T

TALES FROM THE CRYPT. Tales from the Crypt was EC Comics’ fl agship horror comics

anthology title; it has become culturally synonymous with gory, twist-in-the-tale horror
and has been adapted into a number of media. Tales from the Crypt was launched with the
April/May 1950 issue (the same year as other notable bi-monthly EC Comics titles Th e
Haunt of Fear, and Th e Vault of Horror); it ran for 46 issues until the February/March
1955 issue. All three titles were reluctantly axed by EC’s publisher William Gaines in
the face increasingly stringent restrictions by the Comics Code after a campaign against
horror and crime comics in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Although Fredric Wertham’s notorious expose of comic violence and its eff ects on
young readers, Seduction of the Innocent (1954), constantly cites crime and horror comics,
the book’s raison d’être is not comics scholarship or genre studies. Wertham classifi es
Western comics as crime comics because they involve criminal schemes, like cattle rus-
tling, and takes the descriptions of comics from his subjects, often young people in care,
at face value without looking at the comic book sources in context. Th us, Blue Beetle
“turns into” Superman, according to one child. Tales from the Crypt is cited by name only
once in the text by one of the interviewees, from a small group of 11 children (9 boys and
2 girls between 9 and 13 years old) and none of the scurrilous illustrations chosen for
Wertham’s centerpiece are from Tales from the Crypt. Th e famous baseball game played
with entrails is from Haunt of Fear 19, and a stark cover of a hanged man above the un-
convincing description “Cover of a children’s comic book” is from EC’s Crime Suspense
Stories issue #20. What Wertham overlooked was the rising age of comic readership,
and the mostly adult audience of EC comics in the World War II and the postwar pe-
riod, where horror and crime comics gained a new adult readership. In the Congressional