Horror Week: The Loathsome!

[cyberghostface.insanejournal.com]

This one's from Weird Science #20.

















If the girl looks familar to you, Alex Ross used her as the model for "Maggie" in Marvels.

Comments

[mechanicaljewel.insanejournal.com]

You've got to love EC. Given the way the other Golden Age comics so often fell back on stereotypes and out-and-out racism/sexism/ableism for a cheap story, EC was always trying to make their readers think and to question those same tropes.

God, I really hate Dr. Wertham whenever I read EC stories. This was destroying the minds of America's youth? Really?

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Not in the right way. Destroying it with patriotism and paranoia about "good and evil" and "law and order" was infinitely more preferable. Oh, and encouraging young boys to like battle, and guns--when used against the right people--and go off to war. That was okay.

[mechanicaljewel.insanejournal.com]

There's a reason that all the hippies had grown up reading MAD.

It wouldn't have been so bad if he had only attacked EC's gore, but he deliberately took panels out of context to prove that they were also racist. It was so easy to find racism in a lot of those comics, but he picked on the ONE company that was actively anti-racist, and thus actually in line with Wertham's primary cause. But he just had this horse-with-blinders approach to comics and managed to take this side cause to the Senate. What a waste of time for him, and a waste of talent for EC.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Not just the hippies, either. Myself, in the form of reprints(MAD mostly) as a little kid, and later in the 80s as a teen, in the South. Getting the Russ Cochran SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES set one Christmas was one of the greatest Xmas gifts ever.