Posted by Franz Potter on April 18, 2009 in Dr Franz Potter, Guest Blog tagged with
For several years now I have incorporated chapbooks or bluebooks into my courses on Gothic Fiction. These short tales of terror have been extraordinarily popular with my students, not just for their brevity and accessibility, but also for the garish illustrations which often accompany them, and quite frankly, their horror. It is not that students don’t enjoy reading full length Gothic novels…. Lewis’s The Monk is a perennial favourite as is Radcliffe’s The Italian….but Gothic chapbooks seem to capture their imaginations if not their attention. The reason for this is really quite straightforward …they see Gothic chapbooks as simply old horror comic books. Seriously?
Gothic chapbooks are an integral though often marginalized feature of the Gothic genre. The chapbook in part satisfied the demand for Gothic fiction which followed the popularity of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. The success of these short 36 to 72 page productions was enormous. They were enjoyed by thousands of readers of all classes, eager to read tales of terror in a straightforward and unsophisticated form. After all, Gothic novels were often quite lengthy, some upwards of 5 volumes. These tales had the additional benefit of being inexpensive—sixpence or a shilling—or a mere penny a night from the local circulating library which held numerous sensational offerings.
I share my students’ fascination with these literary mushrooms of the Gothic novel and have spent years researching them. I love their disreputable reputation, their scarcity and their explicit sensationalism and melodramatic illustrations. Their double-barreled titles like Spectre Chief; or The Blood-Stained Banner, Father Innocent, Abbot of Capuchins; or, The Crimes of the Cloisters, The Secret Tribunal; or, The Court of Wincelaus and Tomb of Aurora; or, The Mysterious Summon were designed to attract not only the notice of readers, but to advertise the horrific content of their wares and shocking it was. Where some Gothic novelists like Ann Radcliffe and her imitators moderated their use of terror, chapbook authors were often horror-mongers. They filled their pages with continual scenes of horror, or as Fred Frank pointed out, “Horror, sensibility, shadowy terror, and the raucous equipment of the haunted castle were all crammed into the compressed Gothic, then thrust all at once upon that type of reader who had neither the time nor the taste for a leisurely Gothic experience.” There is an intensity in Gothic chapbooks, one wanders about dark corridors at a breathless pace only to discover you are walled in.
Like my students it is also the publisher’s use of graphics that I find fascinating. The illustrations demonstrate the reader’s predilection for shocking and horrible scenes. Some illustrations were pullouts garishly colored with daubs of red, yellow and blue paint. One particular graphic found in an adaption of Lewis’s The Monk now titled The Bleeding Nun of the Castle of Lindendorff; or, The History of Raymond and Agnes is an elaborate display of the most horrifying scenes in the chapbook and offers readers a visual guide to important points of the plot. Comprised of four panels each representing a scene from the chapbook, the pullout includes the ‘Death of Baptiste.’, ‘Raymond & Agnes discovered by the Aunt.’, ‘The Bleeding Nun appears to Raymond.’ and ‘Agnes with her Child in the Dungeon.’ with the Bleeding Nun herself appearing in the center holding a taper and a knife.
For many students this type of illustration establishes a clear link between the ‘hasty and relentless horrors’ of chapbooks to horror comics of the 1940s and 50s. In 1943 Comic Classics released the first horror comic with their adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde setting into motion a series of comic books which adapted old tales of terror that included Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Stoker’s Dracula. Like the chapbooks some 150 years before, the success of such adaptations spawned many imitators. Comic books with names reminiscent of Gothic chapbooks soon emerged including The Crypt of Terror, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, Chambers of Chills, and Tomb of Terror, which proclaimed “Tales Beyond Belief and Imagination” and offered chilling tales of terror for mere pennies. It was the Golden Age of Comic books and Gothic tales like No Rest for the Dead, The Corpse That Wouldn’t Die!, Dungeon of Doom, The Living Dead and The Horror of the Walking Corpse flooded the marketplace. Opposition to these ‘hasty and relentless horrors’ culminated in America with the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency hearings in 1954 which resulted in the formalization of the Comic Code limiting excessive blood, gore and horror. While restricting the amount of horror (and even the very word), the code did not remove the supernatural from the comics. Indeed, it is clear that tales of terror continue in graphic form today and we see them expanding their presence into the longer graphic novels like V for Vendette, Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. But are Gothic chapbooks really comparable to horror comics? Are graphic novels like Steve Niles & Ben Templesmith’s 30 Days of Night or Kohta Hirano’s Hellsing really very Gothic?Some of my students see a clear link, but I am left wondering how closely related chapbooks and horror comics really are.
Any thoughts?
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What I find fascinating about chapbooks, especially redactions of Radcliffe, is the way in which they elide much of the aesthetics of the sublime. Of course, the emphasis upon plot, together with the premium on shorter narrative, automatically precludes the lengthy descriptions of sublime landscape usually found in Radcliffe. But it seems to me that there’s also an interesting point to be made about the class affiliations of sublimity in these elisions. It’s notoriously difficult to pin down, precisely, the economic classes from which the initial readers of chapbooks came; your book addresses this issue, Franz, as does Toni Wein’s study. There’s nothing to say that these chapbooks were read only by servant-girls and other members of the labouring classes. Still, I can’t help thinking that the lack of the discourse of the sublime in Gothic chapbooks, and a corresponding foregrounding of the lurid and visual, reveals just how bourgeois a discourse sublimity is. The same might be said about the picturesque, I think. These popular chapbooks seem to jettison these aesthetic ‘luxuries’ in the production of cheaper, shorter, more popular texts.
According to Scott McCloud’s ‘dictionary-style definition’, comics consist of ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer’ (‘Understanding Comics’, 9). The Bayeux tapestry, ‘The Tortures of Saint Erasmus’ (c.1460) and Hogarth’s ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ (1731), are all identified by McCloud as early instances of comics; the term simply denotes the medium, and should not be confused with ‘comic books’ or cartoons (though few would make or even allow this distinction). While I’m unfamiliar with the phenomenon of chapbooks, it would seem that the same definition could be applied to the above illustrations from ‘The Bleeding Nun’ – in which case, these chapbooks could be considered as being, not just precursors to horror comics, but as horror comics themselves. But even if the illustrations should form only the crudest of narratives, I do think they can be placed on the same evolutionary scale as contemporary horror comics.
Most, if not all of the horror comics listed above were published by the now notorious EC Comics. As Educational Comics, the company had started off publishing titles such as ‘Picture Stories from the Bible’ – the sort of comic book conservative parents might purchase for their child, that the child would sensibly avoid when given the option. This might explain the initial, commercial failure of the company; but after the death of its founder, Maxwell Gaines, it was son Bill’s transformation of Educational Comics into Entertaining Comics that led to the creative change in the company’s output. Nineteenth-century ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ and the similarly cheap pulp fiction periodicals of the thirties and forties seem likely precedents for Gaines’s horror comics of the late forties and fifties, a commercial success until the Senate’s own scare-mongering threatened to put the company once more out of business.
Though I’ve only seen snippets from a few of these titles, what’s often struck me is their humour. This is, perhaps, unsurprising given that one of Bill Gaines’s other landmark publications was the satiric ‘MAD’ magazine. With several members of MAD’s original ‘Gang of Idiots’ onboard, the horror comics’ black comedy was laced with the same biting satire, enlivened by a ghoulish relish for the depiction of spilled guts and the use of knowingly bad puns. A good deal more animated than the images from ‘The Bleeding Nun’, they do share a tendency to bypass intellectual and philosophical terrors in favour of sensationalism. This arguably belies the EC horror comics’ true sophistication, as well as their being, like so many Gothic texts, morality tales. While Stephen King has described Gothic as being ‘as conservative as a republican in a three-piece suit’, EC’s comics displayed a more liberal morality, opposed to America’s then prevailing conservatism, with the ‘American Dream’ the subject most frequently up for dissection.
I’m afraid I haven’t read anything by Steve Niles beyond an atrocious Batman title he wrote for DC Comics, called ‘Gotham County Line’. Though I’ve managed to derive pleasure from reading all sorts of pap under the Bat-label, ‘County Line’ took the proverbial biscuit, and I suspect much of Niles’s success is owed to his artistic collaborators. Employing a handful of tropes culled from a thousand zombie flicks to fill page after page with scenes of blood-letting and flesh-eating may have earned him his horror comic credentials – may even qualify as Gothic – but unless Niles has done something startlingly original with them in ’30 Days of Night’, I suspect his writing is largely dull and uninspired.
The stateside arrival of Alan Moore in the late eighties, spearheading what has since come to be called ‘the British invasion’, certainly did lead to the production of more Gothic comic books, and to the above list I’d add his run on ‘Swamp Thing’ and the graphic novel ‘The Killing Joke’, both among the first DC titles to carry the ‘recommended for mature readers’ label. From 1971 onwards, the Comics Code had become increasingly devalued by the existence of underground comics and the decisions made by publishers such as Marvel to occasionally eschew the Code (a little healthy controversy could improve sales). The launch of DC’s Vertigo imprint would herald more ‘adult’ titles, and was aided early on by Neil Gaiman, another British ‘invader’ whose ‘Sandman’ saga (1988-1996) borrowed much of its principal cast from EC and DC Comics’ early horror titles. The first two collected volumes in particular – ‘Preludes and Nocturnes’ and ‘The Doll’s House’ – are good instances of horror comics containing Gothic elements, scenes of horrific violence accompanying such familiar Gothic tropes as the persecuted heroine, and monsters of all shapes and sizes, set across a variety of likely and unlikely Gothic locales, from a crumbling asylum to a contemporary diner in ‘Preludes and Nocturnes’.
The asylum is, in fact, Batman’s Arkham Asylum, which serves as a reminder of how mainstream superhero comics have come to flirt with, and even to embrace Gothic over the years. ‘Batman’ is, perhaps, the most obvious example, having dabbled in Gothic tropes almost from its inception, in strips such as ‘Batman vs. The Vampire’ (‘Detective Comics’ #31-32, 1939) to Grant Morrison’s most recent run on the flagship ‘Batman’ title (2006-2008). The asylum’s introduction in the seventies signalled a renewed emphasis on Gothic storytelling, with a focus on aberrant psychology and trauma narratives characterising the ‘Batman’ comics of the eighties and nineties. Peter David’s run on ‘The Incredible Hulk’, with its focus on gamma-irradiated monstrosities and fragmented identities, would finally realise that particular title’s Gothic potential towards the end of the eighties; and more recently, in an issue of Ed Brubaker’s run on, of all things, ‘Captain America’ (2005), the hero could be seen traipsing through the picturesque ruins of European castles, recalling the Nazi war atrocities perpetrated there by the dastardly Baron Zemo. Gothic, in its most contemporary and most traditional forms, thus continues to exert its influence upon the mainstream comic book, and given their shared literary disreputability and commercial popularity, the two seem ideally suited for one another.
Sorry if I’ve rambled and rushed things a bit!
Franz, I am inclined to agree about things like ‘Hellsing’ and ’30 Days of Night’. Merely employing the trappings of Gothic does not automatically qualify a work as Gothic.
PS – James, that’s quite a post !
I think blue books are precious curiosities which have an irreverent, hybrid nature. If Gothic novels were condemned as an irrational influence on weak impressionable minds, their authors attracted virulent criticism, and the Gothic was pejoratively labelled as a subgenre, consequently, the blue books or chapbooks went beyond the boundaries since they were the leftovers of the supposedly unwanted literary waste. Both artefacts – Gothic novels and blue books – undermined the standards of taste but both of them found niches in the market, which were socially differentiated, but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t circulate around the whole society; it is said that Percy Shelley was a devourer of chapbooks.
Although the literary quality of the bluebooks might be questionable, and copyright was not respected, what calls my attention is the fact that publishers were aware of the importance of the illustrations as paratexts and as hooks to attract the public. It is not insignificant that they hired famous artists such as Thomas Rowlandson, a cartoonist recognised by his satirical style. As paratexts or as sale hooks, publishers paid attention to the quality of frontispieces; they were copperplate or wood-engravings especially produced not only to accompany the narrative. These engravings depicted the most dramatic moments of the story, so, on the one hand, they fed the Gothic common places, such as the maiden in flight or trapped in the dungeons of a labyrinthine castle. However, on the other hand, some of them inspired nightmarish effects beyond the common places. I consider that in both cases, as an extension of horror clichés or as artefacts that go beyond them, the origins of horror inspired comics and graphic novels can be traced back to the chap books. They have inherited their commercial nature, and the quickness in the development of the stories. However, in high quality comic books and graphic novels, inspired by Gothic sources, the illustrations are effective paratexts precisely because they contribute to the narrative; as it happens for example in Arkham Asylum, a Serious House on Serious Earth, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean, where the chaotic atmosphere of the haunted asylum is emphasized by the magnificent dark vignettes.
I have a couple of questions: If publishers of blue books were aware of the strength of the images to produce terror, is it possible to state that in some cases the sublime, most of the times excluded from the text itself, was to be found in the illustrations? And can we consider the chap books as the work of the editor more than the work of the author?
I appreciate each of your comments and insights!
Dale…the question of readership and the lack of the sublime in chapbooks is intriguing. I do think they were read by all classes including those who could not be bothered to read a triple decker novel and the lack of the sublime certainly reveals more about the readers than the publishers.
James…fantastic information…thank you. I love the familiar Gothic tropes in graphic novels…I clearly need to check out some of the ones you mentioned. As the proprietor of a micro press I would still love to see old Gothic novels such as Monfrone; or, The One-handed Monk or The Monk as full length Graphic novels. I think there is potential there!
Carolina…great questions….as far as the illustrations…I don’t think the publishers ever considered the sublime when choosing an illustrations. Illustrations varied…from the horrific vision of bloodied spectres and murder…to scenes of lovers meeting under a tree…These pictures were really to draw the reader to tale. Most illustrations in chapbooks have a page number for readers to find the scene depicted…
Your second question is really interesting. Chapbook authors such as Sarah Wilkinson were not only authors of chapbooks…redacting plays and novels, but she did assemble chapbooks into the Tell-Tale Magazine…writing and editing some. So I think they were both.Also, there were ‘chapbooks’ that were extracted from novels and editors would trim a bit a way. One example is The Horrible Revenge which is lifted from Eliza Parsons’s The Mysterious Warning (1796). But for the most part, I think that ‘authors’ crafted chapbooks pretty carefully.