Book Review: EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest by Qiana Whitted

EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest. Qiana Whitted. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/ec-comics/9780813566313

Book Review by Maite Urcaregui

 

Qiana Whitted’s EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest explores how William M. Gaines’ Entertaining Comics (EC) experimented with generic constraints in their “preachy” stories to critique the status quo of the Atomic Age, “the post-World War II era known as both the ‘Fabulous Fifties’ and the ‘Age of Anxiety’” (p. 5). Whitted brings critical attention to the “preachies,” also referred to as social-protest comics or message stories, “a distinct group of EC stories designed to challenge readers’ assumptions about racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, Cold War paranoia, and other anxieties over social difference and American heterogeneity” (p. 5). These stories appeared in EC’s genre-fiction anthologies, such as Shock SuspenStories or Incredible Science Fiction, beginning in 1952 and ending in 1956, when EC ceased publishing comic books due to the Comics Code Authority’s increasing restrictions. While EC’s Mad or individual EC creators have received critical attention,¹ the preachies have been overlooked, often dismissed as too formulaic and didactic.² Whitted’s “study takes a different approach by analyzing the creative choices and critical significance of the message stories within the EC brand and against the larger ideological contexts of the Late 1940s and 1950s” (p. 6). EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest introduces readers not only to the breadth of EC’s social-protest stories, but also to their depth. Whitted’s analysis of the preachies emphasizes the network of narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies that the company developed as part of their “EC way” (p. x). These formal innovations opened opportunities for the company to initiate conversations around racial justice during a time of simultaneous social progress and increasingly insular national impulses.

In her “Preface,” Whitted beautifully elucidates her personal investments in and the political stakes of her work by reflecting on Mad’s back cover “fold-ins.” Describing the process of folding the page to reveal “a new picture and a clever quip,” she concludes: “I marveled over the story that our hands made together. Even now I remain fascinated by the way the words and image that seemed so familiar could be reoriented to expose something wholly unexpected from within” (pp. ix-x). Just as the fold-in’s “sleight of hand” invites readers to become a part of the clever joke that their hands have helped co-create (p. x), EC’s preachies played with generic conventions (extradiegetic narration, twist- or snap-endings, optical illusions) to shock readers out of complacency. Through this generic call and affective response, EC challenged its readers to question normative notions of race, nation, authority, and safety. I linger over the preface because it was such an elegant, efficient example of how a meditation on medium and materiality can look outward and can gesture toward community. In her short preface, Whitted stakes out her hope for the book, “that readers will come away with a deeper insight into how American comic books advance the public understanding of complex social problems through popular media” (p. xi). Certainly, Whitted does her part to fulfill that hope throughout the book. In an effort to draw out the complex social problems that EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest explores, this review thinks with and through the provocations of the book’s subtitle--race, shock, and social protest--to showcase these distinct yet interconnected contributions.

Whitted’s study of race in EC’s message stories attends both to the quality of representation and to its effect on readers and public consciousness. Her analysis of the formal strategies EC used “to disassociate white normative subjectivity from virtuous qualities such as innocence, courage, and moral authority” is always situated within the cultural, historical, and political backdrop of Atomic Age anxieties over both comics and race (p. 53). Chapter One, “‘Spelled Out Carefully in the Captions’: How to Read an EC Magazine,” traces these public anxieties by explicating EC’s role in the 1954 US Senate subcommittee hearings over comics’ influence on young readers and their so-called “delinquency.” EC creatively responded to these public pressures by carefully and consciously framing their social-protest stories through extradiegetic narration and pointed captions. Toeing the “boundaries between ‘entertaining’ and ‘educational’ reading practices,”³ EC paired educational captions--verbal text that directed readers regarding how to read the comic--against more sensational and sometimes violent images of racial and mob violence (p. 26). The company’s reliance on a “containment system equipped with discursive barriers to shield readers from harm” ultimately relied on and reinscribed the cultural narratives about the hazards of comics that would lead to the Comics Magazine Association of America’s (CMAA) Comics Code Authority (CCA)--the very thing that would force EC to change its publishing model (p. 34). Whitted’s explication of the well-worn history of the CCA feels refreshing. Despite the impact the CCA had on EC, rather than overdetermining the CCA’s role in comics history, Whitted advocates that “EC’s legacy as a maverick in the mainstream comic-book industry grows out of these Atomic Age controversies” (p. 23). The book illustrates how the growing concern over comics was not disarticulated from post-World War II concerns over racial integration. In fact, as Whitted explores in her second chapter, “the landmark decision to end public-school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education” occurred in the same year as the Senate subcommittee hearings on comics, and both would fundamentally change EC’s approach to portraying the complexities of Black life (p. 53).

EC’s preachies often elicited a sense of shock or shame in their readers, creating an affective call to action. Chapter Two, “‘We Pictured Him So Different, Joey!’: Optical Illusions of Blackness and Embodiment in EC,” explores the comics efforts to picture anti-Black violence and the racial disparities of the criminal-(in)justice system on the comics page. Whitted explores stories that relied on optical illusions, or actively withheld the racial identity of a character, to create a snap ending that reveals the character’s identity alongside the reader’s own expectations and, perhaps, biases. These types of narratives frequently relied on characters of color (often Black male characters) “to embody and to complicate the race problem of the early 1950s” (p. 53).  Yet, at times, these portrayals privileged the affective responses of White readers over complex, expressive portrayals of Black identity. Whitted contends that the most effective stories were those that “call[ed] attention to the way blackness acts as an unstable image/text, a fraught sociohistorical signifier that is misread and misrecognized in American society with devastating consequences” (p. 69). One such example is Wallace Wood (artist and writer) and Marie Severin’s (colorist) “Perimeter!” which appeared in the last issue of Frontline Combat in January 1954. In “Perimeter!” Private Matthews, a Black soldier fighting in a mixed-race US platoon in Korea, is more than an image/text that carries the weight of signifying the US’s racial disparities; he is a heroic Black character who speaks and acts for himself as he struggles alongside his peers to survive. His appearance on the cover of the issue attests to how Wood and Severin created a visual portrayal of a Black man in comics that resisted the iconic weight of that image/text and spoke to readers through Private Matthews’ quotidian specificity. Chapter Three, “‘Oh God . . . Sob! . . . What Have I Done . . . ?’: Shame, Mob Rule, and the Affective Realities of EC Justice,” explores how narrative devices, such as the dramatic identity-reversal-plot or the snap ending, work to elicit shame in both the White characters they portrayed and the White readers they implicated. According to Whitted, “In EC’s social-protest comics, shame chastens society from the inside out; the writers and artists used the emotional burdens of affect to accomplish what the law could not” (p. 103).

The final chapter of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest firmly situates the preachies within a tradition of social protest literature. Chapter Four, “‘Battling, in the Sea of Comics’: EC’s Invisible Man and the Jim Crow Future of ‘Judgment Day!’” examines one of EC’s most famous stories: Joe Orlando (artist) and Feldstein’s (writer) “Judgment Day!” first published in Weird Fantasy #18 in 1953 and republished in a 1956 issue of Incredible Science Fiction #33.⁴ Whitted explores the suggestiveness of this science-fiction story, which “uses the speculative to denounce Jim Crow” (p. 106). “Judgment Day!” is a futuristic tale that follows Tarlton, a helmeted astronaut from Earth, who has been charged with inspecting life on Cybrinia, the “Planet of Mechanical Life” (p. 107). Tarlton is disappointed to see a hierarchical system imposed by the orange androids that relegates the blue androids to segregated portions of the city and positions in the workforce, “a system that bears striking resemblance to the racial segregation of midcentury America” (p. 107). Notably, in the final panel of the comic, Tarlton, now inside his ship and headed to Earth, takes off his helmet to reveal that he is a Black man. Through Orlando’s realistic physical rendering of Tarlton’s face with “beads of perspiration on his dark skin twinkl[ing] like the distant stars” (cited on p. 127), his visage in the final panel becomes emblematic of the expressive possibilities of space itself, an aesthetic precursor to Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist proclamation that “space is the place’ of Black liberation.⁵ In her analysis, Whitted recognizes “Judgment Day!” as more than a social allegory and, through a conceptual (rather than a comparative) reading of the comic alongside Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), uncovers the narrative’s call that “recognition [is] a requisite part of meaningful social change” (p. 126).

This fourth and final chapter, my favorite of the book, illustrates the critical import and creative ingenuity of Whitted’s work. She pairs a deep sense of historical responsibility and cultural specificity with a responsiveness to the preachies’ formal innovations and affective demands. EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest models how comics scholars can open up a space for social protest and justice without flattening texts into sociological mirrors. The book offers extensive, in-depth analysis of many of the social-protest stories that were published throughout EC’s tenure, and Whitted’s close readings are as exciting to read as the shocking plots they plumb. Qiana Whitted’s EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest emphasizes how “even the most disposable ephemera of American popular culture can have a lasting impact,” and it is a work that likewise will have a lasting impact on not only the study of EC comics but also the study of race and form in comics studies more broadly (p. 136).  

Endnotes

1. Mad was EC’s longest running comic. Founded by Gaines (EC’s publisher) and Harvey Kurtzman (Mad’s creator and first editor) in 1952, the humor magazine would continue until the present, although largely via reprints since 2019, long after the company closed down its publication of comic books in 1956, and Gaines sold the company in the 1960s. For more on Mad, see Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird’s collection Seeing MAD: Essays on MAD Magazine’s Humor and Legacy (2021); Grant Geissman’s Feldstein: The MAD Life and Fantastic Art of Al Feldstein! (2013); and Frank Jacob’s The MAD World of William M. Gaines (1972).

2.   Whitted discusses the critical tradition around EC Comics on page six of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (p. 6).

3.      When the company began in 1944 under the direction of Maxwell Charles Gaines (né Ginsberg), EC stood for “Educational Comics.” When William Gaines inherited the company from his father in 1947, he rebranded it as “Entertaining Comics” (p. 9).

4.      Whitted notes how the 1956 reprinting only narrowly gained the CCA seal of approval because Charles F. Murphy, the CCA administrator, wanted the company to make Tarlton White. Gaines argued that Tarlton’s racial identity was “the point of the whole story,” and through his outrage, pushed the story through the Code review unchanged from the 1953 original (p. 105-106).

5.      See Space Is the Place, directed by John Coney, written by Joshua Smith and Sun Ra, performed by Sun Ra (1974; Berkeley: North American Star System, 1974), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iAQCPmpSUI.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23-2.

 

Maite Urcaregui (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current research investigates contemporary mixed-media literature that experiments with visual poetics to examine the relationship between and among race, citizenship, and political belonging. Her most recent publication, “(Un)Documenting Single-Panel Methodologies and Epistemologies in the Non-Fictional Cartoons of Eric J. García and Alberto Ledesma,” appeared in a special issue on “Latinx Studies” in Prose Studies in 2020.

Book Review: A History of Women Cartoonists by Mira Falardeau

 A History of Women Cartoonists. Mira Falardeau. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2020. 298 pp. ISBN 9781771613514. $24.99. http://www.mosaic-press.com/product/history-women-cartoonists/

 reviewed by Jean Sébastien, Professeur, Collège de Maisonneuve

Working in comics, cartooning, or animation was for a long time perceived as man’s work and this is slow in changing. In A History of Women Cartoonists, Mira Falardeau envisions how we can turn the tide. The title of the book shows that one of the ways in which change can be brought is by including more works by women in the canon and to do this by valuing work published by women from the early 20^th century up to the most current day. Even if the book is largely a history of women artists, the last chapters have a different tone.; they act as a call to action in order to get things to change!

In this book, Falardeau gives an overview of the work of creators from the United States, from English Canada and Quebec, from France, Belgium and Switzerland and from the Middle East and the Maghreb. The main portion of her book is structured according to these four regional cut-outs. In her general introduction, she acknowledges that her book, thus, limits itself to only a part of the world’s production by women artists. Such a project, by its very nature, can be celebratory, but deciding who should be included can always become an issue. Falardeau has chosen to reference a larger number of artists in the introductions she writes for each of the four sections that constitute the main content of the book. For example, in her section on the United States she refers briefly to some 60 authors; out of this number, Falardeau selected 15 for whom she has written a more detailed biography, while describing that author’s most important works.

Falardeau’s book is designed to bring forth the similarities in the obstacles that women are faced with, whether in cartooning, comics or animation. In her introduction, she makes a point of noting that these three mediums share elements of a common language. In animation as in comics, women have been less recognized than men and Falardeau’s book works to tilt the balance. This is especially important, for instance, if one is to have a proper historical view of the animation that came out in 1930-1960 period: among the women animators portrayed are two pioneers: American Mary Ellen Bute and Canadian Evelyn Lambart.

A most interesting aspect of the book is its comparative nature. If the section about the United States will not bring any new names to the attention of those who have read Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode’s Women and the Comics, or Trina Robbins’ follow-up works, including her more recent Pretty in Ink. Falardeau does a great job in comparing the general economic context and the prevalence of misogyny at different times in the four contexts that she has chosen to look at. For instance, Falardeau links the relative openness to women in newspaper illustration in the United States to the fact that America developed early on a very dynamic illustrated press and that the sheer number of positions opened some of them up to women. She notes that this was not the case in Canada, either English or French, where she finds that women only began to have a presence as major newspapers added women’s pages and children’s pages to their pages from the 1940’s on. In France, there were numerous girls’ magazines in the early 20^th century. However, very few illustrations in such publications were attributed, and even if it is likely that there were women illustrators, most worked in anonymity. Falardeau’s section on the Middle East and the Maghreb is the shortest of the four and she touches very lightly on the political situations in different countries only to point out that, if some women have found it easier to create as expatriates, others became professional illustrators  to work in their home country. Through this comparison of the history of the press, Falardeau compares feminisms within different national contexts finding more advances for women in the United States.

“Should we link this abundant production to freedom of expression generated, on the one side, by a fundamental tradition and on the other, by successive waves of immigration providing the most innovative ideas of feminist thought? Ultimately, the United States were at the forefront of comic’s innovations while the other countries remained a little more conservative.” (p. 154)

Falardeau also points to the differences as to how second-wave feminism entered comics. Whereas in the U. S., this was mostly in comic book form through counterculture publishers, in France, it was the publishers of the science-fiction magazine Métal hurlant who thought that there was a market for a feminist publication in the world of bande dessinée and developed Ah! Nana a quarterly that came out from 1976 to 1978. The title roughly translates to Hey! Gal, but is homonymous with the French word for “pineapple.” In the section about Quebec, Falardeau briefly situates herself in this. As women’s magazines were taking on feminism, one of them asked her to create a strip which she did for from 1976 to 1978. A few years later (1981-1987), Falardeau joined a specifically feminist monthly, La Vie en rose, covered political and social issues; it gave humor and cartooning an important place.

The small press movement of the early nineties embraced autobiography as an important genre in which quite a few women creators of the period found their niche. Falardeau points to the fact that there already was an important autobiographical strand in the work of many women artists before that and refers to Mary Fleener’s comics in the underground movement, Lynda Barry’s early work in alternative weeklies and Lynn Johnston’s syndicated strip For Better or Worse. Even if there have been some opportunities for women in the past decades, feminist criticism has highlighted the slowness in openings within the mainstream. For those who remember Robbins’ criticism of the closed doors for women at Marvel and DC in her 2001 book The Great Women Cartoonists (to which Falardeau refers), there is a sad resonance to be found in more recent criticisms in France against the Angouleme International Festival which has granted its Grand Prize to only three women since it was founded in 1974. One of the festival’s attempt to correct the situation was miserably sexist; in 2007, the festival had come under heavy fire for having named an event “the brothel”, “La maison close.” In 2016, a collective of women authors called for a boycott because that year there were no women at all in the list of thirty author candidates for the Grand Prize.

In accounting for current production by women, Falardeau takes into account the rise of webcomics. She duly notes issues that come with self-publication on the web, especially that of needing to monetize one’s work, and the fact that, especially for younger artists, webcomics have served as a springboard to get attention from traditional publishers. Here she brings to attention a few artists in each of the four geographical groupings she highlighted. Her book is a who’s who in this new medium, from Meredith Gran and her comedic Octopus Pie to the tidal wave of blogs in France (many of them by women in the early years of this century), to the more recent political use of Facebook posts by Nadia Khiari in which she drew, Willis from Tunis, a cat who commented about the Arab Spring.

Even if Falardeau’s book is mainly designed as a canon-making work, she has found it important to show how empowerment of women cartoonists has been possible over time. In a chapter titled “Three Examples of Positive Action,” she opens with a short history of the New Yorker magazine. Its liberal founders, Harold Ross and Jane Grant published a great number of women illustrators. Her brief overview of the less-than-great record of the magazine in the ‘50s and ‘60s in its openness to women is meant to show that there needs to be an awareness about patriarchy’s hold on the workplace, and on certain types of work at the decision-making level, if change is to be attained. She makes this even more clear with her next example. The National Film Board of Canada developed structures in the early 1980s that encouraged the development of a women’s cinema. However, it was only in 2016 that the organization gave itself the goal of getting to 50% of its productions directed by women. Political cartooning still is, by and large, a line of work in which the number of men is disproportionate.  The organization Cartooning for Peace, founded in 2006, has chosen to value the membership of women cartoonists in many of its activities.

A History of Women Cartoonists translates and updates Falardeau’s 2014 Femmes et humour published by the Presses de l’université Laval. In each of the contextual pieces that precede the portrayals, Falardeau added a new paragraph or two. Among the additions in the section discussing the United States are Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis. In the section about Canada, she features Emily Carroll’s innovative work with webcomics. The call to boycott the Angouleme festival in 2016 is one of the new additions in the contextual text about France. In the case of artists from the Arab world, she added references to a few political cartoonists, among them Samira Saeed and Menekse Cam. However, the editorial work on the book by Mosaic Press is subpar. There are words in which a letter is missing. Some names have not been checked. For instance, when referring to French academic Judith Stora-Sandor, her name is properly spelled on page 22, but misspelled twice on page 246 as Stora-Standor and Stora-Stantor.

Falardeau concludes her book by taking on a certain number of issues. For instance, in cartooning, how can a character be designed to represent humans in general? She notes that the use of characters identifiable as women will lead to an interpretation of the drawing as referring to women specifically. Can the universality of a situation only be represented by the inclusion of male characters? Then there is the issue of caricature --in exaggerating characteristics, one runs the risk of encouraging stereotypes. The situation is not much better in the work of academics who analyze the work of women, where the cliché is noting the ‘sensitivity’ of the work of a woman author. Falardeau closes this short chapter by noting “the obvious link […] between humor and power, and consequently, the difficulty for women […] to achieve recognition for themselves in the world of humour” (p. 247). Destroying stereotypes takes time. “This is the task that feminist women cartoonists have given to themselves. But which stereotypes? Those held by men? The way that they see women? Or the opposite? The way women see themselves?” (p. 258) The last words in her conclusion come as an answer: “Women cartoonists need to create their own mythology.” (p. 269)

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.