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.