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!"
"Let's have some stories about religious prejudice," begs another fan.
At this point in time, TV was just getting underway, and the Hays Code had already imposed strict guidelines on the film industry. Social messages that questioned traditional American beliefs and institutions — from marriage to industry to the government — were rarely heard by the masses. The surprisingly progressive issues (civil rights, feminism, animal cruelty) tackled by EC Comics weren't yet up for open debate. But here they were, in the most populist form of entertainment imaginable: a ten-cent paperback.
Truthfully, most of the stories in this anthology are less heavy-handed than the "preachies;" they're simple domestic, sci-fi, crime or war dramas, gussied up with Twilight Zone endings. But like that first story I mentioned, these all have their subversive streaks. The most violent EC stories tend to start with marriages: subservient housewives snap, overprotective husbands go on jealous murder sprees.
In the war stories, patriotic fervor often turns ugly, revealing a flipside of bigotry and paranoia. Then there's the sci-fi comic about a woman who agrees to a "marriage of convenience" (no questions asked) with a rich, handsome man. At first, she's delighted by the arrangement, but soon she begins to question her well-dressed man's utter lack of sexual interest. Finally, she confronts him, forcing him to reveal that he's a... well, suffice it to say that this story takes place in the future, and her husband was born different from other people. If there's a common thread to EC's genre stories, it's that beneath the serene faŤade of the 50s lurked some serious unrest. "This is like Blue Velvet!" my husband said after poring through the book. And he's right: except Blue Velvet came out in 1986, and Shock SuspenStories was written in and of its time.
Maybe all of that hyperbolic EC prose is going to my head, but I have to wonder what might have been, had EC Comics continued past 1956. Would their feminist subtext have burrowed into the national consciousness before Betty Friedan came along? Would the stories of racial injustice have accelerated the civil rights movement? Would parables of homosexuality and environmentalism have continued, prompting widespread awareness of these issues decades earlier?
Like one of its own stories, EC Comics ended with a sudden ironic twist. A Senate Subcommittee hearing on juvenile delinquency, inspired by the notorious 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, determined that EC Comics produced "some of the most sadistic crime and horror comic books with monstrosities that nature has been incapable of" — even though most of these comics were unapologetic morality tales. The negative backlash from the trial led the comics industry into an era of damning self-censorship, and EC was forbidden to publish nearly all of its signature books. (In addition to sweeping bans on unhappy endings, supernatural elements, graphic violence and the negative portrayal of authority figures, the new Comics Code had specific regulations against words like "horror" and "crime.") The only title still published by the company survived by changing from a four-color comic to a black and white magazine to escape the industry's scrutiny — Mad.
Comics never really recovered from the damage done by the Senate Subcommittee. The hearing's focus on comics' juvenile readers cemented the idea that comics were for kids, and readership declined to a fraction of the heights of the early '50s. (Today, a wildly successful comic might sell 100,000 copies.) Yet in the past decade, adult comic readership has been growing steadily. If this trend continues, the story of EC Comics may have one final twist: these curiosities of pop culture history could become pop culture's future.
©2007 Gwynne Watkins and hooksexup.com