As mentioned in a prior post, one of the most figurative media which influenced my writing and continues to do so today is the once-maligned, now celebrated EC Comics of the 1950s.

This is the same comic book imprint famous (or infamous depending on your tastes) for releasing the original Tales from the Crypt horror comic series which became a mega hit in the 1990s as a televised adaptation for HBO.

If you’re really paying attention to the show’s seven seasons, you’ll note not every story aired was a Tales from the Crypt original tale. The show culled many stories from EC Comics’ other brands like Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear and Shock SuspenStories. I won’t bore you further by delving deep into the British horror film company Amicus, who had their more moderate (but nonetheless creepy fun) short story compendium films for Crypt and Vault during the 1970s.

What I will mention briefly is that EC Comics (acronym for an “Entertaining Comic”) came under fire from the United States government during the McCarthyist paranoia of the 1950s for their garish, sometimes gory depictions of horror-styled comeuppance. Leading to mass comic book burnings helmed by the conservative propagandist Frederick Wertham’s publication of Seduction of the Innocent used by the Senate Judiciary Committee. EC Comics, ironically enough, originally started publishing mainstream romance and Christian-based comics. Funny to think of the Senate’s staking the claim of EC Comics breeding youth of the 1950s into hedonistic mass murderers. Killing in the name of Nikita Khruschev, of course.

Paltry sales then pushing EC to go more hardcore (for the times) in their horror comics, Shock SuspenStories may have been tamed down in the gore department, but the series still pushed mind-alerting stories (also in their sci-fi comics like Weird Fantasy and war lore, Two-Fisted Tales) filled with a repetitive cheaters-will-get-theirs motif.

I was going through my EC reprint collections (alas, I only own two original ECs in my massive comic collection), this morning and forgot how daring Shock SuspenStories issue number 13 was, which leads off with the HBO-adapted “Only Skin Deep.” For me, the second tale of the four in this issue is the most riveting and the biggest challenge to the system which may have added to the spark of monomania when it was published in 1953. I told TJ, who was lying next to me in bed, how blown away I was by “Blood-Brothers” as she woke upon my hitting the final page of the story.

Let me quickly summarize this genius-level storytelling coming during The Fabulous Fifties, which, facing the facts if you have direct experience or were raised by the generation, was fabulous more for Caucasian males than any other demographic of the decade. There was a reason things came to a head the subsequent decade with the Civil Rights Movement.

“Blood-Brothers” focuses on a bigot by the name of Sid who has engineered the death of his neighbor, Henry, who happens to have a mixed-race lineage in his bloodline. All beforehand, Sid has accepted Henry as a friend and an equal, but when another neighbor puts his house up for sale and the leading applicants are a family of color, Sid begins a crusade of hatred leading to Henry’s suicide once Henry has made his family history known.

I’ll let you read the details because this story deserves your attention, even if you could care less about comic books. The punchline is the proof in the pudding where the coroner attending the police scene following Henry’s death reveals the exposition of Sid’s own life as a child depending upon the blood transfusion type match from an African American male.

Making the point, rebellious for its time, that it’s not skin color which differentiates us when our lives on the line, but blood type. In this case, a racist who plants a burning cross upon the lawn of a former friend he’s taken painful measures of destroying his life, having been literally saved once by a black man.

I can only hope McCarthy and Wertham have found bigger enlightenment in the afterlife all these years.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.