EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest - A Lecture By Qiana Whitted
Please join the Transnational Comics Studies Workshop for our second event. All are welcome!
Professor Qiana Whitted (University of South Carolina)
Monday, February 25th | Angell 3154
2:00PM Refreshments | 2:30-3:30PM Panel Presentation & Discussion
“How to Read an EC Magazine"
Using material from her forthcoming book on EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, Qiana Whitted will discuss the 1950s comic book publisher's attempt to establish clear boundaries between “entertaining” and “educational” reading practices that were mindful of the public’s anxieties over how comic books could influence young readers. Essential to this effort was an editorial emphasis on how narrative captions, dialogue, and other words acted as signposts of meaning. If comics were indeed as hazardous as critics such as Sterling North, Dr. Frederic Wertham, and Senator Estes Kefauver feared, the social-protest comics might prove that EC’s writers could contain those dangers and redirect the medium’s unstable visual forces at will. Ultimately, the creative aims, execution, and impact of these stories functioned not only as an extension of the EC tradition but also as an example of the comic-book industry’s early attempts to use the medium and its generic conventions to combat racism and other social ills.
Qiana Whitted is Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her current research examines representations of race, history, and genre in comic books and graphic novels. She is editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and chair of the International Comic Arts Forum. Her forthcoming book, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, will be published by Rutgers University Press in March 2019.
Using material from her forthcoming book on EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, Qiana Whitted will discuss the 1950s comic book publisher's attempt to establish clear boundaries between “entertaining” and “educational” reading practices that were mindful of the public’s anxieties over how comic books could influence young readers. Essential to this effort was an editorial emphasis on how narrative captions, dialogue, and other words acted as signposts of meaning. If comics were indeed as hazardous as critics such as Sterling North, Dr. Frederic Wertham, and Senator Estes Kefauver feared, the social-protest comics might prove that EC’s writers could contain those dangers and redirect the medium’s unstable visual forces at will. Ultimately, the creative aims, execution, and impact of these stories functioned not only as an extension of the EC tradition but also as an example of the comic-book industry’s early attempts to use the medium and its generic conventions to combat racism and other social ills.
Qiana Whitted is Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her current research examines representations of race, history, and genre in comic books and graphic novels. She is editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and chair of the International Comic Arts Forum. Her forthcoming book, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, will be published by Rutgers University Press in March 2019.
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