EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest

EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest

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

EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest

by Qiana Whitted

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Overview

2020 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work

Entertaining Comics Group (EC Comics) is perhaps best-known today for lurid horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and for a publication that long outlived the company’s other titles, Mad magazine. But during its heyday in the early 1950s, EC was also an early innovator in another genre of comics: the so-called “preachies,” socially conscious stories that boldly challenged the conservatism and conformity of Eisenhower-era America. 

EC Comics examines a selection of these works—sensationally-titled comics such as “Hate!,” “The Guilty!,” and “Judgment Day!”—and explores how they grappled with the civil rights struggle, antisemitism, and other forms of prejudice in America. Putting these socially aware stories into conversation with EC’s better-known horror stories, Qiana Whitted discovers surprising similarities between their narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies. She also recounts the controversy that these stories inspired and the central role they played in congressional hearings about offensive content in comics. 

The first serious critical study of EC’s social issues comics, this book will give readers a greater appreciation of their legacy. They not only served to inspire future comics creators, but also introduced a generation of young readers to provocative ideas and progressive ideals that pointed the way to a better America.  

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813566313
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 03/08/2019
Series: Comics Culture
Pages: 196
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range: 16 - 18 Years

About the Author

QIANA WHITTED is a professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She is the author of A God of Justice?: The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
A)    Introduction: The Preachies
1:         Spelled Out Carefully in the Captions
            How to Read an EC Magazine
2:         We Pictured Him So Different, Joey!
            Optical Illusions of Blackness and Embodiment in EC
3:         Oh God…Sob…What Have I Done…?
            Shame, Mob Rule, and the Affective Realities of EC Justice
4:         Battling, in the Sea of Comics
            EC’s Invisible Man and the Jim Crow Future of “Judgment Day!”
B)    Conclusion: Hence We See Justice Triumph!
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography  
Index
 
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