160 EDUCATIONAL COMICS
racism, war, political corruption, and child neglect with established authority fi gures
generally serving as the targets of moral outrage. As a result, the youth market quickly
embraced EC’s approach, particularly the horror titles, allowing the publisher to thrive
fi nancially and to attract talented artists such as Wally Wood, Johnny Craig, and Joe
Orlando.
Th e 1954 Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency was the turning
point that signaled the decline of EC Comics. Th e comic book industry had been subject
to challenges from parents, teachers, and community leaders in the past, but the Senate
hearings, combined with Dr. Fredric Wertham’s study condemning the psychological
infl uence of comics on child development, led to the wholesale self-censorship of the
medium. William Gaines was the only comic book publisher to testify before the sub-
committee and his famously defi ant, unapologetic defense of horror and crime comics
proved to be as detrimental to the industry’s survival as the bloody images themselves.
With the formation of the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) and its
Comics Code later that year, participating publishers agreed to adhere to strict stan-
dards concerning the details of graphic images, the moral substance and resolution of
the plot, character development, and appropriate language use. Gaines initially refused
to join the CMAA, but he had diffi culty selling EC comics without distributors and
stores willing to stock them.
It was outrage over the CMAA’s eff orts to remove the image of a perspiring black
astronaut in the reprinted We i r d Fa n t a s y #18 story “Judgment Day” (for EC’s “New
Direction” line) that ultimately led Gaines to abandon comic book publishing altogether.
After unsuccessfully experimenting with a form of illustrated pulp fi ction that he called
“Picto-Fiction,” Gaines managed to keep the company afl oat by turning Mad into a
bi-monthly, black-and-white magazine. He remained involved with the creative develop-
ment of Mad Magazine until his death in 1992. DC Comics continues to publish U.S.
and foreign editions of Mad Magazine and extends that publication’s signature parody
to audio recordings, board and computer games, and a sketch comedy show. In addition,
since the late 1970s, various publishers including Russ Cochran Publisher Reprints,
Gladstone Publishing, and Gemstone Publishing have reprinted the EC Comics “New
Trend” and “New Direction” titles in hardbound volumes and in comic book form.
Selected Bibliography: Geissman, Grant. Foul Play!: Th e Art and Artists of the Notorious
1950s E.C. Comics! New York: Collins Design, 2005; Hajdu, David. Th e Ten-Cent Plague:
Th e Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2008; Jacobs, Frank. Th e Mad World of William M. Gaines. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle
Stuart Inc., 1972; Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: Th e Transformation of Youth
Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Qiana J. Whitted
EDUCATIONAL COMICS. Rather than constituting a single genre, “educational comics”
encompasses a large constellation of related (and somewhat overlapping) categories.
