Corpses, crimes, and comic books: Old Testament justice in the horror comics of the '50s.

• Author: Beato, Greg

ROTTING CORPSES. Plotting spouses. A jealous cactus that goes on a murderous rampage. In the early 1950s, Charlie Brown and Howdy Doody weren't the only pop culture phantasms delighting America's children. All across the country, gleefully gruesome crime and horror comics brightened newsstands with vivid tableaux of monsters, mobsters, the walking dead, and other assorted fiends.

It was a good time to be a kid, no doubt, and an even better time to be a protector of public virtue. Crusading newspaper columnist Thomas E. Murphy rafted against the "depraved, degenerate bits of scatology" who created crime and horror comics. U.S. senators investigated the comics in a special hearing. Progressive psychiatrist Frederick Wertham penned a best-selling manifesto, Seduction of the Innocent, that accused comics of "mass conditioning" the nation's children to a life of illiterate, criminal, sexually abnormal delinquency. And as David Hadju recounts in The Ten Cent Plague, his excellent 2008 history of the mid-century backlash against crime and horror comics, many organizations, including at least one Girl Scout troop, set fire to these graphic monstrosities in psychotic celebrations of literary decency.

One major purveyor of cartoon shocks and mayhem was the iconoclastic EC Comics, which brought forth such classics as Tales From the Crypt and Crime SuspenStories. When public pressure for a crackdown mounted in 1954, EC publisher William Gaines beat the angry mobs to the punch by ripping up copies from his catalog at a New York press conference. The company's crime and horror comics, he announced, were dead. The ghosts of these series have been haunting the halls of American pop culture ever since--as reprints, movie adaptations, HBO programming, and a Saturday morning cartoon.

But other rifles from the era have led much less visible afterlives. In August the comics publisher Fantagraphics exhumed more than three dozen non-EC stories from the period for a new anthology, Four Color Fear.

While EC now stands as the ghoulish face of 1950s crime and horror comics, it accounted for just 7 percent of such comics produced in that era, according to Four Color Fear coeditor John Benson. Atlas, the genre's largest player, would eventually evolve into the company now known as Marvel Comics, and Marvel has been reprinting old Atlas rifles such as Strange Tales and Menace over the past few years. But much of the material produced by the 30 or so other crime and...