Abstract
This chapter focuses on a controversial period of American comic-book history, from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, during which a wide variety of violent and explicit ‘crime’ and ‘horror comic’ titles could be purchased for only 10 cents. The term ‘comic book’ refers to four-colour pamphlets, 165 mm by 255 mm, with narratives in sequential illustrated form (usually in conjunction with text), slick covers and a pulp-paper interior. They represent a relatively new form of commercial culture emerging out of New Deal America, like the law-and-order cycle of crime movies, to act as an eventual replacement for declining newsstand sales of the ‘pulps’ or detective, sport, adventure and science-fiction short-story magazines with racy covers, printed mostly on cheap wood-pulp paper.1
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William W. Savage, Jr, Comic Books and America, 1945–1954 (Norman, 1990);
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Denis Gifford, ‘William Gaines’, The Independent, 5 June 1992, p. 6;
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Clenenden, Hearings, p. 8; Martin Barker,A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London, 1984) p. 106.
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Goulart, Over 50 Years, pp. 204–5 Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (London, 1992) pp. 518,595,599.
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Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain (New York, 1962) ;
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David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (London, 1978);
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Hearings, p. 1 ; Sabin, Adult Comics, p. 160 James Gilbert, Another Chance:Postwar America, 1945–1968 (New York, 1981) pp. 96–100.
Ibid, 98, 99, 104, 205; Joe Simon with Jim Simon, The Comic Book Makers (New York, 1990) pp. 135–8.
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Michael Denning, ‘The End of Mass Culture’, International Labour and Working-class History, no. 37 (1990), pp. 4–18; Pierre Bordieu, Distinction, passim.
John Springhall, ‘Horror Comics: The Nasties of the 1950s’, History Today, XLIV (1994) pp. 10–13.
Benton, Horror Comics, pp. 47–51; Victor Gorelick, ‘Introduction’, in Archie Americana Series: Best of the Fifties (New York, 1992) p. 5 ; Goulart, Over 50 Years, p. 217. See code for ‘crime’ comic books: Benton, Crime Comics, p. 87.
Reidelbach, Completely Mad, pp. 10–12; Jacobs, The Mad World, pp. 112–13; Nicholas Tucker, ‘What Was All the Fuss About?’, The Times Educational Supplement, 22 Aug .1980, p. 15.
P. M. Pickard, I Could a Tale Unfold: Violence, Horror and Sensationalism in Stories for Children (London, 1961) p. 118.
Peter Mauger, ‘Should U.S. “Comics” Be Banned?’, Picture Post, 17 May 1952, pp. 33–5;’The Cult of Violence Persists’, Picture Post, 20 Nov, 1954, p. 16;’Readers’ Letters’, Picture Post, 31 May 1952, p. 12; Marcus Morris (ed.), The Best of Eagle (London, 1977) p. 3; Barker, A Haunt of Fears, passim.
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Springhall, J. (1998). ‘Horror Comic’ Panic: Campaigning against Comic Books in the 1940s and 1950s. In: Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27458-1_6
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