Know Thy History: Tales From The Crypt

Greetings, boils and ghouls! Imagine you lived in a day with no iPads, no smartphones, and no internet. Chilling, isn’t it? But dig back further. Imagine a day where not everyone had a television… and those who did had only three channels! Positively ghastly! How would a young man or woman like you spend the day? I’d imagine that most days would be … deadly boring.

But for some people, there were comic books. Bright four-color magazines stacked at your local five-and-dime. Surely, this was harmless fun! Perhaps you’d read about a man zooming about the clouds! Or stories of little children getting into troublesome shenanigans! Maybe there was a story about an elderly duck who goes on globe-trotting adventures! There was a lot of fun in comics. Little do you know that your innocence is about to be be murdered.

You find another comic. One whose cover is full of lurid imagery and a bold, drippy title. You open the book. Before you know it, you’re introduced to a dark, demented world of wickedness and gore. Yur mind becomes filled with violent and seductive thoughts. Wicked, murderous thoughts flow through your veins. Oh, and what is that ad for in one of those paiges? Is that an air rifle? It would be a bloody shame if you decided to take things too far….

That’s the line of thought that pervaded the Seduction of the Innocent, Fredric Wertham’s infamous book critiquing the gruesome images in several crime/horror titles, especially those published by EC Comics. Among those titles was one whose reputation would eventually outlast the Comics Code: a titled called Tales From The Crypt.