Then I started reading about comic books—I got hold of The Comic-Book Book and All in Color for A Dime, by Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff, and Comix, by Les Daniels.
The articles on Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and the rest were nothing new, but two subjects came as a revelation: the history of the original Captain Marvel, and the story of E.C. Comics, Dr. Wertham, and the Comics Code Authority.
For those who don’t know, E.C. was a small comic-book publisher, in business from 1943 to 1955. “E.C.” originally stood for “Educational Comics,” but was quickly changed to “Entertaining Comics” when stuff like Picture Stories from the Bible didn’t sell. After starting out as just another mediocre small comics publisher, from 1950 through 1954 they put out comic books often considered the best ever produced, certainly the best produced before 1960, including three no-holds-barred horror titles: Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror. They also did some borderline horror: Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, Weird Science, and Weird Fantasy. Even their war titles, Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales, were unusually gruesome.
About two dozen other publishers (yes, there really were that many) tried to cash in on the boom in horror comics that resulted from E.C.s success with those titles, and turned out heaps and heaps of gory horror.
Then in 1954-1955, a hue and cry led by a psychiatrist named Dr. Frederic Wertham, expert on criminal violence and author of the anti-comics diatribe Seduction of the Innocent, put all the horror comics, all the crime comics, all the really lurid comics of any sort, out of business. Combined with the collapse of the then-existing magazine distribution system, brought about by the liquidation of the gargantuan American News Company in fancy financial maneuvers, this drove about three-fourths of the comic book publishers of the time out of the comics business, including E.C. The survivors, with two exceptions (Dell and Classics Illustrated), submitted to censorship by the newly-created Comics Code Authority, a body owned and operated by the comic-book publishers to censor their products and make sure that they were fit for children to read.
I hadn’t known about any of this.
As for that other revelation, the original Captain Marvel was the star of the Fawcett line of comics, and for a time was more popular and sold more comics than any other hero. DC had sued, claiming he was an imitation of Superman, and after years of litigation finally won and drove Fawcett out of the superhero business.
Both the Big Red Cheese and pre-Code horror had been gone since before I discovered comics, and this was the first I’d heard of either of them. I’d thought the CCA seal had always been on comic-book covers, that Superman had always been the dominant superhero.
Fascinated, I found some of the DC reprints of old Captain Marvel stories that came out in the 1970s under the title Shazam!
What a disappointment! This was the stuff that those fans had raved about?
I decided to check out E.C., though, because the raves about E.C. were even more enthusiastic than the ones about Captain Marvel.
Then I looked at the prices for E.C. comics. A ratty issue of Tales from the Crypt went for ten or fifteen dollars! (For comparison, new comics at the time were just going from 25¢ to 30¢.)
No way! After the Captain Marvel incident, I decided to pass. At least those issues of Shazam! had only cost me a quarter apiece.
Let us skip ahead to April, 1978. I was married, unemployed, living off my wife’s salary in an apartment in Lexington, Kentucky. I had a fairly extensive comic-book collection and was thinking about going into business full-time as a mail-order dealer, since my writing career wasn’t going anywhere yet.
I saw an ad in a publication called The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom—someone in Florida had died, and his widow was selling off his E.C. collection, cheap. Instead of prices in the $10-and-up range, she was asking as little as $1.50 for issues of Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales, and the like.
What the heck, I thought, and I splurged. I ordered half a dozen, mostly war comics, but including one issue of Tales from the Crypt at $4.00.
I got the books, and read ’em, and I was impressed, sort of—but they sure were strange. They weren’t like anything else I’d ever read. For one thing, I wasn’t sure whether the stories in Tales from the Crypt #41 were meant seriously or not—they were sort of on the edge between horror and parody.
I liked ’em, though.
I sold that book for $16.00—and immediately regretted it, and decided to buy some more E.C.s. Which I did.
From then on I was hooked. I bought more, and more, and more, until, six years and $17,000 later, I had one of the ten most complete E.C. collections on Earth.
But when I was finished, or at least as close as I got (there are a few giveaways I never found), where did I go from there?
I thought about it. I considered other companies—should I collect Fiction House? Ziff-Davis? ACG?
But I wasn’t really interested in any of those. I was interested in horror comics.
So I set out to collect all the horror comics ever published in the U.S. I got pretty close to all the pre-Code issues before I quit, and in the mid-’90s a personal financial crisis forced me to sell my collection, putting an end to that particular hobby.
So what does this have to do with Dr. Wertham and my misspent youth?
Well, the reason E.C. got out of the business, the reason horror comics gave way to wimpy “mystery” and “monster” and “ghost” comics, was that Dr. Frederic Wertham and other anti-comics crusaders had driven these horrible mind-warping funnybooks that children were reading off the market.
When I was a kid, all the comics I read were either Code-approved and certified harmless, or came from Dell or one of its offshoots—Dell had never subscribed to the Code but had its own in-house version that was usually followed (except in a few early-sixties books like Universal Presents—remember, I mentioned those?).
That’s why I couldn’t find any really scary or gruesome stuff as a kid!
It was all Dr. Wertham’s fault! He’d killed the good stuff off when I was still in diapers!
(That’s a gross oversimplification, really—he was just the most visible anti-comics crusader, but as a matter of fact he wasn’t all that influential. He hated all comics, and thought superhero stuff was at least as bad as horror. The Code was emphatically not his doing—he disapproved of it. He makes a great scapegoat, though.)
If he’d left well enough alone, I could have overdosed on horror as a kid and saved myself all those thousands of dollars I spent paying collector’s prices for old horror comics!
And that’s not the worst of it. Let me appear to change subject for just a bit—I’ll tie this in in a moment, bear with me.
Who was the best-selling writer in the world throughout the 1980s, the decade when I was building my own career? Stephen King, of course.
So what does King write?
Horror. Often real gross-out stuff, too.
Where’d he learn this?
From the horror comics he read as a kid. He’s said as much, and admits to swiping some of his most horrific images from them. In his short story “The Boogeyman,” in the collection Night Shift, he talks about E.C.’s Haunt of Fear and the artwork of Graham “Ghastly” Ingels. Together with George Romero, who remembered those same hideous old comics, he produced the hit movie “Creepshow” and explicitly based it on a horror comic.
Now, what do I do for a living?
I write books.
What kind of books?
Science fiction and fantasy.
Why?
Because when I was a kid I learned to read from Adventures into the Unknown