A Matter of Fluids: EC Comics and the Vernacular Abject, Abjection Incorporated Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence

26 Pages·2020·0.938 MB·english

by  Nicholas Sammond

chapter ten
A Matter
of Fluids:
EC Comics &
the Vernacular
Abject
nicholas sammond
Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
— J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Decision to Drop the Bomb
Was the Parthenon worth the sufferings of a single slave? Is it poss i ble to write po-
etry after Auschwitz? The question has been countered: when the horror of real ity
tends to become total and blocks po liti cal action, where else than in the radical
imagination, as refusal of real ity, can the rebellion, and its uncompromised goals,
be remembered? But t oday, are the images and their realization still the domain
of “illusory” art?
—H erbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation
The May 1954 cover of EC Comics’ Mad magazine features the bust of a lone
“ woman,” drawn by the artist Basil Wolverton (figure 10.1). To describe the
figure as simply a woman would be inaccurate and misleading. She is a gro-
tesque. Her hair and eyebrows appear to be made of spaghetti or wet straw.
Her nose is a snout or a double-b arreled penis. Her bloodshot eyes protrude;
the epicanthic folds are fatty. Her skin is pocked, and the pox on her face
erupt with either hair or pus. Her veined and cracked teeth protrude from
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figure 10.1 Cover of the May 1954 issue of EC Comics’ Mad magazine.
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pitted gums, and her tongue looks like 10-g rit sandpaper. A simple string of
pearls adorns her neck.
The magazine’s inside cover offers an explanation, if one w ere needed. A
full- page “advertisement” for Mad declares “BEWARE OF IMITATIONS!” and places
the same cover side by side with that of the May 18, 1953, issue of Life maga-
zine (figure 10.2). The Life cover features an attractive young woman; the ac-
companying text identifies her as a student of opera from Indiana. A caption
below the two images warns of imitations, of “filthy unAmerican swipes of
Mad magazine,” the joke, of course, being that it is Wolverton who is parody-
ing the Life cover. Below that caption, the magazine offers a test for determin-
ing which is genuine: roll up both magazines and smoke them. Mad will only
“set your head on fire”; Life will blow your head off.
It would be reasonable to read t hese instructions as offhand references to
an emerging drug counterculture. (Howard Becker published his “Becoming
a Marihuana User” in November 1953; the issue also coincides roughly with
the rise of the Beats.) Yet given the age and disposition of Mad’s artists and
editors, it is just as likely a reference to a joke-s hop exploding cigar.1 Regard-
less of its inspiration, the gag as a whole could easily be dismissed as juve-
nile satire, an offhand gibe at popu lar journalism and a misogynistic jab at
postwar female empowerment. But the juvenilia of the joke, and of Mad and
other “off- color” comic books of the 1940s and 1950s, also expresses an objec-
tion to the breezy per for mance of confidence, the exuberant cele bration of
the power of possibility in the postwar, easy- credit economy represented by
the opera student’s sunny smile.
Mad’s response to Life follows a logic that extends from the central place of
abjection in war time cultural and social life— less than a de cade after World
War II and now framed by a very new Cold War—w hich entailed the force-
ful production of bound aries between a sovereign and just self (as patriot)
and an execrable and loathsome Other/enemy, a threat to that self and to the
society within which it operated. This abjecting operated not only at the level
of repre sen ta tion during the war, through grotesquely offensive propaganda
aimed at Axis enemies2 but also and more profoundly in constant reminders
of the gruesome and bloody deaths that w ere the inevitable result of mecha-
nized combat. This carnage became even more profoundly pres ent with the
firebombing of Dresden and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, ostensibly defensive maneuvers that produced slaughter on an
entirely new scale. So, if Life’s sunny forward look was an act of repression,
Mad’s response, and t hose of dozens of other horror, crime, and romance im-
prints of the fifties, w ere refusals of that repression— not unlike those by Otto
EC Comics and the Vernacular Abject 219
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figure 10.2 Inside cover of the May 1954 issue of Mad magazine.
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Dix or George Grosz following the nightmare of World War I. Dix and Grosz
performed their outrage through graphic depictions of the abjected bodies of
mutilated veterans trolling through the Weimar demimonde, often linking
sex and death in a single image.3 Like Dix or Grosz, the artists who produced
Mad and Cold War pulp comics expressed discomfort with the resumption of
an unexamined “normal” life by depicting h uman bodies generally, but par-
ticularly women’s bodies, as sites of both erotic fascination and corporeal dis-
comfort and disgust.
Yet where Dix and Grosz had plumbed the Weimar underworld for the ab-
ject, comic- book artists in the Cold War era located abjection in everyday life,
as the dark side of normal, middle- class, and middle- American whiteness, in
the white body generally, and often in women’s bodies. An idealized femi-
ninity was integral to the Cold War “politics of containment,” a fantasy of a
well- ordered, rational, and harmonious society as a bulwark against Commu-
nist subversion. Comic- book artists and writers, an almost exclusively male
group, responded to that repressive fantasy through vernacular images of the
abject, and often by abjecting w omen’s bodies in par tic u lar.4 That graphic
misogyny, whether intentional or not, represents an explicit per for mance,
a graphic correlate to the implicit vio lence of the Cold War’s containment
through gender. Where properly gendered bodies w ere expected to perform
a happy normativity, the anxious and the abject revealed (and sometimes rev-
eled in) the costs of failing to do so.
As Anne McClintock has noted, abjection “hovers on the threshold of the
body and the body politic,” and in a society or ga nized at least in part through
the operations of biopower—t he operation of state power through the regula-
tion of the relationship between body and self—p arsing the relation between
the two becomes very impor tant.5 In this instance, comic artists’ juvenile
abreaction when faced with an ideal femininity— creating grotesque and ex-
cessive parodies of the a ctual corporeality of women’s bodies— mobilizes ab-
jection as a profoundly ambivalent objection. That parody is si mul ta neously
misogynist in its reaction to the fluid productions of a ctual bodies and po-
liti cally resistant when invoking that reaction as a protest against repressive
normativity. Following Judith Butler (in a very diff er ent context), it becomes
pos si ble to understand abjection, usually considered an operation impor tant
in the regulation of gendered normativity, as a key site for calling into ques-
tion that normativity, and the larger social, cultural, and po liti cal forces that
inform it.6 Producing and regulating legible gender difference was a central
Cold War domestic proje ct, as much championed by the liberal left as by the
center and right. The vernacular abject refusal of liberal efforts to regulate
EC Comics and the Vernacular Abject 221
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social relations through gender— however juvenile—is a site for beginning a
counter- history of popu lar understandings of Cold War conformism as pol iti-
cally conservative.
In Cold War neo- Freudianism— a simplification of psychoanalytic the-
ory that imagined deploying Freud in day- to- day interactions between lay
individuals—a common thread was the restoration of a femininity that had
been deformed by the absence of male domestic authority during World War II.
This idea was espoused by child-r earing guru Benjamin Spock and deployed
in the domesticated cultural anthropology of Margaret Mead and in pseudo-
scientific antifeminist jeremiads by the likes of Philip Wylie. The inherent
misogyny of proje cts to restore that proper femininity fell most heavil y on
women’s bodies in the form of a simultaneous cele bration and circumscrip-
tion of femininity, the body compressed by girdles and accentuated by poodle
skirts and angora sweaters. Pulp grotesques of that ideal feminine body, and
larger vernacular graphic critiques of the regulation of corporeal and affec-
tive existence in the Cold War, gave form and shape to the viol ence under-
lying that proj ect. Postwar pulp comics in general, and Mad in par tic u lar,
expressed an adolescent discomfort and dis- ease with bodies and affects, and
often mobilized w omen’s bodies to express that discomfort. That abject ob-
jection found its material base through that which had been abjected in the
pro cess of regulation: in nonnormative bodies and attitudes that w ere criti-
cized, undermined, and cast aside in the ser vice of an ideal domestic body
politic. Pulp vernacular media w ere considered at best lowbrow, infantile,
and disposable; at worst, they were impediments to the proper development
of youth and to the embrace of mature social relations in adults. This chap-
ter considers w hether the juvenilia of Mad and of postwar romance, crime,
and horror comics w ere a form of graphic dissent, of res is tance to arguments
in popu lar Cold War psy chol ogy, sociology, and developmental theory about
how to produce a healthy body politic through the regulation of individual
bodies and affects.
It is worthwhile to consider what it means to call comics generally, or Mad
in par tic u lar, “juvenile.” An accounting of comic- book readership in the early
1940s noted that “95 percent of children aged eight to eleven and 84 percent
of children 12 to seventeen read comics, while 35 percent of adults aged
eigh teen to thirty did the same.”7 At first blush, the proportionately higher
number of child readers seems to confirm the perception that comic books
represent a childish form of entertainment. Yet more than a third of midcen-
tury adult Americans also read comics and found some meaning, and some
plea sure, in the pathos of juvenilia; in its uneasy relationship to sex, death,
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and the body (the fixations of adolescent experience); and in their material
production: blood, semen, mucus, putrescence, and so on—t he touchstones
of abjection.
The horrors of World War II—w artime deprivation, the Holocaust, the
siege of Stal in grad, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and fin ally the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—f ormed a backdrop to the
childhoods of the men and w omen (though primarily men) who produced
and consumed t hese comics. This was especially true for veterans who had
to reintegrate into a peacetime society whose burgeoning economy resulted
from that conflict. Following the war, applied psy chol ogy and sociology flour-
ished in the United States, much of it taking shape in response to the trauma
of war time experience, both in b attle and at home.8 That reaction was in-
flected by encounters with totalitarianism and authoritarianism during the
war and in the growing Cold War, most famously articulated in Theodor
Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of To-
talitarianism, but also promulgated in academic and popu lar arguments for
harmonizing and adjusting— two key terms from the period— the individual’s
relationship to social and institutional life.9 Pulp comics, which often linked
horror, humor, and discomfort to abject bodies, were called out in some psy-
chological lite r a ture of the era, not just as potential corruptors of youth, but
as impediments to the harmonization proj ect.
By 1954, these criticisms led to hearings in the US Senate, spurring the
comics industry to promulgate the Comics Code, which regulated the con-
tent and images of comics in much the same way the Production Code had
done for movies earlier in the century.10 Of its many stipulations, includ-
ing banning the words “horror” and “terror” in titles, the code informed its
adherents that all “scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome
crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.”11 In es-
sence, it demanded the abjection of the abject—t he casting off from the body
politic those ele ments that threatened its stability and coherence. (In part
for this reason, EC Comics publisher William Gaines converted Mad, a comic
book created in 1952, to magazine format in 1955. As a magazine rather than
a comic book, it was not subject to the Comics Code.)12
Calls for censorship and the industry’s response of self- censorship were
based on a neo- Freudian fantasy of the vulnerability of youth as fragile per-
sons in formation, only recently beginning to become gendered subjects fol-
lowing their infantile separation from the mother, the very pro cess of ab-
jection. C hildren in need of protection from vernacular lite r a ture stood in
for greater anxi eties around the regulation of identity, linking the individual
EC Comics and the Vernacular Abject 223
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body to the body politic through the repression of exposure to the abject.13
Pulp images became objects of censure, potential disruptors of a harmony
and adjustment based in social regulation. As Sara Ahmed notes in The Cul-
tural Politics of Emotion (2004), “When thinking about how bodies become
objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations. . . .
The relation between disgust and power is evident when we consider the
spatiality of disgust . . . disgust at ‘that which is below’ functions to maintain
the power relations between above and below, through which ‘aboveness’ and
‘belowness’ become properties of par tic u lar bodies, objects, and spaces.”14
In the psychoanalytic telling of harmonization, just as the individual child
achieved subject status by abjecting bodily products associated with an in-
timate relation to the m other (and to “belowness”), so the body politic had
to repress abjected material to establish proper relations between itself and
its component parts. The underl ying tensions that informed such arguments
about harmonizing postwar American society through the individual play out
in Wolverton’s reworking of the Life magazine cover. The gentle smile of a
midwestern art student becomes the tongue- wagging leer of the “Beautiful
Girl of the Month,” a figure who seems to be happily putrefying before the
reader’s eyes. The subhead reveals that she “Reads Mad,” hinting that being
a Mad reader is somehow the perverse complement to being a “Coed Opera
Student from Indiana.” Both w omen seem content with their lot in life, even
though one appears to be a living corpse. Or, for the sake of argument here,
Wolverton’s cover girl is happier living openly as a corpse.
This morbid glee is repeated in a section that Wolverton also drew in
the same issue, a series of portraits of typical Mad readers (figure 10.3). The
opening caption of the section announces “[H ere] are views of what we, the
editors of Mad, believe to be a cross- section of the people who read Mad! . . .
[W]hile you wander through the following pages, smirking, guffawing, and
retching at what you see . . . pause a moment! The face you’re retching at
might be your own!” Each of the six portraits is monstrous in its own way.
All suggest horrible deformity, not unlike the kind commonly i magined in
vernacular horror films of the time as resulting from exposure to atomic
radiation. Some have extra eyes, ears, and limbs; holes where none should
be; and odd unexplained glands. All of them—i ncluding “The Young Mad
Reader” (an ax murderer), “The Student Mad Reader” (a straight- A college
student made a drooling idiot by reading Mad), “The Eld erly Mad Reader”
(who reclaims his libido after reading Mad), and “The Female Reader” (un-
able to attract boys u ntil she subscribes to Mad)— appear approximately
human . . . e xcept for “The Critical Mad Reader,” a demon standing like
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figure 10.3 Top left, the typical Mad reader, according to artist Basil
Wolverton; top right, the critical Mad reader; middle and bottom,
other Mad readers.
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Shiva on the back of a bawling infant, desperately shredding the child’s
copy of Mad. This final Mad reader is monstrous and perverse. A poke at
the alarmist reactions to comic books in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he
satirizes the censorious reader, who, attempting to protect innocent youth,
actually crushes them, converting the loving maternal embrace into the sup-
pression of f ree will.
For Julia Kristeva, “The abject is related to perversion.” It gives shape and
substance to the very thing it denies, and it is perverse “ because it neither
gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside,
misleads, corrupts; uses them . . . the better to deny them.”15 Yet what Mad
attempted in its self-p arody was not equivalent to the individual act of abjec-
tion that Kristeva describes. Beyond that singular taunt to the critical reader,
the portrait gallery as a w hole signals the magazine’s relationship to its audi-
ence, as do its letters pages and editorial comments, which often mock the
magazine itself. The gallery celebrates its readers as malcontents and out-
siders, as defective—if not prior to reading Mad, then certainly a fter. That
the magazine, via Wolverton, chose to celebrate its readers (and itself) as
monstrous points to its efforts to mobilize a shared abjection in res is tance to
conformist norms. This anticipates sociologist Paul Goodman’s bitter 1956
complaint (ventriloquizing an imagined disaffected youth) that “a man is a
fool to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator for his wife, that the
movies, TV, and the Book- of- the- Month Club are beneath contempt, but the
Luce publications make you sick to the stomach.”16
One of the premier Luce publications was, of course, Life magazine, and
nausea was a perfectly (un)reasonable response to its place in the ongoing
operations of social abjection and the regulation of the body politic. The
norms described by Goodman signal an exclusionary ethos in and of them-
selves, an effort to name that which properly marks the social subject. To call
your flagship publications Time and Life is nothing less than to lay claim to
the absolute center, the interior of American cultural identity. To reject those
publications, to be physically revolted by them, was in turn to claim in that
social abjection a self that embraced, through its nausea, being of the abject.
Glossing Sianne Ngai’s discussion of the operations of disgust, Anne Tyler
notes that if we accept abjection as “symptomatic of wider social relations of
power, we can begin to ascertain why disgust might be attributed to par tic u-
lar bodies. Disgust is po liti cal.”17 That disgust is the collective rejection of the
aberrant, the abjecting of difference. At the same time, though, the “paradox
of subjectivation,” Butler argues, “is precisely that the subject who would re-
sist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms.”18 One can,
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