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"You’ll be jarred by the shocking climax of this startling narrative!" reads a typical warning at the beginning of an EC horror comic. Fifty-five years after its original publication, that line may seem hokey — but it still keeps you reading. I devoured the newly reprinted EC anthology Shock SuspenStories in a single sitting, urged on by promises of lurid twists to come. The tales of corrupt cops getting away with murder, housewives driven mad, and alternate sci-fi universes, each with a final Shyamalan-ish bang, are pulp at its finest. But for all their fascination with alternate universes, EC Comics are themselves a window into an alternate universe: one in which comics might have been a more popular form of adult entertainment than television.
From 1950 to 1954, each of EC’s "New Trend" lines — including Shock SuspenStories, Weird Science, The Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt, among others — was read by approximately half a million Americans. Their popularity was a reflection of the booming comics industry: by the mid-fifties, the country owned 25 million television sets and annually purchased 68 million comics. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get these numbers from my new edition of Shock SuspenStories, which offers little in the way of history and context.) EC comics were the supermarket tabloids of their day; they required a short attention span, and the stories — dramatic, gorgeously illustrated and frequently violent — had near-universal appeal. It’s easy to see why they were so popular. Take the first story in the new anthology ("Brace yourselves for the impact of the shocking wind-up to this yarn!"). It begins with a stunned housewife being interrogated by police. The cops are clearly horrified, though we don’t yet know her crime. In flashbacks narrated by her confession, we learn that the woman, Eleanor, was married three years earlier ("I never loved him! I just needed a husband…badly…") to a man named Arthur, who purchased a vast historic mansion for the newlyweds.
While Eleanor loathed the house and all the gaudy antiques it contained, she wanted to be a good wife, so she kept the house exactly as Arthur wanted it. Arthur, however, turned out to have a violent obsessive-compulsive streak ("Hangers should all hook over the rod from the front! Button side facing left! That’s neatness!") Over the years, Arthur’s demands for a perfectly organized house grew more extreme, until the day Eleanor finally snapped. The final panel shows Eleanor proudly displaying her husband’s remains, all sorted in neatly ordered jars — just like Arthur would have wanted. What’s not to love in a story like that? It’s got drama, domestic intrigue, a grisly twist, characters you can relate to; it’s like a Law & Order episode distilled into eight pages. The narrative, schlocky though it may be, is perfectly paced. And for all their camp value, it’s hard to debate the merit of the illustrations; every shadow and facial expression is rendered in cinematic detail. Yet savvy twenty-first century readers will see something else here: a subtext about the unreasonable demands of marriage on 1950s women. The predicament that Eleanor finds herself in — married to a man she didn’t love, but changing her life to accommodate him because that’s what a wife does — must have been common enough. One could imagine this comic being an outlet for housewives in a similar situation, a sort of cathartic wish-fulfillment. A woman chopping up her husband may not be an outright feminist call-to-arms, but there’s definitely something at work here. Lest you think I’m either overanalyzing or stating the obvious, let me clarify that this is one of the more subtle comics in the EC catalog. Other tales in Shock SuspenStories include the story of corrupt cops who cover up a Ku Klux Klan murder, a fur-loving astronaut’s wife who lands on a planet where animals wear human pelts, and a man who terrorizes his Jewish neighbors, only to discover a shocking(ly predictable) secret about own heritage. Many of these particular comics (nicknamed "preachies" by the publisher) conclude with a tacked-on editor’s note, just in case the message didn’t quite penetrate. Or perhaps the notes were intended as a wake-up call to readers who didn’t expect social justice along with their crime stories. Again, this seems ludicrous in 2007 — but judging from the letters that these issue-oriented stories received (reprinted in the new anthology), it was a radical concept.
"That wasn’t just a story," reads one awed piece of feedback, "it was close to the bitter truth!"
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