The EC Archives -MD

Content advisory: Horror comics from the 1950s discussed in this review.

Review by Matt Peters

The EC Archives: MD reprints a short-lived comic book series, M.D., that first hit newsstands in the mid-1950s. The series was the work of EC Comics, the publisher that had made a name for itself in the horror genre with comic books like Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror. EC was also the company behind Crime SuspenStories and Shock SuspenStories, both of which generally steered away from the supernatural but still featured torture, decapitation, and other gruesome acts. The publisher’s unsanitized content was a source of both popularity and notoriety.

 M.D. was a medically themed series that debuted with six other titles, collectively known as EC’s New Direction lineup, in the spring of 1955. Rather than pushing the boundaries of taste with blood and gore, these new comic books stuck to tamer themes like historical fiction and space adventures.

Instead of carrying a regular stable of characters, M.D. was an anthology series that relied on thematic, rather than narrative, continuity. It featured stories about doctors whose acumen, compassion, and dedication were indispensable to the patients they served. They were heroes of healthcare who were always ready to treat an abscess, broken bone, respiratory illness, or anything else that came their way.

The doctors were portrayed in such an idealized light that they usually felt one-dimensional, and their stories were often predictable. They didn’t struggle with burnout, impostor syndrome, ethical dilemmas, problematic power dynamics with their colleagues, or anything else that would diminish their auras or the reputation of the profession. They were kind and competent, and they didn’t let their professional accomplishments inflate their egos.

Competing Narratives

The oversimplified and unrealistic portrayals might have been a product of their times. In the 1950s, comic book narratives were still immersed in clear contrasts between good and evil. It wasn’t until later decades that anti-heroes became common currency in comic books, and, along with them, moral gray areas. Beyond the world of graphic storytelling, the 1950s were a time when political rhetoric focused on the sharp ideological divisions of the Cold War. Politicians and pundits embraced reductive constructs that equated the U.S. and its allies with liberty and prosperity—and, conversely, the Soviet Union and its allies with oppression and deprivation.

However, the creative choices in M.D. were largely motivated by commercial imperatives, as well as the need to counter negative perceptions of comics books that EC had played a significant role in creating. A German-born psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, was at the forefront of a moral panic about the perceived role that comic books played in juvenile delinquency. Wertham expressed wide-ranging concerns about comics in a 1954 Senate hearing. He was convinced that a fascination with superheroes could replace a healthy respect for police—and breed an unhealthy obsession with extrajudicial punishment. He also argued that comic book genres like crime fiction and horror could turn children into larcenists, illicit drug users, or other juvenile offenders.

In his testimony, Wertham concluded that a lack of content standards in the comic book industry had resulted in a public health problem. As evidence of the shocking content that was being sold to children, Wertham displayed a page from Tales from the Crypt that depicted the desecration of a corpse. In the scene, a group of baseball players were using dismembered body parts as sports equipment and on the field. A leg served as a bat, the head served as a ball, and the intestines were unraveled to mark the baselines.

William Gaines, who owned and operated EC Comics, appeared at the same Senate hearing to offer his defense of the comic book industry. “The basic personality of a child is established before he reaches the age of comic-book reading,” Gaines said in his testimony. “I don’t believe anything that has ever been written can make a child overaggressive or delinquent.” Gaines argued that the causes of delinquency were complex and that comic books were nothing more than entertainment and a convenient scapegoat.

Turning the Page

Neither Wertham nor Gaines offered solid scientific evidence in their testimony, but ultimately Wertham’s argument won. In the wake of the hearing, the comic book industry voluntarily created its own regulatory body, the Comics Code Authority (CCA); written, in part, to drive EC horror and crime titles from the market. Major publishers quickly fell in line with the CCA’s screening and enforcement practices. Distributors fell in line as well, adopting policies to drop any comic book that didn’t bear the CCA seal.

For Gaines and EC Comics, compliance prompted a complete overhaul. Thirteen of its legacy titles were scrapped entirely, and one title, the humor series MAD, was converted to a magazine. To replace its prior comics, EC introduced its New Direction titles in the spring of 1955.

The extratextual meaning of those titles is arguably the most enduring meaning they had. They represented a turning point in the comic book industry, a direct response to government and public pressure to tone down content. For M.D., there was another layer of extratextual meaning. The series was saturated with reverence for physicians and their profession, as if to offer a counternarrative to the accusation that comic books had become a public health concern. To the contrary, here was a comic book that could encourage young readers to stay healthy—and even consider a healthcare career when they grew up.

The New Direction titles themselves had very little endurance. They never achieved the popularity that their predecessors had, and none of them lasted more than five issues before they were canceled. By the end of 1956, MAD was EC’s only remaining publication.

Preserving Early Graphic Medicine

In 2021, the Oregon-based publisher Dark Horse Comics released The EC Archives: MD, which reprinted all five issues of M.D. The series had previously been reprinted in the 1980s by archivist and publisher Russ Cochran, as part of his Complete EC Library line of books. Cochran was later involved in a second line of reprint collections, The EC Archives, which was launched in 2006 and taken over by Dark Horse in 2013.

For Dark Horse’s collected volume, the five issues of M.D. were recolored to bring them up to modern printing standards, and the pages were renumbered to reflect their sequence within the book instead of individual issues. For the book’s subtitle, Dark Horse also ignored the superfluous periods that EC used when referring to the series. Otherwise Dark Horse stayed true to the original material, preserving vintage ads, letters to the editor, and even the occasional typo (for example, a sentence on page 160, which reads, “One of the most important aspects of medical practise [sic] is the diagnosis”; in British English, which is inexplicably used here, practise is a verb rather than a noun).

How much research went into M.D. is unclear, but an acknowledgment early in the book indicates that the writers and editors did have an interest in accuracy. A footnote in the first issue reads, “‘M.D.’ would like to thank Edward Weck & Co., Manufacturer of Surgical Instruments, for their invaluable technical assistance in preparing this and future issues” (page 12).

At times it seems that the writers took a deep dive into their research and wanted to flaunt their vocabulary afterwards. In a story called “New Outlook,” a physician named Jonas Wilson gives a colleague his assessment of a patient’s condition:

She has a compound comminuted bilateral fracture of the mandible. Her nose is deviated. She’s also suffered a depression of the malar-process of the zygoma in the infra-orbital region. There’s a fragment of bone missing from the right mandible, which, of course, calls for an autogenous bone graft (page 117).

The EC Archives: MD, Page 117, panel 2

Only context clues help the lay reader decipher the full meaning of Wilson’s diagnosis.

To the contemporary reader, looking back at these relatively well-informed depictions of 1950s healthcare, several things might stand out. Doctors still did house calls (“To Fill the Bill,” pages 27-32); polio was not yet eradicated in the U.S. (“So That Others May Walk,” pages 109-115); people could still smoke in hospitals (“A Case for the Books,” pages 59-64); and patient privacy standards were less robust than they are today (“The Right Diagnosis,” pages 160-166).

Another noticeable theme is the lack of diversity in healthcare. The stories were all written before comprehensive desegregation and second-wave feminism, and it definitely shows. Every doctor is a white man, and every nurse is a white woman. It should be noted that EC Comics did challenge racism in some of its other comic books. In her book EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest, Qiana Whitted highlights multiple EC stories that challenged racial, ethnic, or religious stereotypes. In M.D., however, old orders of race ethnicity (not to mention sex and gender) remained fully intact and unquestioned.

More than just declaring a ceasefire in the battle against stereotypes, M.D. occasionally embraced them. “The Right Cure” (pages 83-89) focuses on a family that isn’t explicitly identified as Appalachian, but it’s a reasonable assumption based on their mountainside home, vernacular, and other clues. The story is mired in problematic tropes, depicting them as ignorant, insular, and superstitious. The mother of the family, Henrietta Venable, is struggling for life with an unknown ailment. A city-dwelling doctor, Harold Benson, is able to diagnose her with a pancreatic cyst and provide appropriate treatment, but first he has to deal with Henrietta’s husband, who is hostile toward outsiders and skeptical of medical science.

There are several additional stories that haven’t aged well. The ones that deal with disability or disfigurement, which include “Janie Some Day” (pages 19-25), “Different” (pages 53-58), “So That Others May Walk” (pages 109-115), “New Outlook” (pages 117-122), “Point of View” (pages 123-128), “Complete Cure” (pages 139-145), and “Child’s Play” (pages 147-152), are all well-intentioned attempts to engender compassion and understanding. Unfortunately, they often do so by using ableist tropes, such as the idea that disabled people are self-pitying and withdrawn from society—or the idea that they have to overcome their disabilities to realize their full potential.

Although it definitely won’t pass contemporary sniff tests for inclusive representation, The EC Archives: MD is otherwise an entertaining read and an engaging trip into the past. M.D. had neither the initial nor the enduring popularity of other EC titles like Tales from the Crypt. Nonetheless, it stands as a testament to the talent of EC’s writers and artists that they could pivot to such markedly different subject matter and make it work.

Matt Peters is a program manager at the University of Arizona College of Health Sciences. He is a longtime Marvel fan with an interest in health communication and graphic medicine. Views expressed are his own.