During a televised hearing on April 21, 1955, U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver held up a comic book to the cameras. Its cover depicted an ax-wielding man holding a woman’s severed head.
Kefauver, who was chairing hearings on whether crime and horror comics contributed to juvenile delinquency, asked Bill Gaines, editor of EC Comics and publisher of the comic at issue, whether he thought the cover was in good taste.
“Yes, sir, I do — for the cover of a horror comic,” Gaines said.
Kefauver’s crusade against comics is the subject of “Senators, Sinners, and Supermen: The 1950s Comic Book Scare and Juvenile Delinquency,” a new exhibition at the Sterling Memorial Library on view through Sept. 22.
Stephanie Tomasson ’16 curated the exhibit, which occupies the five cases in the library’s exhibit corridor, based on her senior essay for the Department of History. Each spring, the Yale University Library offers senior undergraduates the opportunity to curate exhibits based on their senior thesis research. Tomasson was selected from a pool of candidates as the first in a new program that makes all of the corridor’s display cases available to one student curator.
Read the full article at Yale News.