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====EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest====
[[File:EC_COMICS.jpg|thumbnail|left|250xp|<i>EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest</i> by Qiana Whitted]]
Finally, Qiana Whitted’s <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813566312/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0813566312&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=17480d13186b0888f46ca1d4ad9ce8a7 EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest]</i> concludes the Comics Culture series for the time being. Witted, a professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC, previously contributed to Rutgers’ University Press’ essay collection, The Blacker the Ink. In EC Comics, she argues, “The narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies of ‘the EC way’ constitute one of the most effective means through which questions of social justice were explored in American comic-book culture after World War II.” <ref> Qiana Whitted, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), x. </ref> Whitted’s work builds upon that of Amy Kiste Nyberg, Bradford W. Wright, David Hajdu, Carol Tilley, and others who examined EC comics, the end of the medium’s Golden Age, and the rise of the Comics Code Authority.<ref> Whitted, EC Comics, 6. </ref> Unlike those works, however, Whitted “takes a different approach by analyzing the creative choices and critical significance of the message stories within the EC brand against the larger ideological contexts of the late 1940s and 1950s.”<ref> Whitted, EC Comics, 6. </ref>
Whitted discusses EC Comics’ use of “preachies,” or social justice stories, to articulate messages that critiqued the U.S. government’s ability to follow its own policies. She writes, “These stories make a case for racial justice by appealing to Americans’ civic and religious beliefs. In doing so, they condemn racism as the betrayal of the nation’s democratic ideals, particularly in light of the Korean War and the Truman Doctrine’s positioning of the United States as the international standard-bearer for democracy.”<ref> Whitted, EC Comics, 53. </ref> Few comic book histories of this period go beyond the rise of the Comics Code Authority to examine the work in the larger context of Cold War America. In this regard, Whitted offers an innovative approach to material familiar with many comics scholars. Her focus on psychology, literary technique, and fan reaction enables her to go beyond the familiar historiography of Nyberg, Wright, Hajdu, and Tilley while also demonstrating the scholarship that sets Rutgers University Press’s Comics Culture series apart from others.
