The forgotten prose fiction in 1950s horror comics
“I noticed that he had grown pale, but he forced a grin and started to dig. It was when the point of the pick bit into springy green sod for the second time that we noticed the smell. It was an odor which warned of death and age and mystic occurrences. Richard stared at me in great wonderment, but before he could speak there was a clap like thunder, and a great crack appeared in the grave at our feet. Up from the crack, squeaking and beating their wings, flew two great bats. And following them out came — IT!”
The prose excerpt quoted above comes from “The Thing from the Grave!” in the horror anthology comic book Eerie #9 (Avon, 1952). Written by an uncredited author, the entire story can be found on a single page of the 32-page comic; with the comic’s other one-page text story (“The Haunted Cave”), “The Thing from the Grave!” stands out as a short prose horror story found among multiple comic strip features. The story is an example of the uncelebrated and often unexamined prose horror fiction that was once published in comics.
In the 1950s, American comic books of all genres featured prose stories alongside the primary comic strip content, as comic books were required to have at least two pages of text features in order to qualify for magazine postage shipping rates, which were cheaper than standard postage. But publishers knew that readers purchased comic books for the comic strips, not the prose; the prose stories were only meant to satisfy the post office. Prose stories were eventually dropped from comic books, and these stories are not remembered for their quality.
While scholars like David Hajdu (The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America) explore the impact that 1950s horror comics had on American popular culture, and although there are various current comics publishers reprinting horror titles from the 1950s in collected, high-quality book formats, there is a dearth of commentary on the prose features that appeared in those comics.
Like the primary horror comic strip features, the prose stories were often moral tales in which people suffered horrible consequences as a result of their immoral actions. But while the comic strip features had several pages and eye-catching sequential illustrations to convey their respective stories, the prose features were limited to one or two pages, with perhaps an illustration or two; if writers aspired to create an engaging, entertaining story (which was perhaps not always a motive, as these prose stories were considered postage-mandated filler), they had to employ great craft to do so.
The prose of these horror tales is often purple. Take this passage, for example, from writer Jesse Merlan’s prose feature “Haunted Houses” in Dark Mysteries #2 (Master Comics, 1951):
“In the morning, my face must have told my landlady the story. She nodded her skinny crone’s neck and said, ‘He came, hah? Always he come. He never rest. That room, this house… is curse…bad curse…ghost curse!’”
And yet, Merlan writes a gripping introductory paragraph:
“All over America ghosts will walk tonight. In moldy attics, in gusty garrets, in bat-hung basements… ghosts will walk. Perhaps they’ll walk in your house… or float over your neighbor’s house. Pale ghosts will tap at the walls, tapping out ghostly messages and threats… and ancient hates and revenges. The spirits of the tortured dead will return to horrify the eyes and ears of the frightened living. They always come back, the restless dead.”
While arguably not as elegant as Shirley Jackson’s opening paragraph for The Haunting of Hill House, Merlan’s first paragraph grabs the reader’s attention; the rest of the piece is presented as the author’s real experience with a Brooklyn ghost, and a survey of supposedly true supernatural phenomenon across the United States. Merlan’s stated personal experience with the supernatural, as well as his evocative descriptions of various phenomenon, give the feature an authenticity that is unfortunately belied by the author’s colorful prose. In a post-script, the comic’s editor even invites readers to send Merlan a self-addressed envelope to get more detailed information about these hauntings, and one may ponder how many such envelopes were received by the author.
Many of these prose horror stories do not have a credited author, but some of the best do. In “The Ghost’s Last Laugh,” (Horrific #1, Artful Publications, 1952), writer Ellen Ludwell crafts a humorous story featuring an attorney who represents an eccentric, wealthy American determined to buy and move a Scottish castle — including the castle’s ghost — to New York. Although the story is more fantasy than horror, Ludwell utilizes fearsome imagery to describe the ghost:
“It was even worse than Old Ben had intimated. Red Campbell was a huge man. He wore rusty armor and carried a great claymore that dripped blood on the dank stones. His eyes were pin points of red flame in a flat and bearded face. There was the smell of brimstone about him. But worst of all was his voice — when he spoke it was like a great wolf howling through the dungeons.”
Writer Irwin Shapiro wrote approximately 40 books, many for children, including some of the well-regarded Golden Book series from Western Publishing. A skilled author, Shapiro builds tension around a grandfather clock in the opening paragraph of “The Chimes of Doom” (Adventures Into Darkness #5, Visual Editions, 1952):
“Back and forth, back and forth, Charles Hanover paced the broad landing on the upper end of the old mansion. His glance kept shifting from the closed door of his Aunt Agatha’s room to the huge, ornately carved grandfather clock that was solemnly ticking in the corner. Back and forth, tick — tock, back and forth…”
The first paragraph makes an artful comparison of Charles’ pacing to the repetitive swing of the clock’s pendulum, and Shapiro writes an engaging tale of a man driven mad by his actions. The story is heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and it features the usual moral lesson of a man undone by his transgression, but Shapiro adds atypical elements to the story that are intriguing.
Charles is not a selfish, greedy man who murders his Aunt Agatha for access to the family fortune she holds in trust for Charles until her death, but rather a desperate man who wants to escape his aunt’s domineering control of his life and fortune. As Charles’ guardian, Agatha had prevented the young man from getting a practical education or acquiring useful skills. When Charles seeks to marry the girl he loves, Agatha forbids it; Charles threatens to leave, but Agatha reminds him that he has no skills to find gainful employment, a limitation she engineered.
Unlike the protagonists found in many 1950s horror comics, Charles is a sympathetic figure, and his wealthy murder victim is not. It is fun to speculate that Shapiro, a former communist in his younger days before going on to write comics and children’s books, took delight in writing about the aristocratic Agatha’s destruction. Regardless, it is a testament to Shapiro’s skill as a writer that he is able to convey such a nuanced, engaging tale in just two pages.
While the horror strips found in 1950s comic books get well-deserved attention from cultural scholars and comics critics, the prose features in those same horror comics remain largely unappreciated and unexamined. Although many of these horror stories were perhaps not intended to be enduring art, some of them are well-crafted and worthy of appreciation.
NOTES AND FURTHER READING:
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (David Hajdu, New York: Picador, 2009)
“How Many Pages Long Have Marvel Comic Stories Been Over the Years?” (Brian Cronin, CBR.com, August 14, 2017) — Cronin’s article notes the inclusion of text pages in comic books to qualify for magazine postage rates, and the impact these text pages had on the content of early Marvel Comics titles.
Information about writer Irwin Shapiro can be found on Wikipedia.
The Digital Comics Museum offers online scans of comic books that have fallen into the public domain, including the following four comics, referenced above: Adventures Into Darkness #5; Dark Mysteries #2; Eerie #9; and Horrific #1. The comic book images and quoted prose featured above are believed to be in the public domain.
The text and images above are the property of their respective owner(s), and are presented here for nonprofit, educational, and review purposes only under the fair use doctrine of the copyright laws of the United States of America.
