| References | Scott Lucas, ‘Policing Dissent: ‘Orwell’ and Cold War Culture, 1945-2004’, in Douglas Field (ed.), American Cold War Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 129.
Peter Mandler, ‘Good Reading for the Million: The ‘Paperback Revolution’ and the Co-Production of Academic Knowledge in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain and America’, Past & Present 244 (2019), p. 235.
Patrick B. Sharp, ‘Anglophone Print Fiction: The Pulps to the New Wave’, in Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler and Sherryl Vint, The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2024), p. 144.
Sheldon Jaffery, Double Trouble: A Bibliographic Chronicle of Ace Mystery Doubles (Mercer Island, WA: Wildside Press, 1992), xiv. Ballantine Books also introduced a line of science fiction titles that featured work by authors who would go on to be very highly regarded – CM Kornbluth & Fred Pohl’s The Space Merchants (1953) Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) were published in the same year and are still highly regarded today. Later in the decade, Ballantine published John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), a seminal classic of British sf. See Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), pp. 166-174 for more on this.
Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 201.
ibid., p. 209.
Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 34-5.
Whitfield, p. 35.
Max Allan Collins, ‘Mickey Spillane: This Time It’s Personal’, in Mickey Spillane: The Mike Hammer Collection, Vol. 1 (New York: New American Library, 2001), x. That darkness within the frontier hero, one might argue, was already relatively clear. The Searchers (novel by Alan Le May 1954, film directed by John Ford 1956) is perhaps the most famous example of this trend, but the presentation of Native American people as a threat to White Americans, and the justification of violent reprisals against them, is inherent to the genre from its origins.
See, for instance, J. Robert Lilly, Taken By Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe During World War II (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Odd Arne Westad rightly points out that while these were heinous crimes, “they paled in comparison with Soviet actions, which affected millions of families.” Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 79.
Whitfield, p. 35.
McCann, p. 202.
On McCarthyism in general, see David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983); on the persecution of LGBTQ+ communities, see David K Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) and Naoko Shibusawa, ‘The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics’, Diplomatic History 36.4 (2012); on anxieties around intellectuals, see Aaron S. Lecklider, ‘Inventing the Egghead: The Paradoxes of Brainpower in Cold War American Culture’, Journal of American Studies 45.2 (2011).
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 111. The importance of identity is clear through some Burroughs titles, such as Junkie (1953) and Queer (written 1951-3, published 1985), and the journey of discovery of the Self inherent to books such as Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957), and indeed the wider self-mythologising of the Beats. Naked Lunch was subject to an obscenity trial following publication of some excerpted material in the magazine Big Table in 1959. While initially judged to be obscene, the verdict was overturned on appeal in 1960.
For a superb discussion of concerns around American attitudes to sexuality, see Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Susan Stryker, Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001), p. 8.
ibid.
Ardis Cameron, Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place (Cornell University Press, 2015), p. 2.
ibid., p. 5.
ibid., p. 3.
One only has to imagine a winking Crypt Keeper addressing the readers of Tales From The Crypt with a pun or a joke after Lucas Crane’s body is buried in the sheep pen to make Peyton Place into an EC-style horror comic.
Cameron, pp. 6-7 has a useful discussion of the place of abortion in the novel.
For the Supreme Court decision, see https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/360/684.html For a history of the censorship, see Grove Koger and Larry Kincaid, ‘Censoring Lady Chatterley’s Lover: A Case Study and Bibliographic Guide’, Reference Services Review 28.2 (2000). One could also consider, in connection to matters of sexuality, the prominent discussions around James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room (originally published 1956) and its portrayal of homosexuality, and the wider world of lesbian pulp fiction. For the latter, see Katherine V. Forrest (ed.), Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965 (Minneapolis: Cleis Press, 2005).
Davis, Two-Bit Culture, p. 135. Information on Melcher also taken from Davis, pp. 134-5.
See, for instance, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson, MS: University Press Mississippi, 1998); Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: Pluto Press, 1984); David Park, ‘The Kefauver Comics Book Hearings as Show Trial: Decency, Authority, and the Dominated Expert’, Cultural Studies 16.2 (2002); Thomas F. O’Connor, ‘The National Organization for Decent Literature: A Phase in American Catholic Censorship’, The Library Quarterly 65.4 (1995); Richard I. Jobs, ‘Tarzan under Attack: Youth, Comics, and Cultural Reconstruction in Postwar France’, French Historical Studies 26.4 (2003).
For a discussion on the complexities and occasional shortcomings of some celebrated EC offerings, see Michael Goodrum & Philip Smith, Printing Terror: American Horror Comics as Cold War Commentary and Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 137-141.
Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comics on Today’s Youth (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1954) is Wertham’s most famous intervention. It was published shortly before the Senate subcommittee hearings at which he became the star expert.
See Joan Schenkar, ‘Patricia Highsmith and the Golden Age of American Comics’ in Roy Thomas (ed.), Alter Ego 3.90 (2009), available online at: https://issuu.com/twomorrows/docs/alterego90preview last accessed 8 July 2024. For an affectionate, personal, tribute to The Price of Salt, see Terry Castle, ‘Pulp Valentine: Patricia Highsmith’s Erotic Lesbian Thriller’, Slate 23 May 2006, retrieved from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/05/the-best-erotic-lesbian-... last accessed 25 October 2024.
Albert E. Kahn, The Game of Death: Effects of the Cold War on Our Children (New York: Cameron & Kahn, 1953), p. 94.
ibid.
Fredric Wertham, ‘The Comics ... Very Funny’, from The Reader’s Digest, 53.316, August 1948 (Pleasantville, 1948), pp. 15–18.
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 88.
ibid., p. 155.
While critics might have argued that genres such as crime and horror were being aimed at children, such titles always carried adverts aimed squarely at adults. Continued advertising expenditure shows that these comics were certainly aimed at an adult audience and secured enough of one to justify it, whoever else they might have reached.
Wright, p. 59.
Gary Grossman, Superman: From Serial to Cereal (New York: Popular Film Library Series, 1977) gives a good overview of the popularity of Superman in the 1950s.
David Hajdu, The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Picador, 2008), p. 106.
Jeffrey Gray, ‘Transgression, Release, and ‘Moloch’, in Harold Bloom & Blake Hobby (eds), The Taboo (Infobase Publishing, 2010), p. 39.
Gray, p. 38.
Jonah Raskin, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 4.
For a broad overview of the fortunes of comics in this era, see Wright, Comic Book Nation; for more on horror, see Goodrum & Smith, Printing Terror; for more on crime, see Terrence R. Wandtke, The Dark Night Returns: The Contemporary Resurgence of Crime Comics (RIT Press, 2015). Other popular genres included jungle, science fiction, romance, ‘funny animal’, and western.
For an excellent reading of EC’s preachies, see Qiana Whitted, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019).
Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), pp. 13-4. A similar approach is evident in the sf/horror film, The Blob (1958), dir. Irvin Yeaworth & Russell Doughton, where the assembled teenagers laugh at Daughter of Horror, a 1957 re-cut of the film Dementia (1953), which had been banned on its original release.
Nyberg, p. 18.
On this more generally, see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). This is not to say that the horror and crime comics were not unpleasant – they were. However, one might note that this is precisely the point of horror and crime literature – and is an approach deeply embedded in American literature through the work of Edgar Allen Poe. See, in particular, Timothy Jones, ‘Poe’s Comedy: Carnival and Gothic Laughter’, in Avril Horner & Sue Zlosnik (eds), Comic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
One could also consider the prominent discussions around James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room (originally published 1956) and its portrayal of homosexuality
See, for instance, Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Hugh Stevens, ‘Confession, Autobiography and Resistance: Robert Lowell and the Politics of Privacy’, in Field (ed.), American Cold War Culture, p. 172.
Richard Ivan Jobs, ‘Tarzan Under Attack: Youth, Comics and Cultural Reconstruction in Postwar France,’ French Historical Studies 26.4 (2003), p. 688.
Cameron, Unbuttoning America, p. 6. |
|---|