The commercial apogee of the comic book industry took place over the course of the seven years that followed the end of the war. Although the number of releases and combined print runs reached heights never equaled afterward, the young public’s apparently ravenous appetite for comic books originated an economic boom and a heightened visibility in the media whose unexpected consequence was the stigmatization of comic magazines as one of the main sources of the ills of American youth. Beginning in 1946, and against the backdrop of the collective anxieties of the early cold war, the diverse, heterogeneous criticisms leveled at comics magazines since the late 1930s gradually coalesced into a moral panic that singled out their allegedly crime-inducing nature. They were then scapegoated as engineers of juvenile delinquency, one of the main postwar collective fears daily echoed by the media and the authorities. Although the industry was spared the purges that plagued Hollywood and the nascent television industry, it entered a long economic decline in 1953 that was not to stabilize until the early 1960s.
In 1945 the comic book industry seemed to be on the verge of a recession because of a double loss: the war, which provided the backdrop to most titles, was coming to an end and the army, its largest customer, no longer needed millions of comic books shipped to GIs as priority supplies!1 If the fear of seeing slumping sales due to demobilization was founded for several publishers, the return to peacetime did not make for significant losses: the whole periodical publishing industry experienced a permanent growth in the immediate postwar period.2 The spectacular expansion of the comic book industry was uninterrupted until 1952, the year when approximately a billion magazines representing more than thirty-one hundred new releases were circulated.
Several factors accounted for this growth. The first was the stability of the ten-cent retail price. It had remained unchanged since 1933 thanks to the regular decrease of the average number of pages per magazine and the consistent rise of sales figures—by contrast many pulps, which cost the same price as comic books in the 1930s, had increased to twenty-five cents by the turn of the 1950s. The second factor was the baby boom: it had begun at the start of the decade and mechanically multiplied the homes where comic books were read. The third factor was the pursuit of business strategies initiated during the war—selling more comic books to more people: to those that already read a lot, such as preadolescents of both sexes and male adolescents; but also to those that did not read so many comics, such as adolescents and adults. While some innovations, such as the multiplication of western titles, were well received by the general public, other novelties with an “adult” slant—crime, horror, and romance comics—attracted readers that were fewer in number but just as loyal as those for the more approved genres. The new genres particularly concentrated the fears and the obsessions of censors of all stripes who proceeded to blame some social ills on comic books. The moral panic against comic books unfolded in two successive waves from 1947 to 1950 and 1952 to 1954. It contributed to the fragility of the industry with regard to a new competitor. The progressive entry of television sets into American homes at the end of the 1940s sparked the erosion of both cinema box-office receipts, and from the start of the 1950s, sales of popular periodicals such as comic books and pulps (the latter had disappeared from newsdealers’ racks by 1956). Although the publishers never anticipated how television would restructure daily life and public tastes in the long run, the new medium’s impact on comic books went much further than the simple comics adaptation of televisual properties.3 The irresistible popularity of TV prompted many publishers to follow the path of crime and horror stories and thus provide images and sensations that were still forbidden to the small screen.
After focusing on preadolescents and adolescents between 1942 and 1944, comic book publishers looked toward the female audience starting in 1945. Since “The Woman in Red,” the first female costumed crime fighter whose stories appeared in Better’s Thrilling Comics in 1940, superheroines had only been moderately successful, with the exceptions of All-American/DC’s “Wonder Woman” and Fawcett’s “Mary Marvel” (who benefited from the aura of Captain Marvel),4 essentially because female readers had little interest in costumed crime fighters and/or in superhuman powers while young male readers would ostracize any magazine “for girls.” In 1945, Marvel successively launched Millie the Model, Nellie the Nurse, and Patsy Walker, three magazines whose protagonists were young professional women featured in humorous and somewhat inane adventures. Among new female characters only “Katy Keene” was a lasting success: created by Bill Woggon for MLJ in 1945, this character, a glamorous brunette movie star, appealed for over fifteen years to a vast audience—adults of both sexes, children, and adolescents—that was sustained by means of permanent character-reader interactivity: each issue would feature dresses, houses, cars, and the like submitted by readers and, for some of them, eventually designed as paper dolls in the comic.5
Among the entire female audience it was teenage girls that seemed most attracted to comic books, particularly teen comics. Ironically Archie Comics (the new name adopted by MLJ starting in 1946) was not the largest supplier of teen titles: it was outpaced by Dell, Marvel, and DC during the heyday of the genre. Between 1947 and 1950, over 650 new releases featuring adolescents appeared, accounting for approximately 10 percent of the market.6 Yet only Archie Comics specialized in teen comics, and they have stuck to this niche since the Second World War.
Likewise it was common knowledge in the industry that readers of funny animal titles were very young children, preadolescents of both sexes, and adolescents. The publishers’ sudden interest in appealing to young female readers also translated into a boom in animal strips—Pogo Possum (Dell), Animal Antics (DC), Animal Fair (Fawcett), and Animal Fables (EC), among others, all premiered in 1946.7 Female readers appeared as a promising market for publishers of funny animal comics: the magazines featuring famous animated cartoon characters were then the industry’s undisputed best sellers. Many publishers tried to cut themselves a piece of this market, but it was dominated by Dell, George Delacorte’s company. Under a contract the likes of which existed nowhere else in the industry, Dell published under their own name and distributed magazines whose contents and printing were handled by Western Publishing, originally a Racine, Wisconsin-based publisher-printer that held the licenses to Disney, Lantz, MGM, and Warner characters. Simultaneously Western published numerous proprietary titles, including March of Comics, a series of premium advertising giveaways produced in enormous quantities, up to five million copies for certain issues.8
With the exception of characters like Pogo (whose exceptional popularity stemmed from the daily syndicated newspaper strip starting in 1949), the titles featuring characters expressly created for comic books never sold as well as those showcasing film studio properties. However, two innovations proved unexpectedly popular with young readers. The Fox and the Crow (DC), which debuted in the spring of 1945, featured a wily crow and a naive fox: after a short-lived career in a series of Columbia animated cartoons the comedic duo was a steady seller for two decades. The second was the only character of an American comic to have acquired a global celebrity without relying on cinema or television: Donald Duck’s multibillionaire, miserly uncle Scrooge McDuck was created by Western Publishing employee Carl Barks in 1947.9
A totally different approach to female readers was the one taken by romance comics. Premiering in 1947, they purported to offer “realistic” stories to adolescent and adult readers. The first of the new genre, Young Romance, was the brainchild of the Joe Simon–Jack Kirby duo, who had created the character of Captain America six years before. In his autobiography, Joe Simon claimed that he came up with the idea of a comic book replicating the formula of romance magazines, such as True Story Magazine, whose first-person tearjerkers were known to appeal to large segments of the female audience. He proposed the concept to Crestwood, a publisher of romance pulps. The first issue of Young Romance was released by Prize (one of Crestwood’s many imprints) in the summer of 1947. The goal of breaking into the adult market was indeed reached as Simon saw to it that the cover displayed captions in large type (“DESIGNED FOR THE MORE ADULT READERS OF COMICS” and “all TRUE LOVE STORIES”) that made it almost indistinguishable from non-comic-strip romance magazines. In an industry where publishers were usually quick to plagiarize new titles, Young Romance had a lukewarm reception because it was the first comic book that might seem “inappropriate” for mainstream readers and the first magazine designed by its own creators as “adult,” with all the implications inherent in the term. The first critical reaction came from Marvel owner Martin Goodman, who was always prompt to dread the wrath of censors: in a letter to Harry Donenfeld (whose Independent News distributed Crestwood titles), he wrote that a “love comic book” destined for young readers “came close to pornography” and “would cause irreparable damage to the industry.” In response to this warning, Donenfeld had the word “adult” removed from the cover starting with the fourth issue.10
Romance comic books proved a windfall for Crestwood but Goodman’s initial reluctance was shared by many publishers, which explains why the expected boom finally came about only in 1949. Romance titles were all largely identical and contained the same columns as their text-only counterparts. Besides, in order for the greatest possible resemblance between the comic books and the magazines, the publishers adopted the habit of using photographs on their covers instead of drawings in order to attract (or deceive) the buyers of romance pulps. The romance vein developed to such an extent from 1949 onward that it eventually relied on genre crossover, most notably with the western: Real West Romances and Western Love published at Price, Western Hearts at Standard, and even Cowboy Romances, Cowgirl Romances, Western Life Romances, and Love Trails at Marvel exemplified this otherwise forgettable subgenre. The fad became so widespread that Time magazine devoted a short piece to it in August 1949: it pointed out that the colossal success of romance comics was taking away readers of the magazines that inspired them.11
The sales of romance comics accounted for a quarter of the market in 1949–1950 (when Marvel and Fox churned out the largest number of titles) and remained around 15 percent until 1956.12 After a while, romance sometimes got rough: at the start of the 1950s, some publishers tried to lure young men into their readerships by erring on the side of suggestiveness; obviously the steamy segment of the romance output did not outlive the great purge touched off by the creation of the Comics Code at the end of 1954. Although these publications appear harmless today given the evolution of social mores over the past forty years, it is crucial not to underestimate their erotic potential in their original historical context: censors blamed them for going too far in the graphic depiction of the female body because they actually stopped where Playboy started in 1953. Evidently the boundary that was crossed by comic magazines designed for youngsters seemed too advanced. The evolution of romance comics had shown that the audience for comic books other than those featuring funny animals was largely made up of adolescents, the primary targets of all the editorial policies of the period.
The losers of the Second World War were the Axis forces—and comic book superheroes. Even though Superman and Batman appeared in the late 1930s the Second World War was the single most important factor that enabled the superhero genre to flourish by feeding off ambient patriotism: more than seven hundred superheroes were created during the war years and the genre’s success peaked with forty different titles in 1944. A progressive but inexorable drop began the following year: thirty-three titles in 1945, twenty-eight in 1946, nineteen in 1947, fourteen in 1948, eight in 1949, four in 1950–1951, and three from 1952 to 1957.13 At the end of the 1940s the few survivors were Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and DC’s Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Aquaman. The genre was visibly past its prime: for instance, in 1948, Green Lantern lost top billing in his own title to—his pet “Streak the Wonder Dog”!
The other victims of the return to peacetime were the publishers. Many were quite embarrassed when the conflict ended and they still had a year or two’s worth of unpublished stories. They found out that the transition to peace involved the reconversion of superheroes, whom they typically regarded as one staple of the war effort and nothing more. Nineteen forty-six was the first year since the start of that decade when no new superhero debuted. Marvel replaced its last superhero titles with romance comics in 1949 and up until 1956, every attempt to relaunch superheroes met with bitter failure. Nevertheless the public’s apparent loss of interest in those characters after the war was certainly amplified by editorial policies striving to anticipate the tastes of readers: Jerry Bails has advanced the hypothesis that DC canceled the majority of its superhero titles at the end of the 1940s not because of poor sales but because of the departure in 1948 of Sheldon Mayer, the editor in charge of the All-American superhero cast distributed by DC during the war (Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkman, and the Atom, among others). As the remaining DC editors had no particular interest in superheroes they did not object to management’s decision to line up only funny animals, teen, romance, and crime titles to compete with the other large publishers. This interpretation sheds a new light on the postwar “success” of Wonder Woman: unlike Superman and Batman, who were full-fledged DC properties, the Amazon princess was initially part of Maxwell Gaines’s All-American before he sold his shares to DC in 1945;14 she escaped the postwar cancellation of the All-American line possibly thanks to her exceptional popularity, but more probably because DC’s original contract with her creator W. M. Marston stipulated that his heirs would regain full ownership of the property should the title bearing her name be discontinued.15
Nevertheless, Wonder Woman’s popularity was genuine, at least as much as that of several shapely heroines who enchanted the eyes of postwar adolescents, essentially due to the very competent artists who drew their stories. The first category were the crime fighters: Syd Shores drew Blonde Phantom for Marvel; the remarkable Matt Baker drew Phantom Lady16 for Fox and Tiger Girl for Fiction House; Joe Kubert and Lee Elias illustrated the motorcyclist/judoka Black Cat for Harvey; the young Carmine Infantino created Black Canary for DC at the end of the 1940s. Most of them disappeared at the start of the 1950s. The second category consisted of the female Tarzans based on Sheena: Rulah, Jungle Goddess (Fox) or Lorna the Jungle Girl (Marvel). The heroines of both categories shared a propensity to be involved in risqué situations where their figures were particularly highlighted. More than romance comics, these strips, which were referred to as “good girl art” by their fans, drew the wrath of censors outraged by representations of seminude female bodies in comic books.
Among male superheroes, only Superman seemed to keep a significant power of attraction. The first issue of Superboy came out at Christmas 1948: the teenaged incarnation of Superman was created at the end of the war, first under the guise of a facetious preadolescent, then of a more responsible adolescent. By giving him his own title, DC relied on a safe property to cash in on the wave of teen-themed titles. The character predated the second generation of superheroes, whose private lives interacted with their crime fighters’ activities. The television series The Adventures of Superman premiered in the fall of 1952 for a fifty-four-episode run that lasted until 1957: initially conceived in a “violent” police drama vein, it was taken up in 1953 by Whitney Ellsworth, a longtime DC editor who recast it as a children’s program. This series was one of the most watched television shows in the United States during the 1950s: it maintained the character’s popularity in his diverse titles and consolidated his iconic status in American culture.
Funny animals exemplify how publishers returned to existing genres and took advantage of trends external to comic books to fill the void left by superheroes. An emblematic example was the western genre, which was one of the biggest postwar crazes in American mass culture. It assumed a diversity of forms (film, radio, television, and comics) and touched all levels of society. Since the 1930s, Saturday matinee serials had attracted an audience roughly identical to the readers of comic books; during the war the serials had been instrumental in the popularization of superheroes and other crime fighters, and contributed to fueling the demand for westerns in comic book form. The rise of these titles, starting in 1948, actually reflected the overall popularity of the genre, which became the most successful one along with funny animals in the whole industry. Fawcett was the publisher that put out most western comics from 1949 to 1953.17
The success of cowboy stories was not an effect of chance, nor even sophisticated marketing strategies. Their postwar popularity stemmed from their capacity to strike patriotic chords among the American public. Most of the era’s westerns revolved around the struggle against Indians and outlaws and were structured by one theme: the construction of “the West” as a national mythic space in the nineteenth century. Americans’ taste for westerns never faltered for a quarter century, from the onset of the Depression through the first decade of the cold war. The period’s caricatural anti-Communism and the collective anxieties attached thereto, notably in regard to delinquency and nuclear power, gave birth to a number of largely forgotten comics. However, the anticommunist propaganda pamphlets released by diverse pressure groups then are of greater interest to cultural historians. In this regard, the most memorable was Is This Tomorrow? America Under Communism, a comic book depicting a Communist takeover of the American government published by a small Catholic publisher in Minnesota in 1948: four million copies were distributed across the country via the various channels of the American Catholic Church (parishes, youth clubs, boy scouts, and other groups) and foreign adaptations were printed for Australia, Quebec, and Turkey.
Nineteen forty-eight was the year of crime comics. How such a short-lived fad struck minds so vividly that, six years later, the public believed that they were the norm among comic books rather than the minor genre that they were in reality appears quite puzzling in retrospect. Since the 1930s, gangsters and cops had become usual favorites in American mass culture. Gangsters had been among the first stars of the talking motion pictures, thanks to brilliant actors like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. The radio serial program Gang Busters had been a lasting success since 1936 and the magazines that appeared in its wake, such as Master Detective, True Detective, and Official Detective, typically contained true crime stories adorned with tawdry illustrations.18 Diverse attempts to adapt the genre to comics met with no notable success until 1942, when publisher Lev Gleason launched Crime Does Not Pay. Mimicking the format of “true crime” pulps Gleason created a genre of which he was the market leader for five years while taking advantage of “official” endorsement from law enforcement personalities: each issue contained a letter from a police or law representative expressing his or her support for the public work being carried out by the publisher. Before romance comics, crime comic books overtly flaunted their (at least partially) “adult” orientation: the advertisements for the new title that appeared in other Gleason magazines advised “Get ‘Crime Does Not Pay’! Show it to Dad, he’ll love it!”19
The crime genre remained marginal in comic books until 1947. Out of the eighteen thousand new releases appearing between 1948 and 1954, about fifteen hundred were crime comics: the genre’s market share was 9 percent in 1947, oscillated between 10 percent and 13 percent from 1948 to 1951, and stabilized around 6 percent until 1955. There was certainly a craze for these magazines but it remained limited and never compared with the tidal wave of romance: sentimental comics accounted for a quarter of the market in 1949–1950, and 15 percent until 1956. The appeal of crime comics did not stem only from a taste for the representation of violence: it was also fueled by a 1947 media campaign to single out the alleged rebirth of organized crime after the war (in fact, organized crime had never stopped thriving since Prohibition).20 How, then, to explain the decline of those comics starting in 1952? Probably through a combination of the medium-term effects of the first moral panic against comic books in 1947–1949 and the overexposure of the 1950–1951 Kefauver Senate Committee on Organized Crime, which eventually demonized the mass media representations of gangsters and their activities. Faced with increasing retailer resistance, many publishers preferred to adopt a low profile and instead carry romance comics, a genre far less likely to stir up public outrage or commercial boycott.
However, one last genre appeared at the end of the 1940s. More bloody than crime stories and more voyeuristic than romance yarns, it catered to readers that appreciated crime comics, but also touched off the demise of the first era of comic books.
After Maxwell C. Gaines died in a boating accident in 1947, his son William inherited Educational Comics (EC), the small publishing house that his father had founded after ending his partnership with DC in 1945. EC was the spawn of Max Gaines’s guilt: since 1933, he had seen comic books evolve toward a commercialism that he claimed to resent. The alleged goal of EC was to produce didactic and uplifting magazines presenting in comic-strip form the Bible, great events of American and world history, and, by and large, stories for readers of all ages. The first consequence of this idealistic agenda was that EC posted a deficit of $100,000 when its founder died.
Gaines’s son William, then a student at New York University, took over the business without great enthusiasm both because he had always had a difficult relationship with his overbearing father and was at first anything but business-minded. EC limped along with slow-selling educational and funny animal lines until Gaines met Albert Feldstein, a young commercial artist particularly gifted at drawing beautiful women, whom he hired in late 1947 to work on western, crime, and romance titles. But at a time when every publisher offered similar products, the new direction initiated under Feldstein was not enough to boost sales. The momentous change was only triggered in the fall of 1949, when War Against Crime and Crime Patrol featured horror stories in addition to their usual crime fare and the new stories met with unexpected success. Horror had been seldom represented in comic books up to that time: starting with Eerie, a forgettable one-shot released by Avon in 1947, the genre took off very slowly. By the end of the decade the only notable horror title was ACG’s Adventures into the Unknown from 1948 to 1952.21
EC experienced a meteoric rise starting in 1950, when Gaines restructured his entire comic line around horror (The Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror), suspense (Crime Suspenstories, Shock Suspenstories), and science fiction (Weird Fantasy, Weird Science). Six months later, the start of the Korean War (in late June 1950) prompted Gaines to ask writer-illustrator Harvey Kurtzman to edit a line of war titles (Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales). In the summer of 1952, the first issue of Mad appeared: this other, more personal brainchild of Kurtzman’s was the first humor comic book that set its sights higher than the genre’s traditional juvenile audience.
EC’s prosperity seemed irresistible. Except for its slow-selling science fiction titles, all the other magazines fared very well: the horror and suspense titles were the company’s best sellers, while Mad in a couple of years became a must-read for adolescents enthused by Kurtzman’s unusual, scathing brand of humor. When the end of the Korean War sounded the death knell of the war titles, Gaines tried to make up for this loss by having Feldstein edit Panic, a “house” knockoff of Mad. The first issue, released in December 1953, contained a story about a divorced Santa Claus that earned EC the wrath of the State of Massachusetts. The scandal snowballed and was one of the elements that prompted the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Senate Judiciary Committee to schedule hearings on the comic book industry in the spring of 1954. The press coverage of the hearings propagated an unflattering image of comic magazines and those who made a living off them. Facing an incipient backlash of retailers the largest publishers decided to found the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) in September. The CMAA was a trade association whose members were to comply with a code of self-regulation patterned after the film industry’s Hays Code. Infinitely more restrictive than its Hollywood model, the so-called Comics Code cleaned up the industry; its strict enforcement soon sidetracked all the small and medium-sized publishers that, like EC, essentially put out now unacceptable genres. Discredited by the inadequate arguments he had presented during the Senate hearings, Gaines became the industry’s main scapegoat: he had to cancel the whole line that had made EC successful and introduced new titles complying with Comics Code prescriptions at the start of 1955. None of the new titles lasted more than twelve months. Disgusted with comic book publishers and finally refusing to comply with the new rules governing magazines for children, he transformed Mad into a black-and-white text-and-comics magazine over which the Comics Code would have no power. The new Mad rapidly enjoyed an increased popularity that allowed Gaines to pursue a career as the publisher of one magazine that made his fortune.
EC was not in and of itself the whole comic book industry. Its turnover was actually anything but considerable: Gaines printed 2 to 2.5 million copies each month and guaranteed his advertisers a minimal sales volume of 1.5 million copies.22 Thus, in addition to the educational and religious back titles, EC issued ten bimonthly titles whose printings per issue ranged from 225,000 for science fiction to 400,000 for horror.23 By comparison, Dell alone accounted for a third of comic book sales in all of North America during the same period: it offered ninety titles selling an average 800,000 copies per issue. Out of the twenty-five best-selling periodicals in the United States during this period, eleven were Dell comic books whose newsstand sales ranged from 950,000 copies to almost 2 million copies per issue.24 The comic book with the largest readership was never a horror title but Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, whose issue #156 (September 1953) had a print run in excess of three million copies, almost twice EC’s total monthly circulation.25
And yet histories of American comic books have traditionally presented 1950–1954 as the age of EC. Never has a publisher been so closely associated with a period (with the exception of Marvel and the renaissance of superheroes at the start of the 1960s). Gaines’s company did promote several genres that proved successful and were subsequently picked up by other publishers. But the EC titles themselves never overwhelmed newsstands. While it is true that EC comic books did stand out from their competitors’ output by their graphic and (at times) literary qualities, they never threatened the crushing commercial domination of funny animals and teen comics. William Gaines and EC were simply metonymic of their times: they have been wrongfully cast as the protagonists of the process that brought a segment of the industry to their downfall in the eyes of the American public.26