‘Of Magic and Terror, and Mysterious Symbols’: Batman and the Discourse of the Literary Gothic

‘Of Magic and Terror, and Mysterious Symbols’: Batman and the Discourse of the Literary Gothic Stephen James Carver Ph.D. Previously unpublished, paper originally presented at the American Image/Text Conference, University of East Anglia, Norwich, June, 2011 Copyright © SJ Carver 2011, 2013 Like the reflection of Poe’s House of Usher in the ‘black and lurid…

Weird Tales from the Vault of Fear: The EC Comics Controversy and its Legacy

Before Elvis, there were EC comics. In 1944, American publisher Max Gaines established ‘Educational Comics,’ with a view to selling ‘Picture Stories’ from the Bible, history and science to schools and churches.  The pulp magazines that had inspired comics were merging with paperback novels and passing away, and this separation of popular literature from sequentially…