MIND CANDY
Dedication
Dedicated to Glenn Yeffeth and Leah Wilson
Copyright Information
Copyright © 2013 by Lawrence Watt-Evans.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
Introduction
In 2002 a fellow named Glenn Yeffeth contacted me about writing an essay for a book he was editing, to be called Seven Seasons of Buffy, about the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” That turned out to be the first in a series of similar anthologies about various pop culture phenomena, called the Smart Pop series, and I got invited to write for most of them. I didn’t always have anything to say about a given subject, so I turned down several of those invitations, but I wrote a total of fifteen essays for the series before I finally got somewhat burned out and stopped; fourteen of them were published, while the fifteenth, about Wonder Woman, was intended for an anthology that got canceled.
Writing them was fun. I always tried to find something to say about the work in question that I had never seen anyone say before. In some cases, given the huge amount of fannish writing that already existed, that was a real challenge. I may not have always succeeded.
I usually tried to be funny, or at least amusing, as well—not always, but usually.
I thought some of those essays were pretty good. I kind of regretted that most of my regular readers didn’t see most of them—I mean, someone who doesn’t care about “Grey’s Anatomy” wasn’t about to buy an entire book about the show just because I had an essay in it. Eventually, it occurred to me that there was an obvious solution: Collect them all into a single volume.
While I was assembling it, I realized there wasn’t any good reason not to include other old pop culture essays and articles I’d written, or for that matter new ones. Some of those old pieces had appeared in obscure, low-circulation venues, where almost no one saw them, so here was a chance to give them a larger audience. So I dug through all the articles and columns I’d written since 1984, and found a few I thought were worth reprinting.
(1984 was my cut-off because my seventy or so published articles and columns from before that were written on a typewriter—I got my first computer in August, 1984—and therefore weren’t available in a handy form.)
I limited this collection to pieces about popular culture, so all the articles about writing and publishing and collecting were excluded; I may put them in another book someday, but not this one. Plain old reviews of books or movies also got cut, as did articles that were just history, without any original angle. (I was somewhat startled by how many straight histories I’d written, mostly about comic books.)
I’ve updated several of these essays, as many were written before the work in question concluded, or contained material that hasn’t aged well—the Lone Ranger essay, for example, originally included a critique of the 1981 movie starring Klinton Spilsbury, and really, who cares about that anymore? Some stuff is still a bit dated, even after editing, but I’ll just have to live with that.
These aren’t academic papers or scholarly studies; they’re just for entertainment. You won’t find footnotes or bibliographies or annotations, just me throwing ideas around. I hope you’ll enjoy them.
—Lawrence Watt-Evans
Takoma Park, 2012
Comic Books
Dr. Wertham, E.C. Comics, and My Misspent Youth
Revised; original version published in Penguin Dip, a fanzine, in 1989
Once upon a time an editor invited me to write an article for him, and I asked what sort of article he’d like to see me write. He, knowing of my interest in E.C. comics, suggested the title above.
I think there were some false assumptions involved here. I was well past my misspent youth by the time I first heard of E.C. or Dr. Wertham. Still, here’s my story.
I was born in 1954, fourth of six kids. All three of my older siblings, by the time I was old enough to notice, read comic books, mostly DC superheroes and Dell adventure stuff—Turok, Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, that sort of thing. Little Lulu and some other kiddie comics, too.
All the comic books in the house were treated as communal property; whoever bought one could read it first, but then it got passed around, and when everyone had read it it went up to a box in the attic. Periodically, on boring rainy days, somebody would go up to the attic and haul down a stack of old comics to re-read.
When I was five, late in 1959 or early in 1960, I desperately wanted to learn to read so I could read those comic books that sat around the house so temptingly. I’d learned the alphabet in kindergarten, and one day the teacher was teaching us a song that she’d written on the blackboard, something about “K-k-katy, beautiful Katy,” and the concept of each letter representing a sound abruptly dawned on me.
I suddenly realized that maybe I could read, since I knew all the letters.
When I got home I got out the comic book that most fascinated me, a coverless old one with bright purple spaceships and trees with faces and domed cities in it, and I sat down and read it, skipping words that weren’t spelled phonetically.
So much for the arguments that comic books keep kids from learning to read!
That comic book, by the way, stuck in my memory, and twenty years later I tracked it down and bought a copy. It’s Adventures into the Unknown #105, published by the American Comics Group in 1956.
Once I started, I was a voracious reader. By the time I was seven I had gone through all the comic books that my sibs had accumulated, and I had to start buying my own.
I picked up the first issue of X-Men secondhand, for a nickel, about six months after it came out. I read the first Justice League adventures, which Marian had bought. I liked superheroes. I also liked everything else—I plowed through Marian’s Turok and Lone Ranger and Jody’s Little Lulu and Superboy and all the rest of it, loving all of it. About my favorite was Strange Adventures, a science fiction title.
Then one day I picked up a secondhand copy of Tales to Astonish #13 (I know the issue because I tracked it down later), and discovered monster comics.
That comic book had four or five stories in it. The cover story was about “Groot, the Thing from Planet X!,” a giant walking tree. Then there was a creepy one about a guy obsessed with finding the abominable snowman who becomes the abominable snowman, and one about a guy who gets turned into a wooden statue, and… well, I don’t remember the others for sure anymore, but this was my first exposure to scary stuff in visual form.
I had nightmares for about a week.
I loved it.
If that sounds contradictory, it isn’t really. I had nightmares a lot, about all kinds of things. Even a silly Supergirl story about a red monster so gigantic you only see its feet gave me nightmares.
I started looking for other scary comics, but didn’t find much. Most Marvel monster comics were just dumb, and the Charlton ghost comics, too, and the DC “mystery” comics I came across were even worse. Dell did a few that I liked—my favorite was a one-shot giant called Universal Pictures Presents Dracula, The Mummy, and Other Stories. (Catchy title, huh?) That one gave me nightmares, too.
It seemed to me at the time that there ought to be even scarier comic books than that, and more of them. I wondered why DC and Marvel and Charlton and ACG never had any werewolves or vampires or anything in their spooky comics. I couldn’t find any, though, and eventually I gave up.
Time marched on. By 1969 I wasn’t paying much attention to comics any more.
Then in 1974 I started collecting them because I discovered that there was money in it; I picked up a first-printing Classics Comics #1 at a yard sale for $4.25, as a curiosity, and sold it to a collector for $60.00.
I started buying u
p practically every old comic book I came across, with no discrimination at all. Then I realized how many were pure junk and began to narrow down to the good ones.
Then I started reading about comic books—I got hold of The Comic-Book Book and All in Color for A Dime, by Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff, and Comix, by Les Daniels.
The articles on Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and the rest were nothing new, but two subjects came as a revelation: the history of the original Captain Marvel, and the story of E.C. Comics, Dr. Wertham, and the Comics Code Authority.
For those who don’t know, E.C. was a small comic-book publisher, in business from 1943 to 1955. “E.C.” originally stood for “Educational Comics,” but was quickly changed to “Entertaining Comics” when stuff like Picture Stories from the Bible didn’t sell. After starting out as just another mediocre small comics publisher, from 1950 through 1954 they put out comic books often considered the best ever produced, certainly the best produced before 1960, including three no-holds-barred horror titles: Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror. They also did some borderline horror: Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, Weird Science, and Weird Fantasy. Even their war titles, Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales, were unusually gruesome.
About two dozen other publishers (yes, there really were that many) tried to cash in on the boom in horror comics that resulted from E.C.s success with those titles, and turned out heaps and heaps of gory horror.
Then in 1954-1955, a hue and cry led by a psychiatrist named Dr. Frederic Wertham, expert on criminal violence and author of the anti-comics diatribe Seduction of the Innocent, put all the horror comics, all the crime comics, all the really lurid comics of any sort, out of business. Combined with the collapse of the then-existing magazine distribution system, brought about by the liquidation of the gargantuan American News Company in fancy financial maneuvers, this drove about three-fourths of the comic book publishers of the time out of the comics business, including E.C. The survivors, with two exceptions (Dell and Classics Illustrated), submitted to censorship by the newly-created Comics Code Authority, a body owned and operated by the comic-book publishers to censor their products and make sure that they were fit for children to read.
I hadn’t known about any of this.
As for that other revelation, the original Captain Marvel was the star of the Fawcett line of comics, and for a time was more popular and sold more comics than any other hero. DC had sued, claiming he was an imitation of Superman, and after years of litigation finally won and drove Fawcett out of the superhero business.
Both the Big Red Cheese and pre-Code horror had been gone since before I discovered comics, and this was the first I’d heard of either of them. I’d thought the CCA seal had always been on comic-book covers, that Superman had always been the dominant superhero.
Fascinated, I found some of the DC reprints of old Captain Marvel stories that came out in the 1970s under the title Shazam!
What a disappointment! This was the stuff that those fans had raved about?
I decided to check out E.C., though, because the raves about E.C. were even more enthusiastic than the ones about Captain Marvel.
Then I looked at the prices for E.C. comics. A ratty issue of Tales from the Crypt went for ten or fifteen dollars! (For comparison, new comics at the time were just going from 25¢ to 30¢.)
No way! After the Captain Marvel incident, I decided to pass. At least those issues of Shazam! had only cost me a quarter apiece.
Let us skip ahead to April, 1978. I was married, unemployed, living off my wife’s salary in an apartment in Lexington, Kentucky. I had a fairly extensive comic-book collection and was thinking about going into business full-time as a mail-order dealer, since my writing career wasn’t going anywhere yet.
I saw an ad in a publication called The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom—someone in Florida had died, and his widow was selling off his E.C. collection, cheap. Instead of prices in the $10-and-up range, she was asking as little as $1.50 for issues of Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales, and the like.
What the heck, I thought, and I splurged. I ordered half a dozen, mostly war comics, but including one issue of Tales from the Crypt at $4.00.
I got the books, and read ’em, and I was impressed, sort of—but they sure were strange. They weren’t like anything else I’d ever read. For one thing, I wasn’t sure whether the stories in Tales from the Crypt #41 were meant seriously or not—they were sort of on the edge between horror and parody.
I liked ’em, though.
I sold that book for $16.00—and immediately regretted it, and decided to buy some more E.C.s. Which I did.
From then on I was hooked. I bought more, and more, and more, until, six years and $17,000 later, I had one of the ten most complete E.C. collections on Earth.
But when I was finished, or at least as close as I got (there are a few giveaways I never found), where did I go from there?
I thought about it. I considered other companies—should I collect Fiction House? Ziff-Davis? ACG?
But I wasn’t really interested in any of those. I was interested in horror comics.
So I set out to collect all the horror comics ever published in the U.S. I got pretty close to all the pre-Code issues before I quit, and in the mid-’90s a personal financial crisis forced me to sell my collection, putting an end to that particular hobby.
So what does this have to do with Dr. Wertham and my misspent youth?
Well, the reason E.C. got out of the business, the reason horror comics gave way to wimpy “mystery” and “monster” and “ghost” comics, was that Dr. Frederic Wertham and other anti-comics crusaders had driven these horrible mind-warping funnybooks that children were reading off the market.
When I was a kid, all the comics I read were either Code-approved and certified harmless, or came from Dell or one of its offshoots—Dell had never subscribed to the Code but had its own in-house version that was usually followed (except in a few early-sixties books like Universal Presents—remember, I mentioned those?).
That’s why I couldn’t find any really scary or gruesome stuff as a kid!
It was all Dr. Wertham’s fault! He’d killed the good stuff off when I was still in diapers!
(That’s a gross oversimplification, really—he was just the most visible anti-comics crusader, but as a matter of fact he wasn’t all that influential. He hated all comics, and thought superhero stuff was at least as bad as horror. The Code was emphatically not his doing—he disapproved of it. He makes a great scapegoat, though.)
If he’d left well enough alone, I could have overdosed on horror as a kid and saved myself all those thousands of dollars I spent paying collector’s prices for old horror comics!
And that’s not the worst of it. Let me appear to change subject for just a bit—I’ll tie this in in a moment, bear with me.
Who was the best-selling writer in the world throughout the 1980s, the decade when I was building my own career? Stephen King, of course.
So what does King write?
Horror. Often real gross-out stuff, too.
Where’d he learn this?
From the horror comics he read as a kid. He’s said as much, and admits to swiping some of his most horrific images from them. In his short story “The Boogeyman,” in the collection Night Shift, he talks about E.C.’s Haunt of Fear and the artwork of Graham “Ghastly” Ingels. Together with George Romero, who remembered those same hideous old comics, he produced the hit movie “Creepshow” and explicitly based it on a horror comic.
Now, what do I do for a living?
I write books.
What kind of books?
Science fiction and fantasy.
Why?
Because when I was a kid I learned to read from Adventures into the Unknown and read piles and piles of science fiction comics and books and so forth.
Why didn’t I read horror comics?
Because there weren’t any. If there had been, I’
d have read them, even if I had to sneak them into bed and read them under the covers, the way I snuck my radio in to listen to rock ’n’ roll.
See, it ties back in. It’s all Dr. Wertham’s fault that I wasted my childhood with that other stuff, instead of horror comics, and didn’t wind up as rich and famous as Stephen King!
Talk about a misspent youth!
The X-Men and I: Growing Up Mutant
Originally published in The Unauthorized X-Men
Bedford, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1963—I was eight years old, about to turn nine, a skinny blond kid with four sisters and a brother, living in a big old Victorian house a block from the town common. I got a dime allowance every Sunday—or possibly I’d just gotten a raise to twenty cents, I’m not entirely sure, but it doesn’t matter; either way, it wasn’t very much, and I tried to stretch it as far as I could. Most weeks I would walk up to the corner, where there was a tiny block of stores, too small to be called a shopping center, to spend it.
At the north end of the shops was the Bedford Tailor, which I have never set foot in to this day. At the south end was Harry Silverman’s little grocery, usually referred to simply as “the corner store,” where my sisters and I bought penny candy—which really cost a penny back then, and certain varieties could be had for less, such as these strange green squares called “mint juleps” that you had to soak in your mouth for a minute before they got soft enough to chew which were two for a penny, and Chum Gum, the world’s cheapest chewing gum, which came three sticks to the two-cent pack.
I’d usually spend a nickel at Harry’s, mostly on mint juleps and Chum Gum just because you got more for your money.
But the rest of my money I saved for the middle of the three-store block. That was Dunham’s Used Books, which was jammed full of marvels—stacks and stacks of science fiction paperbacks along one wall, shelf after shelf of strange old books filling most of the shop, hundreds of books dating back as far as the middle of the 19th century. One long shelf held dozens of yellow-bound volumes of the adventures of Tom Swift, Jr., many of which eventually found their way into my possession.
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