly confronted such taboo topics of the era as antisemitism and racism. One example is a white supremacist leading the charge to run the new Jewish family out of town, ultimately discovering he’s adopted and originally came from Jewish parents. By the end, he too faces the same intolerance from his Jew-hating neighbors. It is these types of stories, those that went beyond the fare of simple jump scares, which cemented EC’s place in comicdom.
Dark clouds began to eclipse the horizon as a backlash against horror comics grew. Enter Dr. Frederic Wertham and his campaign to keep comics away from children. Wertham, a name now conflated with evil for your average comic-loving individual, was not merely a one dimensional censor slinging boogeyman. He was a profoundly complex character with many facets to his life and personality. Surprisingly to many who view him as a narrow-minded fear monger, Wertham was a devout socialist who genuinely believed that violence in the world could be eradicated. To accomplish this goal, society had to stop glorifying violence, especially in its popular culture. Wertham established a clinic in Harlem to treat its primarily Black and lower-income residents. At the time, he had the only private clinic in New York City that would even see people of color for psychiatric services.
While Wertham was not a bad man in and of himself, he certainly was confused. In the 1950s, juvenile delinquency was on the rise, perhaps due to the consequences of WWII and the fathers who returned scarred and unable to process their internal turmoil. For the first time, a youth culture developed with its own language and customs, which parents didn’t understand. As a result, America looked for a scapegoat to blame its societal shift on, just as it did with video games in the 1990s and currently does with immigration. It chose horror comics.
Wertham, who treated children who engaged in delinquent behavior, started with the premise that all juvenile delinquents read comics. This was probably true since, at the time, it was estimated that 95% of elementary-age kids read comic books, which meant that a whole ton of non-troublemaking youth read them too. In 1954, Wertham unleashed his career-defining work, Seduction of the Innocent, a book that not only decried crime and horror comics, his favorite targets, but all genres of comics. He put forth such bizarre claims as Superman being nothing more than a symbol for fascism and that Batman and Robin were in a homosexual relationship. That same year, a Senate subcommittee convened to discuss the rise in underage crime, running concurrently with the McCarthy hearings. Wertham was a star witness in the televised hearings, as was Bill Gaines of EC. Wertham came off professional and media savvy, while Gaines appeared like a nervous wreck. By all accounts, he failed in defending his product. This PR predicament led comic publishers to form a self-regulating body and implement the Comics Code. The words “terror,” “horror,” “crime,” and “weird” were all banned — a direct shot across the bow of EC.
EC tried to comply with the code, but its new sanitized selections tanked. The last EC Story to receive publication was a Ray Bradbury adaptation, someone whose fiction they went to quite often as a source for their sci-fi books. The story, Judgement Day, features an astronaut rejecting a planet occupied by blue and orange robots’ admittance to a universal federation because the orange robots are treated as second-class citizens. At the end of the yarn, the astronaut pulls off his helmet to reveal dark skin.
This story was first rejected on the grounds of the ethnicity of the astronaut, and only after Gaines threatened to expose the Comics Code Authority’s bigotry did this narrative see print. The whole ordeal left Gaines broken and dejected — EC Comics was no more.
Yet EC was not forgotten, and new life was breathed into its rotting corpse in the form of two British films in the 1970s adapting stories from Tales From The Crypt and The Vault of Horror. 1983 saw the release of the anthology film Creepshow, directed by George A. Romero, of Night of The Living Dead fame, and scripted by noted horror author Stephen King. The film stands as a direct homage to EC comics. This shocker concerns Billy, a young boy, who gets a comic book from a strange old man at the beginning of the film, who also happens to appear in the comic as the grisly guide to each of the vile vignettes. Billy’s father is seen multiple times scolding him for reading such trash and even smacks his son for his indiscretions. We follow Billy’s eye as he turns the pages revealing each shriek-filled short, complete with gorgeous artwork from former EC artist Jack Davis. The flick boasts EC’s signature blend of gore and giggles, complete with treacherous twist endings. Creepshow was followed up with a sequel in 1987 and a television series currently airing on the Shudder streaming service. In addition to Creepshow, the 1995 socially conscious horror film Tales From the Hood put a new spin on the classic EC Morality endings.
In 1989, the anthology series Tales From The Crypt debuted on HBO, freely adapting entries from the EC canon, but for a modern audience. The show’s titular host, the Crypt Keeper, while bearing little physical commonalities with his comic book counterpart, maintained the same sense of wicked wit and spouted a continuous stream of odious one-liners. As an impressionable little imp in the 1990s, I both feared and revered the ancient rotting rascal, loving his deadpan humor but still afraid of his curdling countenance.
For a while, it seemed as if the Crypt Keeper was omnipresent and the definition of the Halloween season. There were animatronics of the popular puppet in mall window displays, appearances at horror conventions and theme park haunts, dolls to purchase, and even a Christmas album. But slowly, the charm of the perverse puppet seemed to wane, and Tales From The Crypt aired its final episode on July 19th, 1996. A few movies followed, but nothing seemed to sustain the supernatural soothsayer’s presence.
The Comics Code was finally lifted in 2010. Its trademark symbol is now owned by the CBLDF or Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving free speech in the art form for creators, fans, and retailers. It forever serves as a lasting reminder of what fear-mongering can accomplish if not kept in check. EC comics inspired generations of readers and continues to garner new fans through reprints and collections. Until next time kiddies. Pleasant screams.
Further EC Content
Choke Gasp! the Best of 75 Years of EC Comics