The Comic Book

I was very surprised to learn about the beginning of comic books and how they were looked down upon. It feels as if there's a lot of enthusiasm surrounding the medium now, which makes it hard to believe that it was seen as a childish or immature source of entertainment in the past. I was even more surprised to learn that the industry went as far as censoring comics to make them more appropriate for children. Especially since there were so many adult consumers eager for more mature storylines and graphics. Knowing this made the EC Horror comics really stand out to me. The mood and storylines reminded me of The Twilight Zone. The two are similar in the fact that the horror was really woven into the story. Whereas today there's a lot more gore/violence based horror. Which I think may have had something to do with the censorship at that time, although these could very well have come out during the war, before all the censorship took place. Either way, the suspense and terror these comics managed to convey with what seemed to be very little gore was really amazing. In "The Haunt of Fear", for example, there's one story where a man mistreats his wife and is said to have a "heart of ice". Eventually his cruelty pushes the wife to her breaking point and she retaliates by killing him with an ice pick. Yet this is depicted without any blood or gore. All we see is her crouching over his body, murder weapon in hand. EC manages to tell the story without intense graphics and maintain something truly horrific and enthralling, which I found incredibly interesting.