Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Lurid cover art from 1950s comic, Witches Tales

Mark Frauenfelder at 8:55 am Wed, Sep 21, 2011

— FEATURED —

Book Review

The Man Who Laughs: grotesque Victor Hugo potboiler was the basis for The Joker

Feature

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

Book Review

The Twelve-Fingered Boy - mesmerizing YA horror novel

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle
201109210851

A fantastic collection of covers from the pre-Comics Code comic book Witches Tales. Too bad Fredric Wertham had to come along and spoil the fun. (Via Dooby Brain)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

  • mgmars

    Today I learned that being a buxom beauty in a red dress all but guarantees you’ll die a gruesome death at the hands of bizarre and supernatural forces.

    • Guest

      …probably all named ‘Roxanne’.  Sting warned them.

  • http://www.facebook.com/comediAn2323 Michael Crosby

    wertham wouldn`t have been very disturbed by most of those…  the bad ones were much worse.

  • Huwman

    This is beautiful work that often even rivaled the EC output. Lee Elias and warren Kremer were just two of the top notch artists that worked on these. What inspirations these guys were and still are!

  • Syd

    I hope this is the start of “Weird Witches Wednesday”.

  • HenryPootel

    Someone needs to learn to use smaller preview images…

  • samovar100

    My LIFE is a torture jar.

  • pjcamp

    Too much rouge on the mads, there.

  • MonsterMan

    Man, that blog is slow as molasses! Those are some big images on there.

  • Charles H.

    Wertham didn’t help things, but he wasn’t the catalyst. If you want to blame somebody, blame the big publishers of the time — in particular National Periodicals, now DC, and Archie Comics — who saw it as a golden opportunity to kill off the competition that was cutting heavily into their sales.

    (There’s also a bit of a date problem. The hearings into juvenile delinquency that focused on comics in particular were already scheduled and, if I recall correctly, may have actually already been under way by the time Seduction of the Innocent hit the press.)