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Printing Terror American Horror Comics as Cold War Commentary
and Critique
Michael
Goodrum and Philip Smith
Manchester:
University Press, 2021 Hardcover.
328 pages. ISBN 978-1526135926. £80
Reviewed by Nicolas Labarre Université
Bordeaux Montaigne Printing Terror is a frustrating
addition to the growing body of scholarship on horror comics. The book purports
to examine the interactions between these comics and US society, stating in the
introduction that “to understand the purpose of horror, we must understand its
historical context” [27], and seeking to avoid “totalizing theories” [25] about
a notoriously slippery genre. In addition to social context, the two authors
pay close attention to the broader media ecology in which horror developed—building
notably on Skal’s seminal The Monster Show (1993)—and in particular to
the mutual influence between comics and horror cinema. This is a
familiar premise, and the book comes in the wake of many instances of fan studies
of horror comics, as well as a recent surge in scholarly interest (notably
Julia Round, Terrence Wandtke and Qiana Whitted). However, Goodrum and Smith
argue that these works, whether fannish or academic, have typically
overemphasized the rebelliousness and the transgressions of the genre, while
downplaying its more conservative elements: “Unlike our colleagues, we read
horror comics not as a disruptive social force that challenged McCarthy-era
sensibilities, but as primarily preoccupied with threats to, and the preservation
of, white heterosexual male subjectivity” [27-28]. The authors point to the
ambiguous politics of horror and the fact that horror comics “resisted dominant
narratives of social and economic progress” [31] to the point of appearing
“profoundly counter-cultural”, while also being “deeply conservative” [44].
This apparent paradox has, of course, been central to discussions of the
politics of horror cinema (in the work of Robin Wood, Noël Carrol, Barbara
Creed, Carol Clover and David Roche, among others), but it is fairly novel when
applied to horror comics. However,
some problems appear as early as this introduction. For instance, in an abrupt one-page
overview of the comics industry, the two authors note the influence of “the
woodblock prints of Rodolphe Töpher [sic]” [10], while Töpffer used pen
lithography, not woodblocks. Elsewhere they mention the disappearance of ACG’s Adventures in the Unknown in 1959 as
evidence of the decline of horror in the 1950s [19] while that comic book actually remained in print until 1967. These factual errors become less frequent afterward, but they are jarring here. More problematically, the two authors
insist on using the obsolete periodization of the history of comics in terms of
“ages”, borrowing from the very fan scholarship they purport to question [32],
while comics historians have long discarded this terminology. The
authors then identify two broad eras for their study, 1945-1954, then
1964-1979, each studied over three chapters, focusing on trauma, gender and
race. A further chapter on the rise of monster culture bridges the gap between
the two periods. In each chapter the text proceeds through case studies,
ranging from the most obscure early 1950s comics (Witches Tales, Ghost Comics)
to more familiar examples (a few EC stories, Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula or Warren’s Vampirella),
often accompanied by the reproduction of selected panels or pages. This vast
corpus, which ranges from mediocre byproducts to celebrated exemplars (such as
Feldstein and Krigstein’s 1955 “Master Race”), is one of the strongest assets
of the book. Reprints and digital repositories have made it easier than ever to
obtain and read comic books beyond the usual celebrated examples, and Goodrum
and Smith take full advantage of that possibility to offer a survey of the
field that is not entirely predetermined by previous appraisals of worth. The
introduction convincingly argues that horror comics “broadly, [speak] with one
voice” [28] despite all their differences, and the book mostly succeeds in
proving that claim, while paying attention to the particulars of the selected
stories. Yet, this claim would have been even more convincing had the authors
indicated precisely what corpus they used for the book and how they chose their
sample in the case of longer series. For instance, all the examples for Vampirella come
from the first 15 issues of the magazine, out of 112: it is unclear whether the
authors read only these issues or whether they felt they stood for the entire
existence of the publication. Similarly, the first half of the book refers to
many of the reproduced panels as “anonymous” due to the lack of identification
in the comics themselves. However, many of these works have later been
attributed and referenced in the Grand Comic Book database. The fact that a
striking pinup pose [92] was drawn by Black artist Matt Baker, in his
distinctive style, could have enriched the authors’ consideration on the
intersection of race and gender. The book
is frustrating precisely because its main thesis is sound, especially when the
authors focus on fear as the privilege of male white characters. People of
color are an object of fear, but they are almost never shown as experiencing it
themselves. Women, for their part, are often the object of fear, but when they
experience it, they tend to be turned into eroticized stock characters and
pinups [94-97]. This is a difficult case to make, because the book relies on
examples whose representativeness cannot be ascertained. Initially, Printing
Terror appears to impose symptomatic meaning onto isolated images. However,
the accumulation of these images and the diversity of sources gradually bolster
the argument, as echoes and recurrences come into focus. The most convincing
passages in the book are unsurprisingly to be found in the conclusions to the
later chapters, which offer nuanced recapitulation not only of their respective
sections but also of the entire book. Unfortunately,
the authors undercut their demonstration in a variety of ways. Most strikingly,
Goodrum and Smith omit any analysis of the Comics Code and of the hearings at
the 1954 US Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency which led to that
system of self-censorship. In their conclusion, they attempt to justify this
omission by stating that “horror comics of the 1950s were not, as a rule,
written in dialogue with contemporary criticism” [268] and argue that as a
result, they should be read in light of their broader social context, rather
than through this early comics scholarship. This is unconvincing, for horror
comics offer a rare example of a comics genre which did produce an
institutional response, allowing us to chart pragmatically how
countercultural they were, instead of relying on cultural reconstructions. Furthermore,
such a study would likely have bolstered the authors’ cases, if only by
observing that the senators and witnesses who debated the ills of horror and
crime comics were also overwhelmingly white men, for whom the transgressions of
horror comics were tailored. Qiana Whitted’s recent book on EC Comics, EC
Comics : Race, Shock, and Social Protest (Rutgers UP, 2019), whose
central thesis is compatible with Goodrum and Smith’s, demonstrates how fruitful
the use of contemporary sources (the minutes of the Senate Subcommittee’s
hearings, but also readers’ mail and newspaper coverage) can be to ascertain
the political valence of these comics. This
refusal to make use of contemporary modes of reception illustrates what is
possibly the central weakness of the book: its inability to articulate the
position from which it is challenging the politics of these comics. At times,
especially in the convincing later chapters, it correctly puts them in dialogue
with contemporary political discourses, and offers some useful insight on the
way comics writers tried to answer feminist claims in their works [226-227]. At
other times, it merely registers the representations under study as
“problematic” (three instances between pp.52 and 57, among others). The 1950s
comics under study mostly fail to offer progressive representations of gender
and race. They are, in fact, often frankly racist and sexist. Goodrum and Smith
demonstrate as much, but they never establish why we should apply contemporary
modes of judgments to these mostly discarded cultural artifacts. In what way,
in what context and for whom would it be “problematic” for a blond woman to be
represented in a death camp, for instance [53]? It is certainly implausible,
and it indicates reliance on genre archetypes rather than context-specific
characterization, but Goodrum and Smith do not offer a standard against which
the gravity of this deviation should be measured. Printing
Terror’s
conclusion hails the contribution of Marc Singer’s important Breaking the
Frames (2018) to comics studies. Building on Singer, the authors observe
that horror comics scholarship has not entirely shed its relationship to fan
boosterism. This is probably true, yet that observation is not supported by the
kind of careful method and rigorous approach Singer also champions. As a
result, Goodrum and Smith’s potent thesis, appealing selection of examples and
at times astute close readings, result in a deeply flawed book.
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