In today's Friday Know-It-All, Editor Ira explores the link between horror, the Comics Code Authority, and a golden age of satire.

Is there a more Sisyphean calling than being an adult who attempts to tell young people that the art they love is morally unacceptable? Is there a single instance in history where those efforts have paid off in the manner intended? Maybe they exist, but I feel safe in assuming that these kinds of moral crusades have led to far more tilted-at windmills than slain dragons.

Hang on, let me just hop down off of this soapbox and I'll get this Friday Know-It-All underway. As you might have sussed, today I'm examining one float in the 20th century's endless parade of pop cultural moral panics. This being October, I think it's an appropriate occasion to discuss the time the 1950s United States Congress took bold and decisive action in safeguarding our kids against the most insidious threat this side of communism: scary comic books!

(Don't worry, there'll be some scary communism in the mix too. It was the 1950s, after all.)

Let me start by acknowledging that the horror comics scene of the 1950s did feature some pretty nasty stuff. Granted, it would probably feel tame to a modern middle schooler who pages through Junji Ito collections at the local Barnes & Noble. But in an age of general sterility on TV and at the movie theater, comic books were free to explore stranger, gorier paths than other kid-targeted media.

Dozens of horror comics cropped up on early '50s magazine racks, boasting marvelous titles like "Weird Chills," "Horror from the Tomb," and "This Magazine is Haunted." The standard-bearer for the horror boom was New York-based EC Comics, publishers of three titles that came to symbolize the genre: "The Vault of Horror," "Haunt of Fear," and "Tales from the Crypt."

While early horror comics tended toward adaptations of classic stories like "Frankenstein" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," audience demand was high enough that publishers quickly needed original stories, and plenty of them. Soon newsstands were filled with dismemberments, torture devices, and assorted cruelties that got parents wondering whether their kids' innocence was being corrupted by every trip to the drug store.

Now look, I don't fault the parents who were disturbed by their kids delving into some patently disturbing material. There was some legitimately gruesome stuff in these publications, and I'm sure horror comics spawned many a nightmare. But do you remember those kids in grade school who were completely unbothered by all the R-rated movies their parents let them watch, and who relished the chance to freak out their classmates on the playground by relating all of the gory details? Those kids didn't just come into existence at the dawn of the slasher film era. They've always been around, and horror comics gave them an outlet for their unorthodox tastes that they couldn't find anywhere else. It's a "different strokes for different folks" situation.

Won't Somebody Think of the Children?

That kind of nuance has no place in the midst of a good moral panic, though. There had been rumblings about Congress taking some kind of action against the comic book industry since the 1940s, when the popularity of crime comics sparked fears of young readers mimicking their storylines. That debate was quelled somewhat after a 1948 Supreme Court ruling found a decades-old New York law criminalizing salacious works of art to be unconstitutional, but the outcry kept growing in the following years.

The wave crested with the 1954 publication of Dr. Fredric Wertham's "Seduction of the Innocent," a purported exposé of the comic book industry that pointed to comics as a root cause of juvenile delinquency, gambling addiction, childhood violence, and sexual deviancy up to and including — gasp — homosexuality!

Wertham's "research" relied heavily on unsourced anecdotes, cherry-picked examples, and pure speculation. You'll recognize those as time-honored criteria for launching a headline-grabbing congressional inquiry. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency agreed to let Dr. Wertham present his findings later in 1954. Wertham provided examples of grisly comic book artwork that he claimed demonstrated a concerted effort to corrupt the youth of America with violent and sexual imagery. He even became one of the first public examples of Godwin's law when he told committee chair Senator Estes Kefauver that "Hitler was a beginner compared to the comics industry."

(A brief sidebar here to defend the man I'm attacking. As wrong-headed as I think most of Wertham's comics campaign was, he did have some indisputable points. In that Hitler quote, for instance, Wertham — a Jewish immigrant from Germany — was specifically talking about racist imagery in children's comics. He was absolutely right on that point; even the most mainstream 1940s and '50s comic books are loaded with objectively vile racial caricatures and stereotypes. His charges of rampant comic book sexism are likewise impossible to refute. It took another several decades before women and characters of color started to see agency in the comics pages.

It's also worth noting that Fredric Wertham was a dedicated anti-racism activist who worked closely with "Native Son" author Richard Wright to improve social services for Black residents of New York City. Wertham devoted much of the money he made from his comics crusade to founding the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic in Harlem along with Wright. He raked in donations from morally panicked segregationist conservatives, many of whom would have been horrified to know that their contributions were going to healthcare for Black urbanites at a clinic that took its name from Karl Marx's multiracial son-in-law. I told you communism would make an appearance!)

Capitol Gaines

If the congressional hearings made Fredric Wertham a darling of social conservatives, they also created an icon on the opposite side. EC Comics publisher William Gaines took the stand in defense of his company and industry. Gaines's dry wit and obvious disdain for censorship led to several exchanges that were widely reported on by U.S. media.

Gaines opened his testimony by telling the Senate that he wouldn't be trying to win over Wertham, because explaining the appeal of horror comics to a square like Wertham would be like explaining sex to an elderly virgin. When Kefauver questioned Gaines on the appropriateness of a fake brassiere ad in his parody comic "Panic," Gaines noted, "This is a lampoon magazine, sir. We make fun of things." Asked whether he thought a horror comic cover featuring a graphic drawing of a killer holding a severed head was in "good taste," Gaines said, "I do, for the cover of a horror comic." He proceeded to explain that the cover could have easily been made more explicit — if the head was being held higher, the reader could see blood dripping from the neck, for instance.

Remember earlier when I said that horror comics were probably responsible for plenty of childhood nightmares? I can testify that some of those nightmares were mine. I became aware of this story in elementary school, when I first read "The World Encyclopedia of Comics" by Maurice Horn. This was a massive, dense volume that did a thorough job of cataloging the world's most noteworthy comic books, strips, and creators from the first three-quarters of the 20th century.

That book was like a bible to me, and like the Bible, it had a lot of parts that disturbed the hell out of me. Suffice it to say, I was not yet ready to contemplate the intricacies of Robert Crumb or Guido Crepax at age 10. The most upsetting segment of that book, however, was a transcript from the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings. In that section I read vivid descriptions of ghastly comic book art and lascivious storylines as reported by Fredric Wertham and Estes Kefauver. The things they described were so unthinkable that they kept me awake at night wondering what kind of a mind could even dream them up.

But here's the thing: Not long after that, HBO's updated adaptation of "Tales from the Crypt" became a cult TV hit and reprintings of some of the series' classic issues became available even on my small town newsstands. I couldn't resist the temptation to thumb through those infamous volumes. Sure enough, there was all of the grotesque murder and ironic punishment I'd read about, splayed out in full color.

Strangely, though, I found that the actual items didn't unsettle me nearly as much as reading about them had. Presented in their intended context, it was clear that these stories were all in good fun. To see their tongue-in-cheek shocks and outrages as anything more sinister than a cheap thrill would take either a total lack of nuance or a willful misreading. Estes Kefauver's glowed-up narrations of comic book atrocities were what cost me sleep, not the goofy gore of "Tales from the Crypt."

And Now the Screaming Stops

The hearings ended with no official legislation about the content of comic books, but industry leaders agreed to a plan of self-regulation that had the same chilling effect. In a bitter irony, the death of horror comics was partially a result of William Gaines and EC Comics trying to stand their ground. According to Gaines, following the congressional debacle, he wrote to all of his colleagues and urged them to come together to fund legitimate research into the actual impacts comics had on young readers' psyches. He figured this would help put the issue to rest, or at worst prove Wertham's theories and drive the industry to change for the better.

Instead, Gaines' peers pushed him aside and used their newly shared platform to form the Comics Magazine Association of America, an industry watchdog group that adhered to the newly written Comics Code Authority. The code set strict rules on the topics comics could cover, the level of violence and sexuality they could depict, and the words they could use in their titles. Words like "horror," "crime," and even "weird" were forbidden, which instantly put a large chunk of EC's output off limits — a move that Gaines believed was specifically aimed at him.

Although the code was strictly voluntary, the political and social pressure was heavy enough that most reputable booksellers refused to stock comics that didn't bear the CMAA's literal stamp of approval. Horror comics were effectively dead. Many of the publishers shifted their focus to children's titles, mystery stories, or superheroes, all genres that were easier to squeeze into the narrow parameters set by the Comics Code.

This, incidentally, is how we got all those years of dopey, G-rated stories about Superman using super-ventriloquism, Batman dressing like a zebra, and Supergirl collecting a petting zoo's worth of super-pets. On the other hand, it also led to the founding of Mad Magazine, one of the most important events in the timeline of American satire.

The Mad Men Cometh

William Gaines briefly tried to work within the confines of the new Comics Code, but that was never going to happen. Not long after a clash with a CMAA judge who wanted to ban one of EC's comics because a story featured a Black protagonist, Gaines gave up the ghost and turned his full attention to Mad. (EC didn't back down on that story, incidentally. They took a gamble that the CMAA would rather let the issue drop than be exposed as public racists, and they won the bet.)

Mad began life as EC Comics' premiere parody title, specializing in crass-but-clever send-ups of everything from Batman to Sherlock Holmes to Howdy Doody. Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman had been advocating for shifting the publication from a comic book to a magazine format for a while, a change that was already underway when the Comics Code tanked EC's other operations in 1955.

Gaines and company realized that classifying Mad as a magazine placed it outside of the CMAA's reach. When Mad relaunched in 1955, it was a larger-format, black-and-white magazine. It still featured several comic-style parodies in each issue, alongside fake ads, advice columns, comical feature stories, and all of the other trappings of a 1950s lifestyle magazine. As Gaines' flagship publication, Mad was able to attract top-tier artists and satirists who drove a quick spike in readership.

Over the next couple of decades, Mad emerged as one of the most visible and influential voices in American comedy. At its best, the magazine held a mirror up to every corner of U.S. culture, from TV to politics to classic literature to Broadway show tunes. At the heart of all of its comedy was a nonconformist mistrust of bureaucracies, ingrained systems, and performative morality, no doubt informed by EC's experiences in Washington, D.C.

Would Mad Magazine have been such an important foundational document for 1960s American satire if William Gaines and EC hadn't been pushed to the margins by Wertham's crusade? We can't know for sure, but whatever victories the censors might have claimed were short-lived. A generation of horror-loving artists pivoted to other media after being denied their comics.

By the end of the 1960s, teenage gore hounds could choose from an endless array of splatter films and grindhouse movies that went to much further extremes than the comics ever had. The underground "comix" scene likewise exploded, giving a spotlight to all kinds of dark depravities Estes Kefauver couldn't have imagined. Late-night TV airings of vintage horror movies rekindled interest in pre-code scares around the world. And Mad Magazine was there to poke fun at all of it. The moral of the story: horror weirdos gonna horror weirdo. Let 'em have their fun.