I’ve elected to share some of my recent publications here for general readership. When it can draw attention to great writing by my colleagues, as in this case, I’m happy to take these things out from behind the paywall.
carrington, andré. Review of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, by Qiana Whitted. Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 4 no. 1, 2020, p. 130-132. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ink.2020.0001. © 2020 The Ohio State University Press
Qiana Whitted. EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest. Rutgers University Press, 2019. xii + 181 pp, $99.95, $29.95.
The reading practices modeled by comic books from the 1950s belie the homogenizing nostalgia that typically frames this period in American culture. Although there is ample evidence of the normalizing force of popular media in EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, its principal strengths emerge from the author’s efforts to document the modes of articulating racial attitudes and strategies of moral suasion that distinguished EC Comics publications from their peers. Qiana Whitted illustrates how the didactic short stories in EC Comics from the postwar era, nicknamed “Preachies” for their heavy-handed messaging, communicated egalitarian values through a blend of horror, empathy, and speculation. EC Comics cultivated an alternative sensibility meant to assure its readers of their membership in a conscience-driven cognoscenti. Whitted appraises the ethos of the Preachies as a constant insistence that comics can serve a higher purpose, a doctrine that also (unsuccessfully) inoculates its branding efforts from the motivation of base commercialism. Despite their shortcomings, which the author documents thoughtfully, the comics demonstrate relevance to real and imagined shifts in interpersonal and communal relationships that would inform the incipient civil rights movement.
The comics of EC’s New Trend series drew audiences into genre-specific situations that comic strips and books had prepared them to understand, rendering them vulnerable to the same opprobrium that fell upon other sensationalist comics in the era. Whitted differs from other critics in eschewing the “myth of quality” that aims to edify the study of comics by finding redeeming value in their distinctiveness or arguing that others have underestimated their aesthetic sophistication (19). Instead, she focuses on the way EC Comics texts function as documents of a tightly woven imagined community. Throughout the book, Whitted emphasizes how the comics acknowledge their audience strategically: they portray a community of readers linked together by simple values and equally simple laws of causality. The stories of crime, prejudice, guilt, and punishment told in the Preachies make clear to readers that their actions and those of their peers have consequences. More important, they insist that the content and the moral significance of virtually any sequence of events can be represented visually and verbally. Even far-fetched accounts of supernatural forces and future civilizations yield life lessons, according to the comics, provided the readers pay equally close attention to dialogue, captions, and narration, as well as the images.
Whitted eschews the myth of quality by reading EC Comics rhetorically and sociologically. She argues that their comics took advantage of an emergent strategy that positioned youth as consumers at the same time that consumers became a more positively defined constituency within the postwar body politic (44–7). These contextualizing arguments make her treatment of the comics’ aesthetics relevant beyond their own pages. In chapter 2, Whitted criticizes the diminished agency that Black characters possess in many comics [End Page 130] due to their lack of spoken dialogue. They were more frequently victims of injustice than models for resistance. By employing realistic illustration styles, EC encoded an image of “dignity” in their depiction of Black characters that did not require them to speak for themselves; at the same time, the points-of-view employed in EC Comics invite readers to see through the eyes of characters who experience fear, suspense, and excitement, tacitly reinforcing the collective identification of young readers with the ordinary members of the white public in the text (59). Whitted reads these stories in relation to their contemporary context, e.g., the mode of address in The Challenger and All-Negro Comics, which made racial attitudes a matter of individual self-righteousness, among white people, and the valorization of upstanding citizenship, for Black folks (61). Whitted acknowledges that the approach of the Preachies made Black subjects into sympathetic martyrs, but she shows equal consideration for the comics’ effort to make white people collectively responsible for racism.
In chapter 3, subtitled “Shame, Mob Rule, and the Affective Realities of EC Justice,” Whitted demonstrates fluency in the “affective turn” and its value for literary criticism through studious attention to the way the emotional appeals in EC Comics take advantage of affiliation as an instrumental aspect of the sense of shame, drawing on the work of critics Helen Lewis and Salman Akhtar, among others (78–80). Whitted interprets the struggle of a white soldier to make his peers appreciate the Black compatriot who died saving his life as part of EC’s attempt to foster new relations between white and Black members of a community. The bereaved protagonist of this story, “In Gratitude …,” leaves his white family and neighbors with downcast eyes and bowed heads through his impassioned indictment of their decision to keep his fallen comrade’s remains segregated away from the white burial ground (81). Other stories, like the violent tales “A Kind of Justice” and “Master Race,” borrow from horror comics to deliver shocking twist endings. In these stories, Whitted examines the construction of undesirable emotional connections between readers and characters who participate (or fail to intervene) in harmful acts. Strategies for setting up these relations include captions written in the second person and visual/verbal staging that defers key pieces of information, such as the identity of a speaker, in order to upset readers’ assumptions. By playing up the audience’s susceptibility to the misdirected motivations that give way to lynching and other spectacles of punishment and revenge, these stories evoke “the silence and fear of the ordinary person … without ever losing sight of the state-sanctioned actions of a mob that once stretched to multitudes” (102).
The book is best represented by this inference regarding a character who remains unseen until a key moment: “EC readers may have been more familiar with H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man than with Ralph Ellison’s” (119). These politically minded comics educated readers by calling their expectations into question, but not by expanding their cultural frame of reference. Readers of Whitted’s study will witness how EC utilized repetitive formulas, for everything from the arrangement of visual and verbal elements within panels to the order of stories in each issue, to cultivate a sense of familiarity and self-assuredness in its audience. Like other participatory cultures, such as those associated with science [End Page 131] fiction pulp magazines and the “cult” following of horror cinema, EC developed a set of reliable conventions to mediate the “shock” or mystification their comics elicited from the uninitiated. For the in-group accustomed to the pattern of EC storytelling, anticipating the refutation of apparent facts or seeing the possibility of justice foreclosed in a story was an instrumental part of its sentimental efficacy. Stories that leave outsiders puzzled, disappointed, and judgmental reinforced the attitudes of those readers who had grown inured to shock and suspense through repeated exposure.
The book’s last and most in-depth treatment of a paradigmatic EC Comics story is “Judgment Day.” In it, a human astronaut (with his face concealed within a bulky helmet) visits a planet of robots mired in their own form of color-based segregation, only to reveal at the end that he is the future descendant of the Black people living under Jim Crow at the time of the comic’s publication. Whitted uses this story to illustrate how EC imagined a postracial future through comics while displacing the means of resolving present conflicts to an unseen time and place.
The book restores some specificity to our understanding of the way cultural norms were contested in the pages of postwar comics. It also delivers a measured appraisal of how the ostensibly shocking tactics of social protest comics secured a space in the public imagination for the modest ambitions of moral appeals for social change before the uptake of more radical civil rights discourse. [End Page 132]