SDSU lecture explores comic books, anti-racism in ’50s

The fear of the power of books — the ideas they explore and the influence they have, particularly as that relates to children — shows up again and again. The most recent examples that come to mind include the announcement by the College Board last week, updating its curriculum for Advanced Placement African American Studies, which excludes some Black writers who discuss critical race theory, intersectionality and Black feminism; or the general increase in banning books in schools that are focused on themes of race, gender or sexuality. This isn’t new.

In her 2019 book, “EC Comics: Race, Shock & Social Protest,” professor and author Qiana Whitted explores the response to, and impact of, comic book stories that addressed social issues in America during the 1950s, along with the public anxieties around those stories that ultimately led to congressional hearings and self-regulation in the industry. On Tuesday, Whitted will present “Captions and Corpses: How to Read an EC Comic” as a guest lecturer at San Diego State University through its Center for Comics Studies. The public lecture begins at 3 p.m. at the Gold Auditorium in the Donald P. Shiley Bioscience Center.

Whitted, also a professor of English and African American studies at the University of South

Carolina, researches and teaches about comics and graphic novels related to race and gender that raise questions about identity, representations of history and other social issues. She took some time to talk about what was happening when these comics were being published, and how the influence of those works shows up today. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdutlisa-deaderick-staff.html.)

Q: In your upcoming lecture at San Diego State University, you’ll be discussing “Captions and Corpses: How to Read an EC Comic.” Can you start off by talking a bit about what, exactly, an EC comic is and a bit of the history of these comics?

A: EC stands for “Entertaining Comics” and it was a comic book publisher that was really popular during the late ’40s and ’50s. It started a little earlier than that, when the title “EC” stood for “Educational Comics” and the publisher at that time, Max Gaines, was one of the first publishers in comics. He published funny animal comics, comics for kids, picture stories from American history and from the Bible; so, they were very educational, but they weren’t making a lot of money. When he passed away, his son, Bill Gaines, took over. He and his editor decided that they wanted to turn a profit, and the two of them (Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein) both enjoyed science fiction, pulp magazines, radio shows like “The Witching Hour” that were very into horror. They were one of the first to really popularize horror comics. A lot of people know them from “Tales From the Crypt.” People also know them from MAD Magazine. They started MAD, as well, which is more of a humor compendium of stories and cartoon art. For my purposes, EC (Entertaining Comics), when they got started in New York, they were not the biggest or most popular publisher, but they became very well known for horror and crime comics. They also published science fiction and war comics, in addition to the humor ones.

Q:

Your book, “EC Comics: Race, Shock & Social Protest,” won an Eisner Award in 2020 for best academic/scholarly work for its exploration of the response to EC’S stories during the 1950s. What were some of these stories about?

A:

In terms of what the stories were about, they also were well known for what they like to call “Shock Suspenstories.” The shock stories were interesting because people really liked them, in that they often had a surprise ending, and they were very realistic; they weren’t science fiction or horror, but they were taken from real life. Oftentimes, for the culprit or villain, there would be a revenge plot where they would suffer some kind of retributive justice for the terrible things they might have done. So, in the early 1950s, EC started to publish one of their “Shock Suspenstories.” Just to give some quick background, each of their comics contains four stories, so the second story in each issue of “Shock Suspenstories” has often been called the “preachies” or “preachy,” and that’s what my book mostly focuses on. These were stories that really, explicitly and directly, focused on racism, antisemitism, sometimes it was the red-baiting and questions about patriotism and communism after the war. There were very few, but some focused on sexual assault, or cruelty to animals. There were a range of different issues that they would address in the preachies, in that second “Shock Suspenstories.” My book sort of pulls that out and talks about how they were able to incorporate these messages about issues and problems that were happening right then and there, in the moment. While there were comics that talked about racism, they were not hugely popular, as you can imagine. They were considered to be very educational, and they didn’t last very long, but EC lasted for several years. One of the ways they did that was that they incorporated some of their more popular genres — the scary, the gross, the bloody — into the stories about race, or about antisemitism, and so forth.

Q:

From your perspective, what has been the impact of EC comics on comic culture, and more broadly, on American culture? A:

I feel like a lot of the ways that we think about comics having a kind of social significance today can sometimes feel very heavy handed and sometimes it’s criticized as a kind of fad, or trend. I think about adding diversity to certain titles, and to some extent, that can be true. EC was very heavy handed. I mean, these messages that I’m talking about, my students often laugh at how blunt they were in relaying them. I think that not enough people realize that what they may be seeing today in comics that may address issues such as racism, there’s a long history of that; that’s not something that started 10 years ago when “Miles Morales” was created. That was something that has been with comics since the beginning and that’s one of the things that I really tried to emphasize when I talk about the book, that there is a history there of Black stories and Black readers, as well.

I would also add that one of the things EC didn’t have was a lot of Black creators. There were virtually no Black writers or artists at EC, and today that’s changed. I think that the influence of some of those stories, or the benefit of it, rather, is that we can now have Black creators who are telling their own stories, artists who are able to do things that they weren’t able to do in the ’50s.

lisa.deaderick@sduniontribune.com

Qiana Whitted