The Two-Fisted Liberal Idealism of E.C's Shock Suspenstories
One of the nice things about receiving a Bipolar/ADHD/Autism (we call that the Triple Crown, baby!) diagnosis deep into middle age is that you begin to understand why you do the things that you do.
One of the strange gifts of ADHD is a tendency towards hyper-focus. That is when you become obsessed with something to the point that it’s hard to focus on anything else.
Hyper-focus has allowed me to write a 500-page book about “Weird Al” Yankovic and a 700-page book about the history of movies about the film industry. It’s also how I was able to furtively watch and write about over forty episodes of Saturday Night Live over a period of about two months.
The downside to hyper-focus is that you can be so focused on your obsession that you let other things slide. For example, I was so fixated on writing up as much Saturday Night Live as possible that I did not notice when the crowd-funding campaign for my Saturday Night Live book ended with an extremely disappointing final total.
I understand better now why I am so compulsive and prone to extremes. It’s not that I’m defective. My brain is just wired differently.
When you have ADHD, it can be very hard to focus in a world overflowing with mindless distractions, all competing angrily for your scattered attention. I know that if I really want to finish one of the many, many ambitious projects/books that I am perpetually working on, I need to hyper-focus and not give myself excuses to leave things undone.
I love this website. I actually spend a fair amount of time here, but it is, on some level, a literary graveyard of ideas that I fell absolutely in love with and then forgot about for no good reason at all beyond the fact that my AuDHD makes my life chaotic.
This illustration from Felipe expresses how I feel most of the time.
I need to get back to writing down everything that I need to do on a pad of paper on my Patch Adams clipboard and then crossing it off when I finish. It is very easy for me to get confused and overwhelmed, so it’s good to be able to look at the information on a piece of paper so that you know what you’re supposed to do and when.
I have a few areas of hyper-focus. I’m binging a true crime podcast called Murderish, which isn’t great but is good enough for me to keep going. I’m also finishing The Fractured Mirror, getting back to work on my ambitious Saturday Night Live newsletter and books, and working on a Five Nights at Freddy’s project with my son. Finally, I have been immersing myself in the world of Tales From the Crypt.
I became a huge fan of the Tales From the Crypt television show as a child because it perfectly suited my morbid sensibility and also had naked boobs in it. I’ve remained a huge fan of the show as an adult. I dig at least three movies based on Tales From the Crypt (1972’s Tales From the Crypt, 1973’s The Vault of Horror, and 1994's Demon Knight). I even enjoy the kiddie cartoon Tales From the Crypt-Keeper, in part because its source material is often early 1950s E.C. Comics
But it took me forty-six years to get around to actually reading the comic books that started it all.
I’m currently on my sixth E.C. comic book collection. I’ve just gotten started. Tales From the Crypt was essentially the same as its two sister titles, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear.
The three comic books had more or less identical content. It felt like they randomly chose which story would appear in which comic book. They employed the same murderer’s row of comic book greats.
I noticed that a number of Tales From the Crypt episodes were inspired by Shock Suspenstories. The cult comic book is analogous to E.C.’s Big Three but has a personality all its own.
In comic book and television form, Tales From the Crypt (and, by extension, The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror) is a darkly funny morality tale in which the sinful are punished for their sins. However, there’s also an element of nihilism to the whole sordid affair.
Part of what sets Shock Suspenstories apart from its more ghoulish and gothic E.C. contemporaries is a two-fisted idealism that recalls the principled liberalism of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone.
Shock Suspenstories was unafraid to tackle explosive and controversial issues. For twelve of its eighteen issues, the stories were written exclusively by Mad legends William Gaines and Al Feldstein.
Gaines and Feldstein were Jewish outsiders who used the comic book format for overt social commentary as well as horror.
Shock Suspenstories depicts a country overflowing with conflict, discrimination, racism, anti-Semitism, misanthropy, and all-around hatred. It was the antithesis of how America saw itself in the 1950s.
In The Patriots, for example, a gaggle of Commie-hating, self-styled patriots are so enraged by a man at a parade showing insufficient deference to the flag that they beat him to death with their fists, only to learn that the reason he smiles and does not doff his cap is because much of his face was blown off fighting in World War II.
As someone who grew up on Jack Davis’ artwork in Mad and elsewhere, it’s fascinating seeing his signature style, which I associate with lighthearted, comic fare, in a blisteringly intense evisceration of the kind of phony patriotism that is, unfortunately, always popular.
Gaines and Feldstein attacked a subject close to them—anti-Semitism—in Hate. It’s one of a number of stories written in the second person so that it feels like Feldstein and Gaines are yelling at you to stop being such a horrible, bigoted monster.
In Hate, a proud anti-Semite terrorizes and helps kill a Jewish family that has moved into his neighborhood, only to discover from his mother that he was adopted and his parents were Jewish.
At that point, he becomes the recipient of all of the anti-Semitic hatred that he had previously gleefully participated in.
Shock Suspenstories covered racism in all of its ugly, dispiriting forms. In “Under Cover,” a busty sexpot is whipped to death by the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan for consorting with African-Americans, a development an undercover journalist cannot prevent.
In case there’s any ambiguity as to what the comic book is trying to say, “Under Cover” ends with the KKK taking comfort in knowing that their secrets are safe after they kill the meddling journalist, followed by the urgent warning, “Yes…Safe! Safe Behind Their Masks of Prejudice, These Hooded Peddlers of Racial, Religious, and Political Hatred Operate Today! Mind You, They Are Shrewd and Ruthless Men Such As Those in Our Story! How Long Can We Stay ‘Cool’ and Indifferent To This Threat To Our Democratic Way of Life? It Is Time To Unveil These Usurpers of Our Constitutionally Guaranteed Freedoms!”
The cover of the issue with “Under Cover” is almost impossibly lurid. It’s easy to see how moralistic busybodies professing to care about the innocence of our precious children would want to shut the whole operation down.
Shock Suspenstories was ultimately too intense and principled for its own good. Critics of E.C. fixated on gore, sex, and violence and ignored the ways in which Gaines and Feldstein were trying to make our country live up to the principles it was founded upon.
I can’t wait to read more Shock Suspenstories. It’s another reason why I would love another Tales from the Crypt TV series. There are so many stories that have not been adapted in any other form that would be perfect for television.
I wouldn’t even need the Crypt-Keeper. Shock Suspenstories doesn’t have The Crypt-Keeper or his rivals, The Old Witch and The Vault Keeper, but it’s riveting nonetheless.
More Tales From the Crypt in any form would be very good, particularly if they used more tales from Shock Suspenstories. Over seventy years on, there’s still a lot of life left in this American original.
Stories are good, but suspenstories are great.
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AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here