“It was an era of tea rooms and card readings, horoscopes and spells. And, under it all, a seething political revolution in the making.” – Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces
INTRODUCTION
The following is a selection from an essay I wrote while a member of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, a group of writers and others who shared their interest in H.P. Lovecraft by way of an Amateur Press Association. The group was (and still is) moderated by noted Lovecraft scholar, S.T. Joshi. It was a very fulfilling experience and I had the great fortune of Joshi selecting one of my essays (“Lovecraft and the Polar Myth”) for inclusion in his The Lovecraft Annual (2009).
While this essay focuses on Lovecraft in the comics, it is at its heart a short history of underground comics, and in particular, Last Gasp’s SKULL COMICS, an underground title that provides an excellent example of what writers and artists could do with horror comics if left to their own devices.
This is the first in a series of posts that discusses the history of SKULL COMICS, H.P. Lovecraft, and horror comics in general.
LOVECRAFT’S LAST GASP
By the late 1960s, the fabric of mainstream society had been stretched thin by the hippie counterculture on the one hand and liberal activists on the other. The line between them, however, was easily blurred, and their ostensibly divergent paths often crossed, usually on the grounds of the universities that were the Petri dishes of the youth culture of the times. The pot-smoking, music-loving, sprout-munching land of the hippy commune and “crash pad” was also often the breeding ground for the more extreme in revolutionary expression, and from seeds sown from the “flower power” way of life sprang the infamous Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Yippies, Black Panthers and the like, supported by such radical figureheads as Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Abbie Hoffman. It became increasingly evident that even the Love Generation had its own black sheep of the family.
The counterculture itself assumed many of the aspects of conventional, contemporary life, albeit with an LSD-induced twist which added the necessary measure of “counter” to the culture. In a milieu that was part Land of Oz, part Alice’s Wonderland, the hippies ate organic food instead of the processed food found in grocery stores, drank carrot juice instead of the hormone-laden stew sold for milk, and dressed in clothing more befitting of a century before -- or even earlier -- as if one were a citizen in good standing of fabled, sunken Atlantis.
Eventually, as is the fate of all quasi- and pseudo-Utopias, the bitter breeze of reality began to dissipate the purple haze surrounding the hippie movement.
By the early 1970s, a few of the various industries of the subculture were still hanging on, and even going strong; in particular politics and publishing. Indeed, the profitable business of underground independent publishing was not lost on a number of industrious people. Newspapers like The San Francisco Oracle, The Los Angeles Free Press (1), The Staff, and The Berkeley Barb, all had varying degrees of longevity on the corner news racks of the day. Even comic books, known as “comix” in their counterculture guise, enjoyed a healthy circulation, and were read among both hippies and straights alike.
Irreverent, politically-charged, and teeming with sex and drugs, characters found in the "undergrounds", from R. Crumb's Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont, to Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak brothers, to S. Clay Wilson's Checkered Demon, were more likely to say "F*#k You" than "Thank You", albeit in a perversely cynical and satirical way. To anyone remotely possessed with a sense of humor, one couldn't help but to at least snicker at some of the wry pot shots that were taken at the institution of The Great Society in the pages of the undergrounds.
This attitude was further fueled by the copious use of the most populare mind-melting drug in town, known in short as LSD, by many of the creators of underground comix, most notably by the most famous of underground comix artists, Robert “R.” Crumb:
The [LSD] experience itself is
indescribable, but afterward you no longer feel a member of this accepted
version of reality. Basically, you’re coming from another planet. You’re using
the old language to communicate with people, but you’re definitely seeing
things as if you’re coming from somewhere else. Going to work after a night of
LSD was like coming from Mars back down to Earth, it was hard to do. People would
stare at me and say, ‘Crumb, what’s the matter with you? What’s wrong? What’s
wrong?’ I’d say, ‘Nothing, oh, nothing.’ ‘You look funny. What happened?’ So,
functioning in normal society became very strange: going to work, dealing with
things that people were taking very seriously, which to you were obviously just
a bunch of silly games that didn’t mean anything.
Ironically, many of the creators of underground comix were proud to admit they cut their artistic teeth on the mainstream comic books of the late 1940s and 1950s, and even before, literally drawing upon the inspiration of the masters that came before them. Names such as Winsor McCay, Will Eisner, Lou Fine, and Basil Wolverton are often mentioned as inspiration. A good many of them were also impressed by the wave of horror comics that deluged the "Hey Kids! Comics!" spinner racks of the day. Titles like Beware! Terror Tales, Tomb of Terror, Ghostly Weird Stories, Horrific, and Weird Terror, all promised many a blood-and-gore drenched page to the reader, and especially the budding comic artist.
But the greatest influence on this group of rogue draftsmen
was a group of publications that were the brainchild of a comic book genius by
the name of William “Bill” Gaines. His flagship title which almost everyone
mentions had changed their lives was called Mad.
Hosted by a dorky mascot, one Alfred E. Neuman, Mad is now generally regarded as the classic series in the history
of illustrated humor. And if that wasn't enough, Gaines also launched yet
another classic series of comic books under the E.C. (Entertaining Comics!)
logo, which are recognized by nearly everyone as the most famous line of
horror, crime and science fiction titles in the history of comics. They were so
popular in fact, that they were virtually singled out by a 50’s campaign against horror and crime comics. This
modern-day Inquisition was headed by the Joe McCarthy of the comic books,
Frederic Wertham, M.D., an erudite, self-appointed vocal champion of decency
whose book Seduction of the Innocent
was read by thousands of concerned but gullible parents. This lead to the
infamous Kefauver Senate Subcommittee Hearings where horror and crime comics were
literally put on the stand and alleged as major contributors to the burgeoning salacious
behavior and delinquency of American Youth. It's hard to imagine in the world
of today, but this was pretty serious stuff back in the 50’s.
Speaking on censorship right in the pages of one of his own
comic magazines (Tales From the Crypt #45, Jan/Feb 1955), Bill Gaines lamented:
Comics are under fire … due to the
efforts of various “do-gooders” and “do-gooder” groups, a large segment of the
public is being led to believe that certain comic magazines cause juvenile
delinquency, warp the minds of America
In an essay from the pages of a current day E.C. fan magazine, Horror From the Crypt of Fear, author “The Old Witek” offers a very astute observation that describes both the reason why kids loved E.C.’s and why opponents abhorred them:
When E.C.’s were new they were very
edgy, almost underground, and potentially dangerous, in ways we didn’t fully
understand them. Reading them was an illicit pleasure. Before Playboy and the sexual revolution made
T&A as common as A&P, E.C. managed to be a hot girlie magazine for
kiddies, right under the inquisitors like the Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of
Decency.
So, it can be safely said that comix assimilated both the irreverent humor of Mad and the dark, sardonic wit found in titles such as Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, incorporating them into the most extreme examples of each. In some ways, comix were the next logical step, albeit one drenched in Boone's Farm and pot smoke.
Spain Rodriguez was one of a number of underground
cartoonists who literally drew their inspiration from the old E.C. and other
censored and blacklisted 50’s horror comics, and shared an acute understanding
that these “funny books” held the key to the type of forbidden fruit that would
grow and flourish in the fecund soil of the underground comix garden:
I’d always had this thing and had a
small core of friends who somehow believed these comics would come back and
people would have dreams and walk into a drugstore and they’d find some E.C.
comic they’d never seen before … I mean, I had these dreams, but I knew other
guys who had these dreams. E.C. comics really touched people deeply, and me,
too. With Marvel [the comic book publisher that gave the world such enduring
super-heroes as Spider Man and Fantastic Four], at some point, the psychedelic
pop came back, and you knew that underground comics were just down the line and
had to happen.
The thing about the stuff you read in E.C.
comics was that it was incredible … and somehow you just knew everything else
you got in the media was bullshit, you just knew that even these people who
were conformists weren’t really that way, they weren’t really these nice
people. They were basically as rotten as everybody else, but they somehow put
on the “goody-goody” façade. Spain
The artist known as Jaxon is responsible for what is
probably the most recognized image of the H.P. Lovecraft material that
eventually found itself in the pages of underground comix, his cover of Skull Comics #4 depicting the tale, “The
Hound”:
I was born in 1941 and wasn’t really
aware of E.C. comics in my “formative years”. I don’t think our town drugstore
carried them. Only after I finished college, moved to Austin Shelton
The king-pin behind the E.C. influence
in underground comix of course, was Gary Arlington. His San Francisco Comic
Book Store and his obsession with E.C. horror comics gave birth to Skull (his title) and the energy was
carried over to Slow Death, our stab
at sci-fi.
We stuck close to the E.C. format,
creating characters like the Crypt-Keeper to introduce our strips. [Richard]
Corben and [Dave] Sheridan were into the E.C. trip, as was Spain [Rodriguez] –
I think we were all aware that we had the liberty to expand on E.C. in terms of
sex, violence and most of the other aspects that were taboo back in the ‘50s.
Thus we tended to see just how far we could go without getting stepped on. The
artists that took this attitude with Disney’s characters soon found out …
Charles Dallas, another underground comix artist who
uniquely adapted Lovecraft’s poem, “To A Dreamer”, in the pages of Skull comics, was also influenced by the
E.C. line:
I was born in 1951 and was thereby
spared a childhood traumatized by E.C. Comics. I do have vague recollections of
reading Mad comics, and later, Mad magazine. Mad performed a valuable service by presenting a point of view
other than that of the schools, advertising, and government, and that was a
rarity in the ‘50s. Mad and the other
E.C. titles gave voice to a lot of truths that may have otherwise gone
unspoken.
My first real exposure to E.C. horror
and science fiction was courtesy of Gary Arlington of the San Francisco Comic
Book Company. Gary
It is not surprising, then, that those underground artists
who discovered elements of horror and the supernatural in the comic books of
their youth as well as later in life would express their counterculture ideas
by utilizing a newer, mutated form infused with satirical and sociological
horror. It is also not surprising that, based upon the various sources of their
material they would sooner or later come around to Lovecraft.
And, it is exactly in this underground comix milieu that we
again find the name of H.P. Lovecraft, another seemingly incongruous conjoining
of pop culture and genre literature that for all intents and purposes should
have been relegated to the musty paperbacks with lurid covers found only in midway
flea markets and seedy used bookstores. On the contrary, H. P. Lovecraft’s work
found new, enthusiastic readership in the 60’s and 70’s (Ballantine’s Adult
Fantasy Series edited by Lin Carter, and a series of Lancer paperback
reprints), and even, as we shall soon see, extended to the world of head shops
and hippie comix!
Notes
(1) The Los Angeles
(2) The Lovecraft adaptations that appeared in Marvel Comics
Group publications will be discussed in a later installment of “Fear In Four
Colors: H. P. Lovecraft in the Comics”.
Works Cited or Consulted
Beauchamp, Monte, ed. Blab #1 (reprint edition). Princeton ,
WI
Estren, Mark James. A History of Underground Comics. San Francisco , CA
Goldwater, John L. Americana In Four Colors: Twenty Years of Self-Regulation by the Comics
Magazine Industry. New York , NY : Comics Magazine Association of America
Groth, Gary and Fiore, Robert, ed. The New Comics. New
York , NY : Berkley
Leach, Bill, ed. Horror
From the Crypt of Fear #10. Oakley ,
CA
Sennitt, Stephen. Ghastly
Terror: The Horrible Story of the Horror Comics. Manchester , UK
Skinn, Dez. Comix:
The Underground Revolution. London ,
UK
von Bernewitz, Fred, and Geissman, Grant, ed. Tales of Terror: A Compendium of All the
Incredible old EC Comics. Timonium MD, and Lake City WA
NEXT: SKULL COMIX!
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