In the 1950s, truthful depictions of bigotry in the U.S.
were almost completely absent in pop culture. Shockingly, one of the few places
where indictments of racism, anti-semitism, and other forms of prejudice could
be found (if only sporadically) was in the controversial Shock Suspenstories of EC comics, which were
so often denigrated as harmful to youth and generally disgusting. There
were tales of racist harassment and mob violence with very explicitly stated
morals. In “The Whipping” from ShockSuspenstories,
a racist accidentally beats his own daughter to death think that he is actually
attacking her Hispanic boyfriend. In “Hate!”, a drooling anti-semite impels a
Jewish couple to kill themselves before discovering that his own biological
parents were Jewish. In “Judgment Day!” from Weird Fantasy, a valiant astronaut who turns out to be African
American instills hope in robots existing in a segregated society. These
stories were told with the same unflinching audacity and ironic denouements of
EC’s more celebrated crypt tales of oozing corpses and gore-devouring creeps.
Qiana Whitted’s EC
Comics: Race, Shock & Social Protest is the first book-length study of
how EC comics dealt with race. Whitted analyzes the characters, the artist’s
depictions of those characters, and such recurring themes as how the villains
of these pieces tend to receive their comeuppances via a crippling sense of
shame rather than EC’s usual ironic dismemberings. She often refers to the
letters sections in these books to assess the effectiveness of the preaching in
EC’s so-called “preachies.” The crass bluntness of the readers who did not
appreciate these anti-racism messages is more shocking than any act of violence
in the stories.
Whitted is generally and rightly complimentary of EC’s bravery
in its depictions of race issues at a time when such things were not discussed
in popular entertainments, though she also rightfully criticizes the comics’
tendency to reduce its black characters to victims with neither personalities
nor voices— vehicles for delivering a message of intolerance and altering the
lives of the white bigots who are usually the real main characters of the preachies.
Whitted also points out that EC could be guilty of the same kinds
of broad racial stereotypes common to the fifties when spinning yarns of voodoo
and zombies, but the overall tone of EC
Comics: Race, Shock & Social Protest is reasonably celebratory. It is also
highly readable and attractively put together, illustrating Whitted’s points with
numerous full-color panels from EC comics. While it may find its most natural
home in the classroom, EC Comics: Race,
Shock & Social Protest is a book that everyone interested in comics
history should check out.
